GR1 - Project Proposal & Analysis

User Analysis

General (Characteristics in common to almost all users):

• Age 10-100.
• Owns an iPad, and is familiar with its interface.
• Has a Facebook account and is able to go on it to add friends.
• Interested in seeing and sharing photos of friends.
• Users come from many different countries and know different languages, though the majority of users live in the US and speak English.

User Classes:

Facebook Power Users:

These users are generally young and know how to use computers well. They are happy with the Facebook photo features, but would want to have more features specific to photo viewing and sharing such as creating smart albums, finding specific photos quickly, downloading many photos at the same time, and seeing the latest photos their friends have posted. They are also quite interested in efficiency. Some of these users are photographers, own expensive cameras, and are interested in the metadata associated with their photos. Some have experience with other photo editing applications, such as Aperature and Photoshop.

Casual Facebook Users:

These users do not log into Facebook very often but are interested in the app for its ability to explore their friend’s photos, occasionally look for a specific album, and share albums with friends. These users care most about learnability and satisfaction (having fun). They are generally not professional photographers and own cheap cameras, such as smartphones. More extreme examples of subclasses include:

• Grandmother: Has not learnt how to use a computer, but due to the simplicity of the iPad, can browse through pictures of family. Her family can take care of setting up the Facebook account.
• Parents: Like the simpler interface just for browsing pictures as a way to say connected with children.
• Facebook Photo Downloader: Just wants an easy way to download photos from Facebook as an album (or a smart album) containing photos uploaded by friends or the user himself or herself.

User Interviews

We interviewed three users from both of our primary user classes: Facebook Photos power-users and Casual Facebook users. The first two interviews were done on a Mac, and the third was done on an iPad. Note that Facebook’s interface is nearly identical on the Mac and iPad, so the same issues noted on the Mac also apply to the iPad. The final interview notes some of the usability issues a user found that were specific to the iPad.

Facebook Mom

We first interviewed a 56-year-old female “Facebook Mom,” a member of the fastest growing Facebook age group. With only 21 friends, she is a very casual Facebook user. She goes on Facebook about once a month to read messages and view photos her friends have uploaded. She posts very little content to Facebook. However, throughout the interview, she expressed an interest in better ways to view and find photos others have uploaded.


1. Finding all the photos that a particular friend was tagged in
   1. Before she began the task, she asked us what it meant to be “tagged” in a photo. Indeed, Facebook uses the term “tagged” frequently in the interface, and she had trouble understanding the term.
   2. She first identified the friend on the Facebook home page (she did not use search) and went to the friend’s profile.
   3. She saw a line of five photos at the top and thought her friend had only uploaded 5 photos. We told her that there were more photos to find.
   4. Eventually, she found the “Photos” link in the sidebar and clicked on it.
   5. The Photos page was divided into two sections: “[Friend’s name] Photos” and “Photos and Videos of [friend’s name].” She did not understand the difference between these two sections (the former shows photos the friend has uploaded, and the latter shows photos the friend is in).
2. Viewing a photo
   1. She identified a photo she found interesting and clicked on it.
   2. The photo viewer HUD window appeared, which she found intuitive.
   3. She navigated between photos easily using the arrow buttons and used the back button to go back.
   4. After viewing several photos we asked her to close the photo viewer and return to Facebook. She could see the Facebook page behind the HUD window but had trouble reaching it. She did not notice the “Close” button, marked by an “X” glyph. She eventually decided to hit the back button in her browser several times until she reached the Facebook home page.
3. Finding a specific album
   1. We asked her to find an album containing Hanukkah photos. She quickly decided to try searching for “Hanukkah Pictures” using the search field at the top of the page.
   2. The search did not find photos; it only showed names that sounded like “Hanukkah” and Bing web results. She looked around the search page for awhile trying to find photos.
   3. She tried different spellings for Hanukkah with the same results and gave up.

Frequent User

We interviewed a 20 years old college student who has over 900 Facebook friends. He uses Facebook on average 45 minutes every day to get news about his friends by going through the news feed and their profile pages, and to communicate with them. We asked him to perform the same tasks as for the first interview, but it was clear that he was experienced enough to navigate his way successfully. We thus asked him some other questions:

• How would you describe your interaction with photos on Facebook? Do you find anything too complicated and are there features which you think are missing?
  • He said that the interaction with photos was rather complicated due to the fact that photos were divided into three categories (profile pictures, tagged pictures, and albums) and that you would often find the same pictures in each of them. Furthermore, although he knew exactly where to find each type of picture, he agreed that it was illogical. Also, he explained that Facebook lacked features to have more specific searches, such as searching for all pictures in which a specified group of people are tagged.
• How do you enjoy the viewing of individual photos through Facebook?
  • He said that he was bothered by all the unrelated material that appeared next to the photos. For example, while he looked at a photo, he saw all the comments, which he thought reduced his ability to immerse himself in the picture. Furthermore, he thought it was a shame that it was not possible to view an album in full screen.
• Do you ever download photos from Facebook to save them on your computer? If so, how usable is Facebook’s interface?
  • He said that he sometimes did, but that if he wanted a whole album, he would ask friends to email them to him, or get them directly from their computer, as going through them on Facebook took too long. To save an album, he would have to load each of them individually, and save them with the old “Right Click + Save Image”, which he found very cumbersome. He seemed very excited about the possibility of downloading whole albums by using the App. 

Photographer

Finally, we interviewed a 21-year-old male MIT student. He has a strong interest in photography and owns a DSLR. He checks Facebook several times a day and enjoys exploring his friends’ photos. He frequently looks for specific albums and uploads his own photos. Recently, he tried to download a family member’s photo album to share on his family’s personal website, and found it very difficult. He also owns an iPad. So, we observed him trying to download an album on his iPad:

1. First, he used the search bar at the top of the page to find his family member’s profile.
2. He clicked on the “Photos” link in the sidebar. He missed the “Photos” link and opened the “Info” page instead. He zoomed in and hit the “Photos” link the second time.
3. He browsed the albums, and clicked on the one he wanted.
4. He clicked on the first photo to open it. Then, he pressed down on the image, and chose the “Save Image’” option.
5. He used the Back button to go back to the album page and repeated these steps for several more photos until we told him he could stop.
6. He also expressed how, after he downloaded all the photos, he would have to spend time organizing and naming the downloaded files.

Task Analysis

Login to Facebook account

Prerequisites: User has a Facebook account.

1. Enter username and password into standard Facebook login screen.
2. Allow PhotoBook access to data.
3. Close Facebook dialog, confirming to PhotoBook that login is complete.

Explore photos and albums

Prerequisites: User has logged in.

1. Decide how to browse albums (by date, friend, etc).
2. Choose an interesting album and open it.
3. Decide how to browse photos in the chosen album (by date, caption, etc).
4. Open an interesting photo.
5. Advance to the next photo, or go back to browsing sets of photos.

Find photos and albums

Prerequisites: User has logged in and knows some piece of information about the photo or album they want to find, such as the title/caption, the person who uploaded it, a person who is tagged in it, or the date it was uploaded.

1. Search for the desired photo or album using the known information.
2. Look through the results and possibly open potential matches.
3. Verify that the right photo/album is being displayed. If the desired photo or album was found, perform actions on that photo or album, or exit. Otherwise, go back and try a different result or try searching with different information.

Share a Photo or Album

Prerequisites: User has logged in and found photo or album to be shared.

1. Decide how to share the photo (download to iPad’s Camera Roll, Twitter, email, etc.).
2. Tell the application how the photo should be shared.
3. Fill out the information for sharing (Twitter username/password, email recipient and subject).
4. Wait for application to finish performing the appropriate share operations (such as downloading the photos, uploading the photos to Twitter, etc.)
5. Cancel the share operation while it is in progress if desired.

View a Photo Set as a Slideshow

Prerequisites: User has logged in and found a set of photos

1. Tell the application how the slideshow should be played. For example, specify music, transitions, and timing.
2. Start slideshow.
3. Manually advance slideshow if needed, or go back to previous photo.
4. Pause slideshow if wanted.
5. Exit slideshow early, or wait for it to finish.

Other Possible Tasks

• Find photos matching several conditions. For example, find photos that contain several known people together.
• View photo comments and “likes.”
• Comment on or “like” a photo.

Domain Analysis

We identified the following important entities in our domain analysis:

• Person: A Facebook user. This group includes the person using our application (the User) and all of the User’s Friends.
• Album: An album of photos. Each album has exactly one “owner,” or the person who uploaded the album. (For simplicity, we will not consider albums uploaded by a Facebook group).
• Photo: An image uploaded to Facebook (encapsulating the image data and any associated metadata). A photo is contained in exactly one album. Zero or more people can be tagged in a photo.
• Camera Roll: The iOS camera roll, visible in many applications, including the built in Photos application. Photos or entire albums can be shared (i.e., copied) to the Camera Roll so they can be used elsewhere and be synced automatically to the user’s computer. Note that this is just one possible destination to which photos and albums can be shared; Twitter, or the user’s Facebook wall might also be share destinations.