ASSIGNMENT
3: INITIAL DESIGNS
TuLiP
(By Mike Wooldridge and Scott Fisher)
This design focuses on the three primary types of
point-of-capture metadata associated with our camera-phone photos:
temporal information, spatial information, and co-present information.
Temporal information is assigned to the photo based on the camera
phone’s internal clock. Spatial information is assigned to
the photo based on GPS and/or Cell ID readings. Co-present information
is assigned to the photo based on Bluetooth sensing of other cell
phone users.
When
we communicate with our users in through the PhotoCat interface,
we will call these categories “Time,” “Location,”
and “People.” (The TLP acronym provides us with a name
for the application: TuLiP.) Each category is represented visually
by an icon: a clock (Time), a compass (Location), and a smiley face
(People).
Unfiltered
View
The main organizational feature of the interface enables users to
filter photos by the three categories—Time, Location, or People
(TLP)—alone or in combination. After a user logs in, he or
she is presented with thumbnails representing the photos in the
collection. The thumbnails are displayed in reverse chronological
order (similar to Mobog). This gives the most recent photos prominence.
Above the thumbnails is the TLP navigation area. Below the thumbnails
are the standard links for page-by-page navigation.
Click
to view
![](images/tulip1_sm.jpg)
Beneath
each TLP icon is a menu. The menus allow the user to specify a value
by which to filter. Example menu values:
TIME |
LOCATION |
PEOPLE |
Current
Month |
School |
Mario |
2004 |
Berkeley,
CA |
Dad |
Range
(User Specified) |
GPS:
26’59/21’44 |
Bluetooth:
000d93115b0e |
Filtered
View
The users can drill down into the photo collection by selecting
category values in the drop-down menus. After changing the menus
and clicking “Update,” PhotoCat redraws the page to
display a filtered subset of the photo collection.
Click
to view
![](images/tulip2_sm.jpg)
Thumbnail
Layout
An additional feature in the unfiltered and filtered layouts is
the design of the thumbnail grid area. Different chucks of time
will be designated by different background colors behind the thumbnails.
Every time there is a time gap between photos of more than 6 hours
the background changes color to indicate a new temporal grouping.
The groupings would generally separate photos taken on different
days since most people sleep six or more hours a day and are not
actively taking photos during that time. Automatically grouping
photos is likely to help users with the visual scanning process
when looking for photos since time divisions between photos become
more obvious.
Click
to view
![](images/tulip_thumb_sm.jpg)
When
mousing over a thumbnail, a larger preview box is shown over part
of the photo and some of the adjacent thumbnails. The preview box
disappears when the mouse moves out of the thumbnail and the preview
box. The preview box shows a larger thumbnail (but not full size)
of the photo along with more details about the date, title, and
subjects of the photo below. This allows the user to see more information
about a photo without moving to the Detailed View. Clicking the
items in the mouse-over allow modification of date, title and subject
information directly. Moving the mouse out of the mouseover box
or off the thumbnail makes it disappear.
Detailed View
After drilling down to the set of photos that he or she is interested
in, the user can click a thumbnail to see a detailed view of the
photo in question. On the Photo Details page, the menus change to
static text describing the photo. Below the static text are “More
Like This” links that allow the users to move back up to a
filtered view based on a specific category (Time, Location, or People).
Click
to view
![](images/tulip3_sm.jpg)
Metadata
Labels
During the initial use of the application, the drop-down menus are
populated with technical information such as GPS coordinates and
Bluetooth codes. The user could optionally assign labels to these
codes to make their meaning easier to distinguish. For instance,
Darla Garcia could assign the label “School” to the
GPS coordinate corresponding to her son Mario’s school.
From
our interviews, we know that users of photo management applications
want fast and easy ways of labeling photos with minimal text input.
They would rather not do this labeling at the time of capture. The
TuLiP system would streamline the labeling process by having users
create labels not for individual photos, but for the metadata associated
with groups of photos in the application. For example, assigning
the “School” label to the GPS coordinate for Mario’s
school would apply that label as the Location category to all of
the photos in the collection taken at Mario’s school. Creating
the label would also place “School” in the drop-down
menu for Location.
Sharing
The user will be able to select photos to share from all of the
page views (unfiltered, filtered, and detailed). Users can share
via e-mail attachment or by creating an online gallery.
In
the different page views, the thumbnails and the full-size photos
have checkboxes associated with them. A user can select one or more
checkboxes and then click a “Share” button at the bottom
of the page. Clicking “Share” will add the selected
photos to something similar to an online shopping cart called a
“sharing cart.” When all the photos to be shared have
been selected and added to the sharing cart, the user can select
whether the photos should be shared via e-mail or via an online
gallery. Sharing via e-mail will open an e-mail interface; sharing
via an online gallery will open a gallery interface that allows
the user to specify the title, style, and other characteristics.
See
the interaction diagrams below for details on the sharing process.
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