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Visibility: The state of the interface is generally quite visible. Almost the entire screen is occupied by content, namely thumbnails of photos, and thus there is little “chrome” that gets in the users way. Every thumbnail is tappable or pinchable, and is thus directly manipulable. Additionally, every view has a title that indicates what is being displayed.
Efficiency: The grid design of this interface allows many thumbnails (about 9-12) to be displayed on the screen at a time. Thus, the user can quickly scan the screen to find interesting albums and photos, without excessive scrolling.
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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.
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This design presents a powerful combination between designs 1 and 2. Overall, we thought design 1 works very well for exploring, so this design uses a grid view similar to that used in design 1 to display albums. We thought design 2 works very well for searching, especially when the user is looking for a particular photo, so this design uses a side-scroll view for displaying search results. This design also uses a different metaphor for opening albums, and makes several other important changes, as explained next.
Albums/Friends 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.
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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).
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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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