Pixera | Tommy Chu

Specificiations

Overview

Photographers spend a lot of time planning a shoot, and finding the perfect location is always a struggle. Pixera App allows the user to quickly drop markers on places they have visited and create custom location libraries to share with others. Photographers can look up locations based on the theme of their shoot and quickly streamline their process when setting up a photoshoot.
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Responsibilities & Tools

Personal Project, Case Study, User Research, Prototyping, UI Design, Figma, Photoshop

March - June 2019

Conclusion

The Solution

Photographers can quickly drop location markers with the app, and create photoshoot locations to share with others. This would help streamline the scouting process and provide insightful information on locations. Users can also lookup these locations by searching the type or style for their next photoshoot.

See Process Final Design

Scouting

"Will this location work?"

A photoshoot can be pretty complicated and a backdrop is just as important as the subject. Photographers want to find something that matches, and in doing so they would have to spend hours to days scouting and looking at possibilities. Sometimes they are on the go and just quickly snap a photo of the location on their phone. And later looking back on these photos the locations may have changed, and finding it again maybe impossible. Another dilemma that arises for photographers is not knowing if the location is crowded, an entrance fee needs a permit, or allows for big groups. There are a lot of unknowns that make scouting time-consuming.

Pixera Objectives

Allows photographers to quickly drop map marker with photo reference.
Create categorized locations for sharing and informing other photographers
Discovery and searchable locations around the users area.

User Research

Literary Reviews

Every day there are millions of photos being taken; whether it’s selfies, foods, animals, landscape, or whatever it might be. It is endless, however, some want to take photography a step further, and one of the challenges that come up is the location.

On average, 95 million photos are uploaded daily on Instagram.
48% of Americans use photo editing apps for their photos.
Photography industry of the US in 2020 is estimated to be worth around $11.2 billion.

Interview Insights

I conducted in-person interviews with some photographers to get a better understanding of how they set up a photoshoot. There is a whole process that they have to complete before a photoshoot actually starts and here is what I learned.

Photographers draw ideas for their shoots from social media or a concept.
Location scouting takes a lot of time, and sometimes they travel to multiple locations to find one spot.
It's hard to identify locations through photos, since the scenes would change over time.
Photoshoots are typically a hour or so and they have to make sure its easy to get to.
Is the location safe? Photographers carry a lot of gear.
There's a lot of things to take into consideration, like are there any permits required.

Competitive Analysis

Before designing my app, I examined each of these apps to see what features they had and didn't have. This would help me get a better understanding of how to design my app so that photographers would have all the necessary functions they would need when hunting for their next location.

GPS location trackers can be found when looking for location information.
All apps contain photos of location.

Yelp

A great resource for finding popular locations with lots of photos and reviews. Isn't geared towards customization, if the location isn't official. Can't add own markers to share with others. Search options are very limited when looking for photographic locations.

Features: Rating, Search, Reviews, Categories, Recommendations

Google Maps

Google Maps is great for searching up general locations and getting great information of nearby places. It is very easy to use and has the ability for the user to create custom locations for future visits.

Features: Search, Reviews, Categories, Recommendations, Custom Markers

Instagram

A social media platform that emphasizes photo and video sharing via its mobile app. You can take, edit, and publish visual content for your followers to interact with thorough likes, comments, and shares.

Features: Search, Reviews, Categories, Recommendations, Custom Markers

Personas

I created persona from my interviews to help identify the pain points that my user experience when looking for locations to take photos. This will help me come up with different approaches in designing a viable solution.

Ideation

App Map

I created a app map and listed all its function from the main to the subs. I wanted to keep the end user's in mind, and focus on the core features they would need when launching the app.

Sketches

Sketching and reviewing the app map gave me ideas on how I wanted this prototype to be, it let me examine what was possible and what wasn't when laying out the foundation. How can I make scouting a location enjoyable and easy for photographers? That was something to keep in mind when working on these sketches.

User Flow

Taking key elements from my sketches, I was able to create a scenario breakdown of the steps of my users may take when using the app.

Lo-Fidelity Wireframes

Turning my sketches into wireframes, this helped me a get a better idea of how each part connected. I made some adjustments along the when referring back to my app map and user flow.

Testing and Revision

The concept of the app was pretty solid as there aren’t any apps out there that catered to photographers. Some pain points that were brought to my attention when discussing with the users:

The current layout needs some adjusting? Work on hierarchy.
Creating a new location should have its own page and not be buried in collections.
A map for the user would be useful in quickly mapping down the location.
User can skip address input since GPS Marker has the information.
Re-evaluate the menu options and create new ones if needed, some areas are too packed.

design

Logo and Branding

The design was inspired by aperture blades found in lenses and a frame, which resembles the action of taking a photo when looking through a viewfinder. And then incorporating pointers to give it the map kind of feel.

PIXERA MOBILE APP

Final Design

A new way of finding and keeping track of photo perfect locations.

Prototype

visualize

Hi-Fidelity Wireframes

Turning wireframes into a real product, I added visuals to get a sense of what this app would look like in the real world and how users would see and use it.

Advance

Additional Frames

Created additional frames to add to the experience when using Pixera. Users can favorite locations and explore nearby locations for additional places for photoshoots.

Advanced Version

Visual Kit

Main assets used in the UI layout.

My thoughts

Reflection

There’s a lot that I learned throughout this project and that is trying to think from the photographer’s point of view how they go about when using this app. It’s not that simple when you think they could simply yelp a location. But many locations photographers go to are unlisted and sometimes they can’t find where they took the photo because there is no geotagging. By taking all these important needs of a photographer I was able to create something that would streamline the process and keep track of their locations and photos.

User feedback and testing were really important in this project as they let me rethink the layout process and fix pain points along the way. One of the challenges was examining how could I better implement the marker system. After a few iterations, I was able to retest and users were much more satisfied with the revision. User's enjoyed the app overall and liked how it was so easy to track their locations and to create locations to share with the photographer community. By making things easier for photographers, they can spend more time taking photos, and hopefully, this app makes it to the stores one day.

Location guide for Photographers.

Photography Mobile App