Redesigning the iPhone Camera App
the scenario: imagine this. you're walking outside at nighttime when you suddenly spot a raccoon. in a hurry, you grab your phone to take a picture before it runs away. but when you press the shutter button expecting to take a flash photo, your camera instead goes on night mode. hold still, it says. but because you weren't expecting to be holding still, your raccoon picture ends up as a blurry mess, and the raccoon has disappeared.
as a part of our DSGN 1 class, we were asked to explore and redesign a problem with a product in our daily lives. as a group of five, we had all experienced the struggle of taking a flash photo at night too well. thus, we decided to analyze and redesign the camera app, specifically the flash and burst functions, in an effort to streamline the user experience.
Figure 1 (left) and Figure 2 (right)
my contribution: my primary role was to be in charge of creating the redesign prototype, based on the interview data collected by our entire group. additionally, as the unofficial leader, i kept my group mates accountable for their work and encouraged consistent discussion to align our findings into one cohesive project.
our user research: to start, our group of five interviewed a total of 15 people about their experiences using the camera app. we asked them to conduct certain tasks with the app and recorded the time it took for them to complete them. here are some of our interesting findings:
- we asked users to take a picture with flash in a dark setting. 7 out of 15 users were observed having difficulty taking the photo, as they turned on flash using an icon that instead turned on 'auto' flash mode.
- we asked users to take a burst. 12 out of 15 of our interviewees had to search up how to take a burst since they lacked the knowledge.
- we asked users to take a picture with night mode and no flash. interviewees took an average of 17.36 seconds to complete the task.
the redesign process: throughout this project, our team followed the double diamond design process. after first discovering problems that users face and defining a specific one to address through analyzing patterns and trends we found in our research, we entered the develop stage, where i created prototypes of possible solutions, showed them to my teammates and users for feedback, and repeated. i would choose a problem that users faced, determine the root cause of the error, and focus on solving that problem. for instance, users often had no clue how to take a burst on the camera app. we observed that many tried to hold down on the shutter button, as that was how the burst worked in a previous IOS version. to fix this, i added a line to the left and the 'burst' label when the shutter button is pressed, to signify that a burst should be taken by sliding the shutter to the left.