Sharing Photos Reimagined: PhotoBox | A case study
We all take pictures of things we love and want to share with others.
Almost everyone does this on a regular basis. Whether you post 20 at a time on social media or text a quick picture to a friend, it’s a fairly common practice. In some form, I’m sure we’ve all tried to send a photo to friend and experienced frustration with the process of trying to get it to them. Maybe they don’t have airdrop or Dropbox. So the real question is what could be done to make this process easier.
More specifically, an event based way of sharing your photos. This is the challenge my design team was presented with.
The First evolution:
My team approached this challenge by listing out our assumptions of what we knew about photo sharing. Then challenging each one, and then identifying what we needed to know more about. Based on that information we developed a survey to send out and get more information.
Getting to know what people really think about photo sharing:
As data began to come in from the survey, we started to realize many people were frustrated with traditional photo sharing methods. Many had seen photo sharing on a large scale. In most cases, individuals shared photos by posting to social media by means of a hashtag. But many also expressed frustrations with a person to person or a small group setting.
Those frustrations were things such as:
After getting a good amount of data from our survey we then conducted an interview specifically with an event promoter. She confirmed the data we were already seeing in our survey responses. She also told us how difficult it was to get people to download and use an app which they might ever only use once for a major event. Being an event manager, she did not place much value on event sourced photos for any sort of marketing. If anything, they could be used for a social media contest to get a marginal amount of publicity, but not much more.
Learning this information convinced us to alter the course of our project slightly. We then focused on directing our app to a much smaller setting, among friends or family and small events.
Empathizing and relating with our users:
Having the data from our survey and Interview, we then put all the commonalities found and made a user empathy map. This was to really understand what our user would be thinking, feeling, and saying, as well as to determine our key goals. We decided on an empathy map instead of a persona because of the wide range of users we had acquired in our survey.
After completing our empathy map, we determined our users most important goals:
Coming together to brainstorm the flow:
Having this completed, we partnered with the development team to work through the user story mapping process. Doing this allowed us to tackle and resolve several sticking points we had in the process so far:
- Whether photos were to upload automatically during an event or after the scheduled event.
- What information would be needed to create an account within the app.
- How users would send and receive notifications.
Being it was the first day of the week, we had a full week of sprint planning and meetings. This is where we determined a schedule and requirements for each team. The developers were in charge of building the firebase and background structure. On the UX side we were to get wireframes to them by end of day on Wednesday.
With our story map complete, we transitioned to creating a user site map to define the specific steps our user would take.
Our flow was complete, so we separated briefly to begin working on a few wireframes in sketch, with plans to combine and adjust styles the next day. The following day we had a general completion of wireframes and prototyping, due to the short amount of time. Shortly after the handoff with the dev’s, a few questions were raised after taking a look at the wireframes.
Just a couple of the questions asked:
- The addition of selecting an event photo when creating an event.
- Changing the slide out menu to a tab bar at the bottom of the screen for easier navigation through the app.
After transitioning from wireframes to high fidelity designs we ran into issues with trying to keep our files synced together. I became hesitant to make changes to our designs so my partner wouldn’t be confused. Our solution was to work side by side to reconcile any differences and also develop the app style guide. By combining our efforts we were able to reach a place where we both were comfortable with the layout and design of the app.
Trimming down:
It’s funny how all of the awesome work we did came to a grinding halt later in the project. Our dev’s came to us and explained that we would need to scale the project back significantly. This was because we wanted to get the app completed and submitted to the app store by the end of the month deadline. The social aspect of the app, including the ability to add Connections and create Groups, was cut completely. It was time to go back the drawing board.
Adapting:
The next day we regrouped to discuss how the app would look now that several features had been dropped. Luckily we realized this would not result in a big change to our general site map and information architecture. It actually would be greatly simplified as far as the navigation. The tab bar was removed since it would only had two tabs and wouldn’t make much sense to have any longer.
We did have another point that needed to be resolved. Without in-app connections, how would app users send and receive notifications for events they created or were invited to?
Joining and Event:
We asked the developers to look for the simplest means of sending invites. This solution would need to be created in a short amount of time. The developers gave us a few choices and after some discussion we decided on a solution together. What we believed would be the easiest and understandable for the user, was simply sending a text message with a code to join the event.
After a few edits to our mock-ups, we did some user testing on creating an event and sending invites. As well as joining an event with others, and confirmed the path we were taking would successful. We were able to test the new prototype with positive results.
The remainder of the project was spent working together so we could start handing off our high fidelity designs. We then transitioned into a support mode as the dev’s began working heavily on building the app.
As the developers began to get into the coding, the UX team talked about what small changes we could add to make the app even more pleasing for users.
What we had pictured in the beginning was automatic uploads, and the developers were optimistic it could happen. But halfway through the final week it looked like that would not be possible with the time we had available. It was decided that the photos would be uploaded after the event, but the user would have to initiate an action to have the photos upload at all. Some extra notifications and reminders were added to the project so as to remind the user to upload their photos.
Wrapping up those last little things, we finally submitted our app to Apple to be reviewed! A few days later we received into the app store! PhotoBox is now available for download! I feel very confident about our final design, and our developers were amazing and able to step up to the design challenge we presented to them.
My team was presented with the challenge of creating an event based way of sharing photos.
We presented PhotoBox. A simple way to upload and share all of your photos with friends and family in once place.
The project required me to think differently and balance multiple things I was working on. My ideas and designs tend to evolve and generate as I work on them. Having a deadline and short amount of time to complete everything, this taught me to be able to design quickly and efficiently. It was enjoyable but also challenging, if anything what I learned was that you can’t get married to having things a certain way. Design is always changing and evolving, and you need to be able to adapt to those changes as they come.
Thanks for reading!
