Google Photos & Accelerated Creation
How Smartphones, modern design, and big data create magical user experiences
Google Photos just hit 100 million users in 5 months. That looks like a hockey stick, especially for a “me too” Photo Backup product that we’ve seen many times before.
But, Google Photos is not just a me too photo backup app. It’s a remarkable smart assistant for your photos.
The Assistant looks at the photos you sync. It combines them with data from Google Now, like your location and trips at the time you took the picture. Then it automatically creates an immersive story of your trip or vacation.
Google Photos is Big Data and Machine Learning applied to Photos.
Google Photos’ killer feature is Accelerated Creation of photo albums.
Accelerated Creation
Accelerated Creation isn’t just about Google Photos. It’s broad trend across tech driven by the rise of mobile. Many other products have a similar delightfully quick creation experience — from Layout for collages, to Ditty for musical messages, to Sway for documents, and many more.
What makes these experiences so compelling?
In a fairy tale, when a wizard waves his magic wand and a meal appears out of thin air, it’s amazing! It’s magic!
What makes it magical?
If he’d cooked and prepared for an hour, it would have been totally normal. But the wizard just waves his arm and yet gets a strikingly disproportionate result.
Magic in fairy tales taps into a deep human desire for work to have an amazing payout. Huge payout for little effort is also what great technology products deliver. When they do it’s magical!
Why now?
Mobile is becoming the center of the computer industry as Smartphone sales far out strip those of PCs and the always-present-in-your-pocket nature of phones causes them to be used more than PCs ever where.
Mobile means two things — Small screens and and shorter usage sessions.
Small Screens
Small screens require a different model of telling the computer what to do. Instead of massive menus or ribbons containing every possible command, commands become contextual and task oriented.
Formatting and creating property-by-property like in Photoshop or Word is tedious and just won’t work on a small screen.
Instead, Typorama has smart defaults and templates.
Google Photos automatically guesses at what you’ll want to do with a set of photos.
Small Sessions
We tend to use small screens for quick burst of productivity, messaging between meetings, triaging messages, posting status updates, taking photos, etc. As Evernote CEO Phil Libin revealed, average sessions for Evernote on a Mac are 40 minutes, while on phone it drops to 5 minutes.
Knowing this, designers of apps for phones focus on specific tasks. Narrowly targeting the app allows templates and smart defaults to accelerate creation.
Truly great mobile experiences go one step further. They take every signal possible from context — GPS, time of day, accelerometer, etc. — and use Machine Learning to create a magical user experience. Google Photos nailed this and the result for users feel like magic.
Magic. That’s how a photo sharing app can go from 0 to 100 million users in 5 months.
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For a list of more products that model Accelerated Creation check out the Product Hunt Collection below. Follow the collection to find out about new magical products as I discover them.