Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson
Create. Consume. Curate: Camera+
The Brief:
Users mainly do three things: They make stuff. They find and watch, or listen to, or read stuff. And they sometimes collect and arrange the stuff they make and find. Camera+ is our contribution to Create: rethink the camera as a tool for seeing as well as a tool for capture, add a lot of features, make it easier to use, and make it cool.
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The strategic issues:
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Many features are made possible using third party solutions that can highjack the user interface in ways that don't make sense; we reevaluated vendor technologies and renegotiated contracts.
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We rearranged controls for scalability, so that we can easily add new features.
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We coordinated features with hardware and services to make it easier to release variants.
The result:
Shipped on Nokia 6 (China) and Sharp Z3, January 2017.
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Here's a few of the new features:
The Compass is a tool that can be turned on and off and works horizontal or perpendicular to the earth. It's great to know which way you're going!
Manual settings are carouseled (swipe left/right) and toggled (tap leftmost icon to close carousel). The zoom slider can be set to always appear, making the pinch gesture unnecessary for zooming, placed to work with most users' grips.
The onscreen display (OSD) can be set to different colors to contrast with the environment. Although the first version was set to white by default, our designs were produced in orange. The next version is intended to sense color in the view and dynamically alter the OSD.
Research > Analysis > Design > Repeat
Step 1: Ask users
How do you use your mobile device camera? what do you love? what goes wrong? what's missing?
Critical incident research asks users 'what typically goes wrong?' Our users said they often can't 'catch the moment' because the camera is too slow.
Users care most about low-light capture and overall image quality.
Most users know about manual settings, but don't know what they mean or how to use them.
Step 2: Survey the competition
Identify the competitors, use their apps, document software and hardware features, and collect reviews.
Step 3: Investigate & Experiment
Work collaboratively to develop logical flows and fit functions to a meta-layout.
Logical flows help us identify error conditions and understand 'interrupt behaviors.' In this project, the flow helped us sort out settings and modes, and clarify what users likely do most often.
We designed the layout to favor 'first order' features and modes. The layout is designed for one-handed use and fully rotates for left- and right-handed users.
Step 4: Design, Build, Test, Repeat
We built animations to illustrate some interactions, and continually updated wireframes and redlines. We tested iteratively throughout using 'microtesting' - choose a small handful of features, test them with real participants, and catch any problems.
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We measured each microtest the same way, using SUS and NPS. Below are the results of the first set of microtests, showing us we had room for improvement!
Step 5: Release!
What seemed like a straightforward design exercise was a year-long negotiation of choices: camera system, Android N capabilities, third party software solutions, customer requests, executive mandates, culture-specific features, and more. The unifying principle: make the right investment.