Blog Post #1 : Capture App Update
Following its introduction at this past November’s Meet Taipei 2020, Capture App Beta officially released on Google Play and Apple Store just in time for the New Year. A short campaign centered around sending PostCapture, a unique “one of a kind” photo asset to a friend in the world gave us an opportunity as a team to evaluate the current state of the app. With the feedback from our early users we set out to further improve Capture App. For Capture App version 0.17.0 release, we prioritized improvements in the following areas: Capture App Performance, User Interface and User Experience.
Capture App Performance
First version of Capture App Beta had performance issues that were not unnoticed by our team and our early users. Additionally, Capture App Beta had a limitation on the number of photos that can exist at any given time. These issues are being addressed and though the newest version (0.17.0) has some significant improvements, this area of the application is an ongoing process.
User Interface / User Experience:
With this latest version of Capture App, we focused on mimicking the behavior of other camera apps. That is: when a picture is taken it immediately shows up on the feed. When a picture is taken with Capture, it records the time, location, photographer and other metadata to create a unique and traceable fingerprint. The photo along with its data are stored on the Blockchain to ensure the images immutability. All of these steps take time. Previous implementation required all data and blockchain actions to complete before the image showed up in the feed. This turned out to be unideal as we learned from user feedback from our introductory campaign. The delay was atypical from most camera app experiences and caused confusion regarding whether a photo was actually captured.
To remedy this, we made Capture App display a photo preview immediately after a picture is captured. A spinner icon floats on top of the image thumbnail while the app completes collecting the necessary metadata. We also added a progress bar that displays the status of the blockchain storage, which users can freely pause and resume.
We hope that these improvements will improve the overall Capture App experience and provide users with more information and control about the processes going on when a picture is taken.
Minor User Interface adjustments were made in this most recent version. We removed “Capture” and “PostCapture” labels and exchanged them with traditional icons for a cleaner look and improved understanding through affordance. We added water marks thumbnails to indicate which pictures have location data and have been stored on the blockchain.
Let us know what you think!
Well that’s it for the first installment of Capture App Update! We hope you enjoyed the content and got an inside look at our most recent application improvements. If you are a Capture App user, let us know what you think of our recent changes. If you haven’t downloaded Capture App consider downloading on Android and iOS and letting us know what you think. We appreciate any and all feedback :) Happy Capturing!
Here at Numbers we are firm believers in open source projects and opening up innovation to everyone. If you are interested, Capture App project is open source and available for the public to view and contribute. Check it out!
