Capturing Memories: Understanding User Behavior in Photo Organization, Sharing, and Retrieval

Summary

The goal of the project was to understand how people curate their photos, how they access it, share it and what pain points do they have. ‘Jobs to be done’ framework was used to identify opportunities that can help solve user issues.

The project started out with user research interviews with 5 participants with an protocol that helped understand the tools they used to take pictures, store pictures, and share.

Some of the Key Findings of the study was:

Almost everyone takes photos on their phones, and share it family through different social media and sharing platforms like Facebook, Google Drive, Text messages, Whatsapp, FB Messenger and others.
They like to organize their photos in folders or albums but the process is tedious. Default organization of photos by date isn’t for everyone.
Almost everyone uses cloud services like iCloud or Google Drive for backup, but not for organization.
People would like the ability to have work and personal images separate.
Photos app have a lot of search features but most participants did not know about these features in the app.
Participants would like to delete unnecessary photos and duplicates easily.

Follow up user research interviews were conducted, as well as persona creation and user journey mapping. Final Findings and Recommendation were proposed to solve user pain points.

Let’s dive into details!

Study Goals

How do people curate and access images and videos of important moments?
How do people share pictures with friends and family?
What issues or frustrations do people experience when trying to access or search for a picture?

Research Methodology:

User Research interviews were used as the primary tool to understand user behavior, needs, pain points. The project included the following steps:

User Research Interviews
Data Analysis
Follow-up Research Interviews
Key Observations & Findings
Persona Development
User Journey Mapping
Key Findings & Recommendations

Step 1 of 7: User Research Interviews:

To understand the user needs and pain points, I conducted in-depth interviews with 6 participants.

Step 2 of 7: Data Analysis

Affinity Diagramming Method was used to analyze the answers from participants. This data was then synthesized to identify common patterns and behaviors to deliver our final findings.

Step 3 of 7: Follow-Up User Research Interviews:

Three additional one-on-one research interview sessions were conducted for follow-up research. This research session focused on observing activities and asking questions that confirmed our findings from the first studies.