Designing 5 user roles into one nationwide arts events platform

Every regional open studios organisation is running events differently. Artists were manually sending bios and information for every event they joined. Organisers were chasing applications, cross-checking details, and building printed catalogues by hand. Art lovers had no reliable way to find events or follow artists they cared about. And because every region operated independently with no shared infrastructure, there was no realistic path to scale.

The challenge extended well beyond the interface. The project required designing a system capable of holding five distinct user types, complex multi-party workflows, and regional independence within a shared platform, while keeping the experience genuinely simple for every person using it.

Before any screens were designed, five distinct user roles were mapped out along with what success looked like for each one.

Treating each role as having genuinely different goals and mental models shaped every decision that followed, from navigation structure and permission logic through to database schema and dashboard design. A single generic admin experience was never an option.

With five user types and deeply interconnected content, Object-Oriented UX methodology was used to define every core object in the platform before a single screen was designed. Artists, Artworks, Studios, Events, Activities, Workshops, Applications, Catalogues, Blogs, Regions, and Maps were each fully mapped with their attributes, relationships to other objects, and the actions each user role could perform on them.

This process delivered two critical outcomes. It gave the system a consistent internal logic where content entered once flows to every part of the platform that needs it, without duplication or manual re-entry. And it surfaced the most complex design problem early, before it had the chance to become a development problem.

Artists can join an event three ways. Independently at their own studio, as a host who invites guest artists to share their space, or as a guest displaying at another artist's studio. Each path introduces dependencies that compound quickly.

A guest cannot apply until a host is confirmed. A host withdrawing affects every guest connected to them. Organisers need to review these relationships without getting buried in edge cases. And the system needs to handle scenarios like a guest applying to a host who has not yet joined the event, or a host withdrawing after their guests are already approved.

A conditional, approval-gated workflow was designed to cover all three participation paths. Every decision point, system prompt, approval state, and failure condition is accounted for, including auto-close rules for lapsed invitations, cascading withdrawal logic, and the ordering dependency between host and guest approvals.

A second workflow covers activity applications, for artists proposing workshops, demonstrations, or talks during an event. This handles collaborative activities with multiple co-hosts, invitation lapse rules, draft and live versioning for approved activities requiring updates, and withdrawal logic that cascades correctly when a host exits mid-event.

Both workflows feed into the same regional team review interface, giving licensees a single consolidated view of all pending decisions regardless of application type.

Each user type received a purpose-built dashboard designed around their actual tasks and goals, not a generic admin panel with permissions added on top.

Artist Dashboard
Events are organised into four clear rows: attending, invited, suggested, and history. Artists have a complete picture of their current and upcoming participation at a glance. Collaboration is built into the activity submission flow, addressing the very real barrier that solo hosting creates for emerging artists.

Licensee Dashboard
Application management, artist search, event creation, catalogue generation, and content publishing are all consolidated in one place. The applications view opens filter-first so licensees land on a sorted, manageable list rather than an unstructured inbox. Artist search includes sorting by event participation count and follower count, supporting both new artist discovery and the management of existing relationships.

Super Admin Dashboard
All licensee capabilities are available, with the addition of a licensee selector dropdown. This single feature enables full platform management across every region from one interface, without requiring separate environments for each. The approach keeps the system lean and avoids duplicating infrastructure across regions.

Licensees were producing event catalogues manually, with no consistent process and significant time investment. The catalogue tool generates directly from existing event data. A custom cover, advertisements, artist highlights, and a thank-you page can all be added within the tool. The output is both a digital catalogue with interactive maps and a print-ready PDF.

Because artist data flows from onboarding into every relevant part of the platform, there is nothing to re-enter and nothing to chase. What previously took hours now takes minutes.

Testing identified that licensees and super admins lacked a central location to manage platform content. The settings area was redesigned as a tabbed content management system, with each tab corresponding to a specific section of the site and surfacing only the controls relevant to that section.

Two further changes came directly from testing. A Highlighted Artists feature was introduced, allowing admins to manually pin and reorder up to four featured artists on the homepage, with remaining slots filled automatically by the platform. The Add Event workflow was also rebuilt with smart time defaults, flexible location options including the ability to pull studio locations directly from approved artist applications, and artist invitations integrated into the creation flow rather than managed as a separate step.

Developed the platform using AI-assisted development tools, working directly from the UX designs and system maps, with support from JABA's tech team on some of the more complex development elements. Because the system had already been mapped with OOUX, each object, relationship and user permission translated directly into the build, which kept design and development closely aligned.

Being both designer and developer meant design decisions could be tested in the real product early, and issues found during testing could be fixed quickly rather than waiting in a backlog. The platform includes subscriptions, map-based studio locations and notifications, all designed around the same five user roles.

This project was not a UI refresh or a visual rebrand. It was a product designed from first principles, starting with a clear understanding of who the users are, mapping every object and relationship in the system before a screen was touched, and resolving the most complex workflow problems before visual design began.

The decisions that had the greatest impact were structural. How participation dependencies are validated. How content flows through the system without duplication. How five very different user types share one platform without any of them feeling like a secondary consideration.

That is the standard this project was held to throughout.