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Error prevention and correction: As noted above, it is rare for users to be able to make a serious error in PhotoBook. Navigation errors, however, may be common when the user is searching for a particular photo and has to look through several albums. While it is easy to correct this error by using the “Back” button, the other designs mentioned below make the error less likely and faster to recover from. Specifically, the user does not need to “open” albums in the Side-scroll design (Design 2), and thus will not open the wrong album by mistake. In design 3, opening an album is less of a commitment than in this design, since instead of being moved to an entirely separate page, some other albums remain visible when an album is opened, and an album can be closed by simply tapping anywhere outside the album.
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Design 3
Albums/Friends
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View
On this interface, a grid of albums (or friends) is shown. Clicking on a photoset opens it in the same style that the iPad uses for folders on the home screen. Close the photoset by tapping outside of the opened portion.
This interface should be easily learned, because it uses metaphors the user is already familiar with.
It is efficient for browsing through large sets of albums, which each contains a large set of photos. The grid formation allows as many photosets or photos to be displayed as possible. You can quickly open and close a photoset without navigating screens.
Because the user is not creating data, there aren’t many errors they can make. If the user accidentally taps on a photoset or photo that they don’t want to browse, they can quickly go back.
Search
Search is the other main mode of PhotoBook (besides browsing). Switching to search is highly visible. The familiar search field is at the top of every page. Tapping it opens the search field, with three search modes shown above the keyboard.
The three search modes are “Tags”, “Title”, and “Uploader”. They can only search by one term at a time. This is a feature limitation, but makes the interface less complicated and easier to learn.
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, namely opening an album to see the photos in that album. By using an interface similar to that found on the iPad home screen, it gains learnability by being externally consistant.
The state of the interface is also very visible, because there is a single tab control at the top that indicates what types of albums are being shown. Additionally, tapping on an album displays the photos in the album in a boxed-off region with a clear title, so photos should not be easily confused with albums.
It is efficient for browsing through large sets of albums, which each contains a large set of photos. The grid formation allows as many photosets or photos to be displayed as possible. You can quickly open and close a photoset without navigating screens. Note that, unlike design 1, the user cannot search from the Albums/Friends view, which makes the interface slightly less efficient. However, making search a fundamentally different task in the user interface has many advantages, as noted below.
Because the user is not creating data, there aren’t many errors they can make. If the user accidentally taps on a photoset or photo that they don’t want to browse, they can quickly go back, since tapping anywhere outside of the album closes the album.
Search View
Search is the other main mode of PhotoBook (besides browsing).
Switching to search is highly visible. The familiar search field is at the top of every page. Tapping it opens the search field, with three search modes shown above the keyboard.
The three search modes are “Tags”, “Title”, and “Uploader”. They can only search by one term at a time. This is a feature limitation, but makes the interface less complicated and easier to learn. When "Tags" or "Uploader" are selected, the user is searching for a friend's name. A popover appears that shows possible matches from the friends list, to make the interface more efficientlimitation, but makes the interface less complicated and easier to learn.
When "Tags" or "Uploader" are selected, the user is searching for a friend's name. A popover appears that shows possible matches from the friends list, to make the interface more efficient.
The search interface is similar to the Album interface used in design 2, which we believe is heavily optimized for making search efficient and powerful since it displays only photos that match the search terms, rather than entire albums.
However, since this design uses two very different ways of viewing albums - tapping on a thumbnail of an album to open it like a folder in Albums/Friends view and scrolling horizontally through an album in Search view - the learnability suffers, as the user needs to learn how to use both interfaces.
Photo Viewer
The PhotoViewer appears and covers the rest of the interface. This is so that the image gets as much screen real estate as possible. There are also translucent overlays for accessing features and displaying photo information. Tapping the photo makes the overlays appear and disappear, as is common in many iPad apps. The photo information is displayed at the bottom (an optional caption, who is tagged, the uploader, and the upload date). At the top is a button to exit the photo viewer. There is also a button to share the photo. A popover appears to show the sharing options (either download, email, or post the photo to Twitter). Otherwise, each option couldn't fit on the interface and symbols would be used instead (which are harder to learn). The popover adds another tap to each share, which sacrifices efficiency. If a user wants to download all photos in an album, they can do that from the album view.
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