PhotoBook
Group Members
Adam Leonard
Bridger Maxwell
William Souillard-Mandar
TA: Tsung-Hsiang (Sean) Chang
Problem Statement
With 2.5 billion photos uploaded each month, Facebook is the most popular photo-sharing website. Yet, Facebook's interface for viewing and organizing photos offers poor usability; many users find it difficult and frustrating to find, explore, and share their friends’ photos and albums, especially on the iPad. Thus, Facebook’s user interface prevents millions of people from taking full advantage of Facebook’s photo collection to interact with friends. PhotoBook leverages the iPad’s unique capabilities to create an amazing interactive Facebook photo browsing experience that focuses on content and usability. PhotoBook allows people to explore their friend’s photos and albums like never before.
Specifically, there are dozens of problems in Facebook’s photo browsing user interface that severely limit usability, including:
- The user must visit the Facebook website to view and organize photos. However, Facebook offers dozens of other features, and focuses the website’s visibility on features unrelated to photo browsing, such as status updates and ads.
- Desktop computers and the iPad share the same interface for viewing and organizing Facebook photos. Thus, the interface is not designed to handle the limitations of the iPad, such as the fact that hit targets must be large to be reachable with the user’s finger, nor does it take advantage of the iPad’s unique capabilities, such as its Multi-Touch gestures, animation capabilities, and full-screen experience.
- Common tasks, such as finding photos a user is tagged in, require a multi-step process that involves navigating to several pages. Each page can take a several seconds to load.
- The website offers few affordances to teach users to perform common tasks with photos, and uses terms unfamiliar to many users, such as “tagging.”
- The user cannot search for albums directly; they must first find the user who uploaded the album, or a user who is tagged in the album, to find it. This creates an unnecessary level of indirection, and makes some types of searches, such as finding all "Christmas" albums, very difficult.
- Photos are displayed in a fake HUD window that cannot be separated from the rest of the content on the Facebook page. There is no way to see photos in a slideshow, or otherwise view photos full screen in a distraction-free, presentable, and social environment.
- Facebook offers very few sharing options. For example, it is very inefficient to download an album of photos, as each photo must be downloaded individually.