Sub Ubi

This is the second in a series of examinations of social content sites. Previous: flickr.

The second site I want to look at is Artsonia. Artsonia has a very specific audience: elementary art teachers. Their business model is pretty simple: parents like to exhibit their children’s art. However, parents typically don’t work with their children to help them produce that art, so targeting the parents is the wrong way to go. Instead, Artsonia has targeted teachers, and encourages them to upload their students’ artworks. Then, parents can come and purchase children’s artwork on mousepads, coffee mugs, t-shirts… the list goes on and on.

In return for the photographing/scanning of student work, and uploading those images to the site, Artsonia pays a portion of their proceeds to the teacher’s school for the teacher to use on anything they desire. No doubt this works out well from a tax perspective. (Schools are typically 501(c)(3) organizations in the USA, meaning that all of Artsonia’s “payments” to the schools probably look like tax-deductable donations… very smart.) From the teacher’s perspective, it gives them a budget they can spend on materials or, really, anything they want—as usually, art teachers are severely constrained in what they can purchase, and have to spend a significant part of each day worrying that their program is going to be cut to support the construction of, say, a new set of bleachers for the football field.

(I have opinions on this matter.)

So, lets look at Artsonia.

Artsonia: Not for casual browsers

Artsonia homepage. Click to zoom.

The first page of the Artsonia site is dominated by a large image. This image does not aid the user in any way, and does not get them (immediately) into the content of the site. This is a massive waste of space (35% of the front-page real-estate), and does nothing to help the user learn the site in the best way possible: browsing.

In fact, a minimal amount of space on the front page of Artsonia is given over to browsing. If we count the three entry points for “Parents & Family”, “Teachers,” and “Just Visiting…” as “browsing”, that represents 10% of the user’s experience. We might also consider the sales advert on the right, which I assume is typically customized depending on the time of year (another 8% of the screen). In truth, only one of these clickable options (”Just visiting…”) actually lets you jump into browsing the site. All of the other options present the user with large amounts of documentation, forms, and choices to make.

The page parents and family are presented with
when navigating from the main page.
Documentation heavy and navigation/browsing-poor.

The “museum” homepage. Also browse-poor.

A critical difference between Artsonia and Flickr is that the Artsonia was created, first-and-foremost, as a profit-making venture. While it is true that it is a social-content site, and it is intended for teachers and families to use in publishing (and then printing/buying) their children’s artwork… it was not created strictly for the specialized sharing/publishing of content. In this regard, we might use the absence of an open API for uploading/managing content on the site as a measure, along with the lack of a browsing focus and the strong commercial bent of the site.

Summary

Considering what we’re trying to do with MyGame (support a growing community of users, provide a place to showcase content, provide infrastructure for students/teachers and other groups with specific (pedagogic) goals), Artsonia does not provide a great deal of insight. In our case, if someone is a Greenfoot user, we’ll want them to be able to get into finding interesting scenarios quickly and (possibly) downloading the source for those scenarios. If they aren’t a user, we’ll want them to be able to easily see what others have done, and perhaps play/interact with those scenarios. In either case, we aren’t currently planning on merchandizing anything submitted to the site… although, being able to order a t-shirt with the splash-screen of your scenario could be cool…