GR2 - Designs
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Scenario
Charles has downloaded PhotoBook and wants to browse through Facebook photos. He opens the app, and logs into his Facebook account. After browsing around a bit, he sees his friend Jennifer. Charles has a crush on Jennifer. He opens photos of her to see what she has been up to. He finds a romantic photo of Jennifer and Brian. Charles is shocked. Brian used to be Charles’ best friend. Is this why they haven’t talked lately? Charles opens the search page on PhotoBook, to investigate this betrayal. Sure enough, he finds plenty of photos with Brian and Jennifer. Charles finds a particularly incriminating sledding photo, and emails it to Donovan, to see if he has any explanation.
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| Charles first logs into PhotoBook and then decides to go through pictures of his friends. He thus enters the “Friends” view and starts scrolling down through friends. |
| He decides to search for all pictures of Jennifer and Brian so he switches to "Search" view using the tabs at the top and types their names into the "Tagged" boxes, which auto-complete with the correct name. |
| He is then taking to the Search Results view, where he starts to scroll through all the albums and photos where they are together. |
| He sees a particularly surprising picture of Jennifer and Brian in the Christmas 2010 album, uploaded by Jennifer. |
| He displays the picture in the Full Screen Photo View and decides to email it to Donovan by tapping the “Share button” and selecting email. |
Advantages
Learnability:
This design is very learnable. The idea of scrolling horizontally follows the metaphor of a photo book in which you would turn pages to see more pictures.
Also, in this design, searching is done in a separate page. The user clicks the Search tab, which opens up a search page. This makes it easier for the user to understand how to search, compared to Design 1.
Visibility:
The state of the model is clear to the user. The tabs at the top of the window clearly show in which view the user currently is. The arrows at the start and end of each row are shown if there are more pictures to view in the respective direction, which allows the user to know if it is possible to scroll to view more pictures. Furthermore, this design does not have the visibility issue of Design 1 of not being able to see other albums while browsing through photos in a particular album.
*Efficiency:
*The use of a separate page allows more flexibility for the search, so that a user could fill out multiple criteria for the search. For example, he could look for friends X and Y being tagged and albums with the name “MIT”. This would make it more powerful and faster for the user to find the picture he/she is looking for.
This design would also be very efficient for going through pictures after a search result looking for multiple tagged friends since, on average, there would be relatively few albums to scroll down through, and few pictures in each album that contain all the friends. Hence, the user would have to do very little scrolling, and would be able to find a specific picture very quickly.
*Error prevention and correction:
Overall, the interface is not prone to errors. The horizontal scrolling would feel very natural to the user and make it simple for him/her to navigate back and forth between albums in pictures.
*Learnability: *This design is very learnable. The idea of scrolling horizontally follows the metaphor of a photo book in which you would turn pages to see more pictures. Also, in this design, searching is done in a separate page. The user clicks the Search tab, which opens up a search page. This makes it easier for the user to understand how to search, compared to Design 1.
Visibility: The state of the model is clear to the user. The tabs at the top of the window clearly show in which view the user currently is. The arrows at the start and end of each row are shown if there are more pictures to view in the respective direction, which allows the user to know if it is possible to scroll to view more pictures. Furthermore, this design does not have the visibility issue of Design 1 of not being able to see other albums while browsing through photos in a particular album.
Efficiency: The use of a separate page allows more flexibility for the search, so that a user could fill out multiple criteria for the search. For example, he could look for friends X and Y being tagged and albums with the name “MIT”. This would make it more powerful and faster for the user to find the picture he/she is looking for.
This design would also be very efficient for going through pictures after a search result looking for multiple tagged friends since, on average, there would be relatively few albums to scroll down through, and few pictures in each album that contain all the friends. Hence, the user would have to do very little scrolling, and would be able to find a specific picture very quickly.
Error prevention and correction: Overall*Overall, the interface is not prone to errors. The horizontal scrolling would feel very natural to the user and make it simple for him/her to navigate back and forth between albums in pictures.
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