PhotoX
PROBLEM STATEMENT
PhotoX has engaged Terraphilium, renowned for its expertise in qualitative and generative research methods, to conduct an extensive study to understand the behaviors and workflows surrounding the sharing, curation, and access of images and videos. Focusing on gaining insights into how individuals presently manage and enjoy visual memories, the research aims to identify shifts and trends in consumer behaviors, offering strategic guidance to PhotoX on optimizing its solutions.
The research methodology involves the participation of nine individuals currently engaged in the manual or digital processes of sharing, accessing, and curating photos and videos. By delving into their experiences, the study seeks to uncover valuable observations illuminating current consumer behaviors and workflows.
The results of this research endeavor are poised to provide PhotoX with actionable insights, empowering the company to refine its products and services to better align with its user base's evolving needs and preferences. By addressing pain points, understanding motivations, and removing barriers, PhotoX aims to offer an enhanced solution that effectively meets users’ diverse and dynamic demands in image and video management. Terraphilium's findings will serve as a strategic compass, guiding PhotoX to provide a more seamless and enjoyable experience for individuals preserving and sharing their cherished memories.
Project goals
Aligned with the key business goals of PhotoX, the research is designed to address the following pivotal questions:
- Cross-Platform Image and Video Management: How do people share, organize, and access images and videos across platforms and devices?
- Identifying Pain Points: What issues or pain points do people experience when sharing, organizing, and accessing images and videos across platforms and devices?
- Understanding Motivations: Why do people share, organize, and access images and videos across platforms and devices?
- Identifying Barriers: Is something preventing people from sharing, organizing, and accessing images and videos across platforms and devices?
Project Duration
Observation & interview-based research
Analysis & Synthesis
Generative research
Tools Used
Approach
Research Objectives, Methods, and Data Collection
Based on the top three business goals, Terraphilium aims to discover insights and observations by conducting user research interviews on how people share, curate, and access friends’ & family members’ photos and videos. After the user research interviews, Terraphilium will analyze and synthesize the result into an affinity diagram to generate the most common themes among participants.
Recruiting Participant Profiles
Terraphilium defined a user profile based on the key business goals to create a short survey to find participants who shared, curated, and accessed photos and videos. We decided to include participants who used manual and digital processes. Terraphilium recruited six research participants.
User Research Interviews
The research method was used to help gather information and bring awareness to help improve the company’s brand. Discovering what people are looking for when sharing, accessing, and curating photos and videos will help us deepen our exploration and development of a user’s journey.
Participant Profiles
This table shows how we recruited our participants surrounding the primary themes, goals, and issues the research team needed to solve. Terraphilium developed a user persona based on the common information found among participants.
Interview Questions
Topic Specific: Theme 1 Sharing:
- How do you currently go about sharing photos and videos?
- How much time do you typically spend doing this?
- How does it work for you?
- What are the biggest problems in this process?
- How frequently do you do this?
- Is there anything that makes you want to do this more?
- Is there anything that makes you want to do this less?
- What do you like?
- What do you dislike?
- Why is it important to you?
- What types of workarounds have you designed to help you with this?
- What is the hardest part?
- What are you doing to make it easier?
- How does it impact other areas of your life/work?
- Are you looking for a solution or alternative?
- What satisfaction do you get from it?
- What are your biggest challenges?
- How do you coordinate with friends and family?
- What are your goals?
- What audience are you trying to reach?
- How does keeping track of this make you feel?
- What types of digital or manual tools do you use to track this?
- Tell me about the last time you did this.
- How does that feel?
- What is that like for you?
- Can you walk me through how you did this?
Theme 2: Accessing
- How do you currently go about accessing photos and videos?
- How much time do you typically spend doing this?
- How does it work for you?
- What are the biggest problems in this process?
- How frequently do you do this?
- Is there anything that makes you want to do this more?
- Is there anything that makes you want to do this less?
- What do you like?
- What do you dislike?
- Why is it important to you?
- What types of workarounds have you designed to help you with this?
- What is the hardest part?
- What are you doing to make it easier?
- How does it impact other areas of your life/work?
- Are you looking for a solution or alternative?
- What satisfaction do you get from it?
- What are your biggest challenges?
- How do you coordinate with friends and family?
- What are your goals?
- What audience are you trying to reach?
- How does keeping track of this make you feel?
- What types of digital or manual tools do you use to track this?
- Tell me about the last time you did this.
- How does that feel?
- What is that like for you?
- Can you walk me through how you did this?
Theme 3 Curation:
- How do you currently go about organizing photos and videos?
- How much time do you typically spend doing this?
- How does it work for you?
- What are the biggest problems in this process?
- How frequently do you do this?
- Is there anything that makes you want to do this more?
- Is there anything that makes you want to do this less?
- What do you like?
- What do you dislike?
- Why is it important to you?
- What types of workarounds have you designed to help you with this?
- What is the hardest part?
- What are you doing to make it easier?
- How does it impact other areas of your life/work?
- Are you looking for a solution or alternative?
- What satisfaction do you get from it?
- What are your biggest challenges?
- How do you coordinate with friends and family?
- What are your goals?
- What audience are you trying to reach?
- How does keeping track of this make you feel?
- What types of digital or manual tools do you use to track this?
- Tell me about the last time you did this.
- How does that feel?
- What is that like for you?
- Can you walk me through how you did this?
User Interviews
ACTIONS
User Persona
After synthesizing the data, Terraphilium found two users. The novice user is the less tech-savvy user who takes photos and videos for a more personal experience. The experienced user takes photos and videos professionally and needs to do so to create content for business needs, and it is a crucial part of their business experience. These two users are closely intertwined in why they shoot photos and videos. The novice user can become an experienced user through practice. Both users can only share or access photos and videos with the organization.
Affinity Diagram
The information and data collected were compiled into an affinity diagram to discover patterns and determine the priority and severity of our findings. The affinity diagram took place on an application we use called LucidCharts. Our team lead organized all the information into the chart, and from there, we broke things down based on the top three business goals and questions from stakeholders. Themes were generated as information was compiled differently to create a shared vision. This process took the team a week to gather and sort.
For the affinity diagram, the information was organized three times. The first was each participant’s answers to the first round of questions. The second was based on sharing, organizing, or accessing photos and videos. The third was compiled based on the common answers between participants and groups into themes based on the information the response was given.
User Journey Map
The Audience:
All users take photos and videos to share, access, and organize for friends, family, and future generations when telling a story, to preserve an experience, and to create memories. In addition, the experienced user takes photos to share artwork for business sales and potential customers.
Frequency:
The frequency varies with whether or not the user shares, accesses, or organizes photos and videos. Therefore, it can vary anywhere from every day to none.
The Main Themes:
Evokes an Experience:
Users sharing, accessing, and organizing photos and videos “evoke an experience” while doing the task. It makes them happy to share photos with others. When organizing, they like to gather an inventory of photos and videos they have while reminiscing about times past. It makes them proud of what they did. It evokes creativity, artistic expression, happiness, connection, and remembrance. They find that different platforms and apps offer different levels of intimacy.
Threshold Loss or Significant Loss:
The biggest challenge is transferring photos and videos to different platforms because the quality gets lost. There are too many steps in the process, and often you can’t find them. If essential photos and videos are lost, it would be heartbreaking, or footage could be missed and detrimental to a project. Each user organizes their information in a particular way.
“If you can’t share it with people and keep it in a little folder, and no one ever sees it. What good is that?”
Data Management:
The user wants to find a solution to help create less clutter. They want to ensure their data is being managed correctly and in the right place. They find that when things automatically upload to their cloud services on their devices, it either gets maxed out or something goes wrong with the transfer. All users try to organize into folders and in multiple places. It is hard for novice users to remember where they put the image because they are not used to managing heavy sets of photos and videos. All users are trying to achieve an analog photo album to create memories of their experiences.
Social Media Pros:
Users use social media to access others’ photos and videos. They want to feel connected to friends and family and the moments when they cannot be present. Experienced users find that it helps them professionally to share and access images and videos.
Social Media Cons:
Users wish the platforms were more effortless. Both users found Instagram painful because of advertisements, cropping, and the inability to share photos and videos easily. They appreciate how some platforms can whip up a certain hunger because it is well organized and targeted to you.
Increase Efficiency:
Users are willing to take the time to organize their photos and videos. It becomes time-consuming and frustrating depending on the achievable goal. Users would like a hub to have photos and videos easily accessible and shareable. If all goes well, users can easily share, access, and organize photos and videos for months, years, etc.
Results
Generative Research
After finding the main themes from the affinity diagram, we introduced three additional participants for generative data to find and understand the underlying workflows to identify unaddressed market needs. It allowed us to formulate questions that would test the validity of the trends we found. Terraphilium wanted to confirm or challenge the trends, then elaborate and dig deeper to amend or correct the themes we saw. We changed the questions for an exploratory loop of this part of the investigation.
Limitations:
We ideally tried to get participants based on our persona, but we could only get 2 out of 3 of those participants, causing a threat to the study’s validity. The qualitative and quantitative data have been added and reformatted for the final report.
Findings
Terraphilium will elaborate on the underlying need or another dimension to this that wasn’t apparent the first time. Threshold Loss or Significant Loss of a photograph became less of a theme upon further investigation. It was decided to change this to Level of Organization because people organize differently and at different levels depending on how time-consuming the task is. The journey map has been updated to reflect this change.
User Journey Map Iteration
More profound findings upon further investigation
Participants express joy in sharing personal photos and videos with friends and family on various platforms but dislike platforms owning photo rights and find editing cumbersome. They store media in multiple locations.
Accessing media serves specific purposes, such as education, entertainment, and artistic inspiration. Participants organize content to reduce clutter, storing it in folders for quick access and to preserve memories. They also engage with others' content on social media out of curiosity.
Apps auto-organize on specific platforms, and sharing frequency varies. Professionals use different platforms based on service levels, but everyone desires easier editing. The Apple iPhone is the primary device.
Suspected Findings:
Cloud services and connections are not perceived as complicated, potentially influenced by internet type or WiFi usage. Losing photos is not seen as detrimental; participants scroll to find them without significant inconvenience. Quality transfer between applications is not a concern.
Participants don't use search terms for easy access and prefer minimal organization, doing it only when necessary. Storage solutions are deemed adequate, and participants resist additional options. Instagram is used selectively for private video access, with a preference for consuming others' content over documenting personal lives.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Actionable Recommendations
Tailored information is more effective in changing attitudes and beliefs than generic information and making life simpler for users by showing only what is relevant to them. Participants might be more willing to organize their photos and videos if they tag them with something specific to make them more searchable or if this could be applied in the organizational phase. This will prove helpful in how much time they spend scrolling to find something and offer terms to access moments easily.
Let users indicate their preferences for how the product should behave and group less important settings to their own screens. Allow users to reduce large datasets into smaller chunks that are more manageable. Allow the user to customize the look and feel of the interface to make it unique to their organizational needs.
Create a Conjoint Analysis:
Statistically estimate consumers’ psychological trade-offs through surveys.How: Determine how people value a product’s features, functions, and benefits and statistically determine which combination influences decision-making more. Conjoint analysis is often used in existing markets where the customer generally knows product attributes, as it’s hard to determine values of unknowns.
Why: Conjoint analysis helps estimate consumer psychological trade-offs and can reveal real or hidden drivers not apparent to consumers themselves. You can use that knowledge to test specific mock-ups, prototypes, or products.
Allow users to decide whether they want a platform to own their rights to their content. Find ways for users to express themselves. Allowing customization, posting content, commenting, following, and sharing are all ways of self-expression. Suggest narrative qualities of storytelling to let the user engage in a perspective with their peers to offer more diverse content, enabling users to try out behavior they wouldn’t normally do. This will prove helpful for participants less engaged with documenting their lives to build up anticipation, a sense of belonging, comfort, and sustained interest. The user needs appropriate challenges to remain engaged.
Create a Micro Survey
Set up short and timely in-app surveys in the context of the studied feature.How: Integrate a micro-survey tool to your website to allow micro-surveys to pop up when an intended behavior has been performed or send an email at the exact moment. Ask focused and brief open-ended questions about specific parts of the experience.
Why: If there is interested in understanding user behavior, it is much more effective to ask one quick open-ended question in the moment of the behavior than through an email several days later. The team will learn more from reading 100 short open-ended responses than knowing that 28 percent chose option C in your quantitative survey.
LESSONS LEARNED
In leading my second major UX research project for PhotoX, I've gained invaluable insights that will shape its future iterations. While our suggestions are a starting point, they offer substantial solutions for PhotoX users to share, access, and organize significant moments. I had a blast getting to know people better with this research, and it was interesting to see patterns when talking with everyone about their manual and digital processes.
The experience reaffirms the significance of combined user and generative research methods in understanding users' core motivations, workflows, and tasks. Building upon this foundation, there is potential to delve deeper into actionable recommendations and uncover more data to inform future developments.
The project fostered a strong bond with teammates, emphasizing the collaborative nature of UX research. Class meetings played a pivotal role in the project's success, showcasing the importance of ongoing communication and shared insights.