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Assignment 1
Project Proposal

Assignment 2
Revised Proposal
Persona Explanation
Personas and Goals
Task Analysis
Interview Questions
Interview Summary

Assignment 3
Task Scenarios
Comp. Analysis
Primary Persona
Initial Designs

Assignment 4
Introduction
Prototype
Methods/Measures
Results/Discussion
Appendices

Presentation #1

Assignment 5
Interactive Prototype
Prototype Overview
Screen Shots
Inter. Scenarios
How to Use It

Assignment 6
Heuristic Evaluation

Assignment 7
Outside HE Update
New "Grid View"

Assignment 8
Introduction
Subjects/Methods
Test Measures
Results
Discussion
Experiment Design
Appendices

Presentation #2

Assignment 9
Overview
Personas/Scenarios
Final Design
Design Evolution
Appendices

Interactive Prototype

Work Distribution

Contact Us
is213-photocat@sims

SIMS 213, Spring 2005

ASSIGNMENT 2: REVISED PROJECT PROPOSAL

Note: Most of the revisions to our original proposal are in the User Characteristics section below.

Problem Statement
User Characteristics
How We Will Find Participants
Initial Design Description

Problem Statement

While digital photos have become an integral part of our lives, collections of digital photos are difficult for many people to manage. This difficulty stems from a number of factors:

• People tend to take lots of digital photos, because they cost practically nothing to shoot and cameras can hold hundreds of photos at time.
• It’s difficult and inconvenient to classify photos by hand at the time of capture due to the limitations of the digital-camera interface.
• Photos usually exist on computers with cryptic alphanumeric names that bear little resemblance to their content (with the exception of the time they were taken).

Addressing this issue is essential since digital photographs represent an important way people communicate with one another across distances and across generations. Without effective ways to sort, filter, and organize digital photographs, this rich source of information has little value. As people accumulate more and more digital photos, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of the ones that have special meaning.

Our project attempts to solve this problem by creating an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for managing digital photos by means of their metadata. We aim to focus on metadata that is assigned to photos automatically at the time of capture to minimize inconvenience to the user.

We will focus on digital photos captured by camera phones. We believe that the newness and mobile nature of camera phones offer interesting opportunities for managing digital photos in innovative ways.

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User Characteristics

• We are targeting users of camera phones
• We are focusing on users aged 18-35 and in particular on college students, who are heavy users of mobile phones.
• We are focusing on users who are relatively early adopters of technology (such as camera phones).
• We are targeting users who are comfortable using digital photo technology and have relatively large collections of photos. (For these reasons, they may are more likely to have both a need and a desire to use a photo management application.)
• We are focusing on users who would be interested in storing their digital photos online. Because of the mobile nature of camera phones, it can be particularly advantageous to use decentralized online storage systems to manage camera phone photos. (As we develop the product, we will need to take into account concerns people have about the security and safety of keeping digital photos online.)
• We are targeting people with broadband connections. Having such technology makes it easier to manage collections of digital photos online.

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How We Will Find Participants

For users, we plan to select from colleagues at SIMS, family members, and non-SIMS friends who have camera phones and fit the user characteristics detailed above.

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Initial Design Description

The MMM2 camera-phone system developed by Garage Cinema Research will serve as the basis for our new tool. MMM2 enables camera-phone users to automatically tag their digital photos with metadata at the time of capture. After tagging, the system automatically uploads the pictures to a Web server, from which those pictures can be viewed and shared.

We will use the MMM2 database as the source of our photos and the MMM2 Web-based interface (see images below) as the starting point for our own interface. Our system will build on MMM2 by allowing users to automatically sort, filter, and manage their photo collections online based on the metadata associated with the photos. This metadata includes time and date of capture, place of capture (based on cell ID and GPS readings), the owner of the photograph and individuals co-present at time of capture (based on Bluetooth-based sensing).

Depending on the outcome of our user assessment, we may also allow users to organize photos in their collections based on the number of times the photos have been viewed or shared. Such information--which is tracked by MMM2--represents metadata that is associated with photos after their time of capture.

By allowing users to organize their photo collections online based on the metadata, we aim to provide a photo-management solution tailored to the needs of camera phone users.

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