3 Things We Need Real-time Photos For, Learned From Our Community

How we are using lessons learned from our beta to shape our app before launch.

Real-time photos are going to be a huge part of how we gain information in the next year, and increasingly so in following years.

We are so connected technologically through our mobile phones and mobile devices that pictures are just an obvious commodity that we can use for more than just selfies. We can use them to plan, to be productive, and to help people. We can use them as we already do to engage in communities, but also to benefit communities.

We knew when we got started building our startup, Spectafy, that we would learn a lot about real-time photo sharing and boy have we ever! Just to give you a bit of background, Spectafy is an app that enables people to engage with and help the community with real-time information and photos from people who are already where you want to see. If you want to know what the park is like before you get there, you can easily get that information in a picture from someone nearby.

We learned quickly (and still are learning) what people really want to share through our community. Some were pretty expected, but some where very unexpected, and actually helped us shape the interface of our app to help facilitate those use cases.

We’ve learned that people mainly like to use the app for:

• Exploring
• Surveying
• Planning

Once we got running we were really staggered by the results of what the community tended to share and request. We started cataloging some trends as to what was being requested, and have used it to shape what will soon be the launched version of our app! We even put some examples on the map on our website!

Like this! (Each one has a descriptive tool-tip)

We thought these individual trends were pretty interesting, and it really helped guide us to provide better usability around these use-cases.

So here are the 3 main things that we discovered people really need and want real-time photos of, and that our community tends to share (in no particular order).

1. Views and exploration

Spectafy users are typically sharing a TON of views and exploration based photos. These are not typically too time-dependent, which is something that is really interesting to us as we thought our real-time photo solution would be our main core solution, but it seems to be just a piece of the puzzle that people are attracted to.

Some example Spectafy queries:

• Are there wild flowers at ____ this time of year?
• What is the view of the city like from ____?

These were also really interesting to us because we expected this kind of information to be gathered via Google Street-view and other similar services. We have realized that Google really can’t show you photos like this, from a person’s perspective, this far from the road. Which made us think, this “adventurer” crowd is a really interesting user-base for Spectafy. We’d also like to think Spectafy is easier to use than Streetview for this particular use!

2. Sports and park info

Honestly we came out of the gate hoping that this would catch on, and we’re really happy to see that it has! We truly wanted this to be one of our core solutions, seeing as we all love to play sports, be outdoors, move around and be active. We always wanted a rich community that we could turn to when we needed information about our favorite local spots to play sports, and in that hope, we created one ourself.

People are using Spectafy to see:

• If their local gym is packed right now
• If there are enough people to play pick-up basketball
• If their local tennis courts are open
• If the local running trails are flooded, or perfect for a jog

There are so many uses focused around people who are active and motivated to be outdoors, these queries barely break the surface!

3. Lines & event information

This one might be expected, as this is probably one of the major gripes we seek to solve. People want to know what the lines are like at their local venues before they get there.

People are using Spectafy to see:

• If their favorite cafe is clogged, before heading out
• If their favorite bar is empty, or if it’s a good night to go out
• If the music festival (Outside Lands, anyone?) looks like a fun place to be

Really people seem to be looking to get real-time information in this sense more than any other. Real-time venue information is a huge gripe that we are trying to solve, and it’s not an easy task. Our community has truly responded greatly though to this kind of information, because it’s so easy to request and reply to.

We really hope to solve this for everyone, so we can all collectively make better decisions with our time, be more productive, and have more fun moving around town with the knowledge we need.

This is just the beginning!

We are still in early beta, will be expanding our beta shortly, and we are launching fully to San Francisco soon! Then we hope to expand as fast as our community can grow. We already have a small, but strong community in place sharing information about the places they care about, and asking for the information they need.

We are excited to have learned so much on this journey so far, and we’re just getting started!

If you want to check out our growing community of early access beta members, visit our website!