Summary:
With digital photography, users are acquiring an increasing number of photo and videos. Most users love the instant gratification of digital photos and want to see the images immediately after they connect their camera to their computer. Unlike the analog world, the digital world poses the challenge of how to find these photos again in the future. Finding files on a computer is a different mental model than shuffling through a shoebox of prints. Furthermore, unlike the physical cue of a shelf of shoe boxes, the computer can seem like a black hole of files and folders for most users.
At the time of this project, there were two main groups of users:
- Typical Users – these users don’t have a well-defined and/or deliberate system of organization for their photo and video files; they frequently use the default organization provided by their photo import application.
- Advanced Users – these users have a pre-defined system of organization that is usually scalable to a large number of photos.
The greatest challenge with the typical users group is their lack of awareness that organization is best done at import time, as doing so enables them to quickly and easily find their photos in the future. This project focuses on finding a solution that creates the best UX for users that don’t know what they need (typical user) as well as provides increased efficiencies for advanced users that already have a system of organization, without altering their workflow.
As with any UX project, the greatest challenge is guiding users on how to get the best experience. Don’t make them work for it, make it easy for them to achieve success in their scenarios.
This design has remained timeless and the UX continues to exist in the latest Windows Live Photo Gallery, 6 years later.
My Role:
- Framing of the Problem
- Concept development
- Prototyping (Paper and Code)
- User Research
Detailed Design:
Key Assumption:
Based on user research, we knew that typical users don’t make the connection between import and future recall (organize now for easier future retrieval), and therefore don’t want to be burdened with additional import tasks. What they are willing to do is simple labeling – i.e. label the events.
Problems to Solve
Problem 1:
Most users don’t delete photos from their camera after each event. As a result, each import session is likely to have multiple events. Most photo solutions store a single import session in a folder (including ours at the time), but users actually want to store and label each event in a separate folder so that they can find them more easily in the future. Some users worked around this by doing multiple import sessions, one session for each event. Addressing this issue was an opportunity to save users time and effort.
Problem 2:
Advanced users know that they need to organize their photos at time of import, and have a system that they don’t want overridden.
Concept Development – Identifying the Opportunity for Further UX Ideation
Given the problems framed, it was important to balance what our solution automatically completed for our typical users while allowing advanced users to preserve their workflow. A quick Venn-mapping of what each of these two user types really wanted (vs. what they say they wanted, or in the typical user case most couldn’t articulate what they wanted, but only talked about general pain-points of labeling and finding photos after import), helped identify an opportunity/gap that could serve both user sets. It also helped put a stake in the ground on what features were for typical vs. advanced users. This helps when thinking about end-to-end flows – where possible we don’t want to burden our typical users with advanced features.
Karen Wong 