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This view displays photos in a particular album as a grid, with a thumbnail of each photo and its caption (if available). Tapping or pinching on a photo displays that photo in Photo view. The user can search in this view just as in Albums view, and the user can choose to share the entire album via a button in the toolbar (tapping the button pops up the menu shown in this sketch). The user can go back to the Albums view by either tapping the “Back” button, or choosing a new tab at the bottom.
Storyboard
| After logging into PhotoBook, Charles clicks on the “Friends” tab and scrolls through the list. He comes across Jennifer’s name and nervously decides to tap on the gorgeous thumbnail of her to see her photos. |
| Charles scrolls through the photos Jennifer is in and comes across a photo with a very worrisome caption, so he pinches on the photo to take a closer look. |
| He sees Brian with Jennifer and gets very worried. He confirms that it is really Brian noticing that Brian’s name in the “In this photo” section. |
| Charles wants to see all photos of Jennifer and Brian together so he can confirm his horrifying suspicions, so he first clicks Back to see photos of Jennifer. |
| Then he taps on “All Albums” and taps on the search field. He then taps on the “Tagged” filter. Finally, he enters Jennifer and Brian (which are helpfully autocompleted). He finds 13 albums that contain photos of Jennifer and Brian (note that only certain photos in each displayed album contain Jennifer and Brian, and perhaps only a subset of those photos contain them together). |
| Charles scrolls through the photos to find photos that might contain Brian and Jennifer together. (Note that, instead of visually looking through the thumbnails, he could have also chosen to search within the album.) He finds a worrisome photo with the caption “Sledding” and taps to take a closer look. |
| Charles sees Brian and Jennifer together and is outraged. He opens the share menu and chooses “Email.” |
| The email composition box appears over the photo, and Charles types an angry email to his friend Donovan to try to get some answers. The incriminating photo is automatically attached. |
Advantages
Learnability: Overall, this design presents a very learnable interface. First, it follows the metaphor of the physical album quite closely; PhotoBook initially displays many albums. Then, the user can tap or pinch on album to open it. Finally, the user can tap or pinch on a photo to pull it out of the album to take a closer look. It is also externally consistent; it is similar to the interfaces of many other photo organizing applications with which users are likely familiar, including iPhoto, the iPad’s “Photos” app, and Facebook’s website. Additionally, it uses standard interface widgets found throughout other iPad applications. Finally, although the photo browsing and searching experience is divided into two views - Album view and Photo List view - these views behave in the same manner. Specifically, the user can tap and pinch on thumbnails to open them in either view, and the user can filter the displayed thumbnails using the same filter interface.
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