EECE418 Project Final Report

Team 2: Portable Digital Photo Album

• Team info
  

• I. Porject Overview

  • A. The problem

  • B. Design approach

  • C. Summary of previous design stages
    

• II. Documentation of Final Prototypes

   

• III. Controlled User Study Sub-Report
  

• IV. Conclusions & Recommendations

  • A. Conclusions

  • B. Recommendations
    

I. Team

I. Porject Overview

A. The problem

Problem Statement: Design a standalone hand-held electronic photo organizer for home/business users, which allows for efficient retrieval, navigation, organization and archiving of digital photographs.

Scope: We are going to design a standalone hand-held electronic photo organizer for home/business users. The photo organizer device will serve as the central hub for a person or family's photo organizing needs.

Function: The form factor of the digital photo album will be a tablet. It is for efficient retrieval, navigation, organization and archiving of digital photographs.

B. Design approach

The digital photo album will support three modes of operation: browsing, organizing, and searching.

The user can browse existing photos albums, as well as photos that have not been organized.

Hand gestures are available for simple tasks such as browsing through the pages of an album, though there will always be visible buttons that allow the user to perform the same tasks.

In “Search” or “Album Creation” views where the searching of photos is required, photos are shown based on an approximation when the picture was taken; a time oriented search function will be available to the user. A hierarchal step navigation scheme is utilized that will clearly show the where in time the user is at. By showing the path the user followed to get to the current state (e.g. you are looking at Year 2001->Jan->Week2), the user will be able to simply touch the level of zoom desired to proceed to another time (e.g. touch on Year2001 again and then Feb to go from January to February).

C. Summary of previous design stages

Pass 1:

Three categories of problems are noted by the evaluators from the heuristic analysis and from the team’s own cognitive walkthrough.

1. Deficiencies in System Navigation

a. Users identified the ambiguities associated with identifying what functions were represented by the two selections on the main menu: Timeline View, and Album View. Users did not associate the timeline with a tool for photo searching, and some entered into the album view to search for photos one album at a time (the reason for creating the timeline view).

b. Users had trouble identifying the use of the right and left gestures when specifying zoom in and undo zoom in the timeline view. There were no visual hints or targets to suggest these were the appropriate actions for the tasks.

c. User had doubts regarding the scope of the timeline view. They were not able to confidently say that the timeline contained all photos from the devices for all times.

d. Several buttons for key modes were missing, resulting in users failing to accomplish their goals (i.e. Create New Album, Exit Photo Add Mode)

2. Deficiencies with Capability and Function Recognition

a. Users found the “up” gesture a point of confusion from a consistency point of view. The “up” gesture serves as both the mechanism for zooming out in the timeline view, while doubling as the escape for the photo full screen view.

b. Users were not able to group the “up” gesture as similar to the left and right gestures (which were found to be natural in keeping with the photo album metaphor). The “up” gesture was said to be awkward, difficult to execute, and not naturally recognized without explicit instructions.

3. Deficiencies with Status Recognition

a. Users were disoriented when viewing photos chronologically in fullscreen view. There was no feedback as to the relative temporal location of the current photo to all others. Users were not sure whether they were moving forward in time or back.

b. Users found the photo selection phase of the picture adding process to be confusing when the timeline was used as the mechanism of photo addition and navigation.

In view of this, we had proposed the following revisions:

1. Navigational improvements

a.Timeline Related

i . The timeline will have a slide bar that rides on the line to indicate the consequence of zoom in operations. Clicking on the bar will zoom in to the time section as indicated by the length of the bar. The bar is adjustable via the same right gesture as before, with the bar adjusting to the drag or via holding onto the ends of the bar and sliding.

ii . A dedicated zoom out button will be added to give users a clear undo path for all zoom in actions. The zoom out will be centered on the middle of the current time period zoom.

iii. The “Timeline View” title will be renamed “Photo Search” to better reflect its true intended usage.

iv. Other photo searching methods will be added (e.g. by file name, or by an explicit time period as an alternative to the timeline)

b.Gesture Related

i . The direction of the gestures will be changed to better mirror the photo album metaphor. To proceed forward in time, the left gesture will be used, and the right gesture used for moving back chronologically. This is analogous to flipping the pages in a real album.

ii. The “up” gesture will be eliminated. Visible buttons will replace any functions previously represented by the gesture.

c. Full screen mode related

i . An exit from full screen mode button will be added to give users an exit path from the full screen photo-viewing mode.

2. System Status Improvements

a.A small picture date display will be added to the fullscreen mode to show users which direction in time they are navigating when flipping through a large number of photos with gestures.

b. In each major mode of operation, the current mode will be displayed to the user. This is designed to eliminate any possible discrepancies between the operation the system is in and the operations the user expects to be able to perform. For example, in the photo adding mode, the interface will clearly display “Photo Add to Album” to indicate to the user the system is awaiting selection of photos for an album.

Pass 2:

We considered the timeline slide bar is still confusing. While it is intuitive to zoom in the period, it is difficult to convey a clear idea of zooming out. Therefore, we have adopted a conservative calendar view to categorize the photos and albums. Users can still move from one time level to another easily with buttons. In the controlled user study, we have prototype the photo searching using calendar view and compared it with traditional folder view.

In addition to providing hand gesture, buttons will also be provided. For people not used to gesture interaction, they can still achieve the same goal using the buttons provided. In the controlled user study, we have specifically prototype the interface to test the user comfort level of using hand gestures.

In addition, we have implemented the “clicked-and-add” photo addition interface and compared it with the “select-and-drag” approach.

IV. Conclusions and Recommendations

A. Conclusions

Having reached the conclusion of two full design passes, our team has completed cognitive walkthroughs, heuristic analyses, as well as multiple revisions of our paper prototype. A number of problems were discovered during informal user studies using the paper prototype, while at the same time certain design decisions have been reaffirmed during the studies. Some selected functional prototypes have been developed to facilitate formal user studies, and to explore key areas of uncertainty in our design. The following listing highlights some of the key points learned over the course of the project:

• Cognitive walkthrough & heuristic analysis: Our team discovered our initial premonitions about the use of a dynamic timeline for temporal navigation of photos turned out to be quite a confusing concept for users. The rapid turn-around of this feedback at such an early stage certainly contained the error to this phase of development.

• Paper Prototyping: We discovered that as effective as paper prototypes are, there are key areas of limitation in their use. For example, the dynamic nature of our interface, with photos rapidly being displayed one after another, could not be faithfully replicated or even simulated on a paper prototype. The flow charts depicting the functional flow for our design was hampered by this inherent fluidness of our interface.

• Functional prototyping: Our team learned that a functional prototype is not intended to serve as a fully functional product, but is designed to explore niche focused areas of uncertainty in the design. We found through the project that a multitude of prototypes may be needed, each specific to a narrow problem being explored. This new approach has added another tool to our repertoire of skills to utilize when designing future interactive systems.

• User studies: This phase of the project revealed the most surprise, especially in the way different users can interpret experimental instructions, and the resulting divergence in the data that came about due to misunderstandings. Our team now fully appreciates the difficulty one tackles when designing experimental protocols to explore a problem, and challenge managing the inevitable nuisance factors that introduce themselves into the tests.

We have been exposed to a wide variety of techniques to aid in human interface design, and can now appreciate the challenges and benefits of such an approach to engineering a product.

B. Recommendations

The main problem we discovered with our implementation of the digital photo album revolved around the use of a touch screen design. Users are on average so accustomed to using a keyboard and mouse for their interaction with a computing device, many of those preconceptions were automatically transfer when they began using a touch screen device. This type of interaction with a touch screen we found is in fact not well studied, and presented a challenge to our design.

The later interaction of our prototypes, and certainly in our functional prototypes, our design has moved to assume a more WIMP style of interaction. Until touch screen devices become more prevalent in common use, our recommendation is for our digital photo album to always provide for visible on screen equivalent buttons targets in parallel with gestural functions.

The distinction between the three modes of the photo album (i.e. Browse, Search, Add) should be re-examined. Through the course of the iterative design process it has become clear that the need to have three separate and independent modes should be eliminated. Users should be given the ability to add, search, and browse all from a central interface area, with all the functions needed on screen. If the user would like to add some photos they see on screen to an album, they should be able to give it a name and just say add. If a user would like to browse the current batch of photos in full screen mode, there should be a button to enable that immediately.

Through our user studies we confirmed our intuition that users are willing to spend very little time organizing their photos. The maximum amount of effort we found entailed the creation of a new folder to hold the latest download of a flash card from the camera. That said, many users organized their photos based on events, and do not perform complicated sorting based on image content or other criterions. Our recommendations as such would be to ensure all functions such as organizing photos are designed to be performed on a batch basis, and utilizing amount of user input.

Some areas that have been identified for further work certainly include the area of efficient photo searching. Given the small size of our tests, it remains inconclusive whether users benefit from a search mechanism that allows them to isolate sections of time to quickly zero in on a photo. Our recommendation for further work in this area include tests with a fuller body of photos from a user’s own archives (which they would be familiar with), and examine the true effectiveness of the “Year-Month-Date” hierarchal search mechanism we’ve proposed.

In summary, we saw there is a large potential with the product we have proposed, though there remains a substantial body of uncertainty that requires exploration before the exact form of a digital photo album will be known.

~End of Final Report~

Last edited on April 8, 2004 9:15 PM