Case Study: Anthology — Photography Platform Bridges Professionals and Enthusiasts
Photographers from enthusiasts to professionals have to navigate no less that half a dozen tools to participate in this high demand industry. Updating and engaging in these sites means more exposure and connection to the industry, but for an enthusiast who doesn’t do photography for work, doesn’t have the time to peruse all of these sites every day. A professional, who has alternate demands on their time also can’t afford to spend the hours online everyday to make sure each and every profile is up to date. We look forward to a product that does it all to help both enthusiast and professionals through a simple site.
Hypothesis + Assumption
We came to Anthology, an idea fostered in 2019, with an understanding of the problem space this product wanted to solve: enthusiast and professional photographers seek a friendly and reliable platform that allows them to improve their craft, share their work in a social and professional capacity, and sell their art to others.
To understand the scope of the product, we assume:
- Users find it difficult to effectively connect with others on photography platforms
- Users want to showcase their work to optimize their performance in the field
- Users want to sell their best performance photography work in digital space
- Users want to browse the best locations for photography
Research
In the beginning of the project, we conducted 7 user interviews — 3 professionals, 3 enthusiasts and 1 who, was transitioning from enthusiast to professional.
We asked questions about their careers, their platforms, and the tools they find the most useful. We set certain goals of the research:
- See if our hypothesis and assumptions were correct
- Validate Anthology’s use case and desired features
- Do professionals want a centralized location for their portfolios and client connections?
- Would enthusiasts be excited for a new focused type of social media that can help them improve their photography skills?
By gathering data from our
- Enthusiast and professional users lean into instagram for exposure and connecting to followers/fellow photographers
- Location scouting is made easier with geo tagging
- Professional users desire a trustworthy and controllable marketplace to sell prints and licensing
- Users search for locations and research to find places they want to take photos, and have a specific style or concept they emulate
Target Audience
Problem Statement
It’s often challenging for photographers to gain all access to their needs at once. In order to launch a successful career in photography, they need a digital platform that not only serves professional photographers but also those who enjoy photography as a hobby. The proposed digital platform will offer showcasing photographers work and generate exposure and professional network connections with potential clients.
How might we host both professionals and hobbyists to utilize the platform to enhance their photography skills and build a photography community to share resources and to engage in professional networks as well as to buy and sell photography digitally and physically?
Insights to Features
Once we gathered our insights from our research we began ideating our top key features which includes:
User marketplace — users want to be able to sell their work online, and value being able to showcase work for sale.
Portfolio feature — users want a successful career in photography by showcasing their work online
Explore page — users search for locations and research to find places they want to take photos, and have a specific style or concept they emulate.
Design
With all the insights in mind we proceeded to the design stage which is sectioned into 3 parts.
design studio:
The very first stage in design we practiced in order to start developing our product was design studio where we were able to roughly sketch our ideas and share and give feedbacks to each other. By doing so, we were able to gain different creative sides from another and enhance the design layout as we proceeded to our mid-fidelity screens.
Mid-Fi Screens
Once we gathered all of our layout sketches, we started developing our mid fidelity model to start ideating where the features will be placed and how each screens will land to another as well as to design navigations for our intended users. Starting from our first home landing page, we started placing each features and images presented in a very basic quality.High-Fi Screenflows
Hi-Fi Screenflows
Testing
We conducted the first round usability testing on the mid-fi prototype to observe how easily and intuitively people could navigate thru Anthology. The result shows all users complete the tasks successfully except the first user had some tech issues that led to his failure on the last two. Some users divert to other pages or didn’t picked our intended path but eventually they managed to complete. Among all the tasks, user rated the first and the last task the most difficult.
In our high-fi testing we saw significant improvements across the board. This time around, there were no failures. We were able to increase the overall direct success of the functionality of this website indicated by all the green you see you see here. In particular — — participants for task 1 were able to complete it 32 seconds faster than our mid-fi. For task 4 the overall success rate was increased by 20% and for Task 5 the success rate was increased by 30%.
Next Steps
We can now feel reassured that these tested features we developed and implemented into the design of Anthology meet the goals of our MVP. Moving forward we wish to iterate on the following — — from the feedback we got from our HiFi testing. For our next steps we wish to:
•Add a portfolio page with book flip animation with a micro interactions
•Flexible uploading, to allow users to add new photos to multiple categories
•Complete another round of design iterations to explore different layouts — specifically sectioning off the information on the landing page
•Define the hotspots further turning them into icons
•Consider the hierarchy of the follow button by moving it up
and
•Include the ability to look at stats of hot spot winners on the home page
