CanonBooth
Mobile App
An app created for DeveloperWeekNYC Hackathon that utilizes Canon's API to allow users to take professional grade pictures by themselves
The Challenge
As part of DeveloperWeekNYC's Hackathon, my team and I took on Canon's challenge of using their newly developed API in the most creative way possible. We decided to make use of the API's remote control picture/video snapshot functionality to create an app called CanonBooth. Our app gives users the tools to step into a photo booth and experience the quality of a professional photo shoot, all by themselves.
Placement: 2nd place
Role
UX/UI Designer
UX Researcher
Tools
Sketch
Zeplin
Team
Tim Wu
Dante A. Cantal
George Liu
John Kim
Peter Ku
What Problem Are We Solving?
The problems we were tackling were the time and cost that professional photo shoots require. While high quality cameras can lead to great photos, in order to produce certain looks and feelings in photos a trained photographer's touch is required. This touch makes for great photos, but comes at high costs and time commitments. What my team and I wanted to provide was a way to reduce this monetary and time cost, while providing the same quality as if one had hired a professional photographer.
Who Are Our Users?
To guide my design decisions, I interviewed 3 photographers that had professional experience taking headshots and conducting photoshoots for others. I focused on interviewing photographers because I felt that by doing so, I could learn what kind of photos people usually ask for, as well as learn the filters and settings used to achieve those looks. These insights were needed to produce high fidelity designs in the limited amount of time we had.
What we needed to discover from these interviews was:
What kind of looks do people request the most with professional photo shoots?
How are you able to achieve these looks? (filters, effects, camera settings, etc)
Key Insights
After Interviewing photographers, we realized that we needed to accommodate for a wide range of picture styles. People enjoy many looks, and because there wouldn't be a photographer in the photo booth we needed to make sure many options were available.
We also realized that the settings used to achieve these looks aren't preset on cameras. There's no setting for "fun look". In order to achieve these styles, we'd have to find which settings the camera already provided that would have to be tweaked. This was accomplished through follow up questions with the photographers and researching online sources.
How it Works
After conducting our research, my team and I discussed what was possible for us to make and how the CanonBooth experience should flow. With a clear picture in mind, I created a brief visual explanation to help people visualize the CanonBooth experience.
Users Choose The Look They Want
Users given a list of preset styles with a quick explanation of the style they will be given
"Freestyle" preset provided if users want to create their own look
Providing Presets
After a preset is chosen, users are given a list of settings that are automatically set at the optimal level (based on data from photographers) to provide that look
Users are also free to change the settings and the changes are reflected in real time on the photo booth preview screen
Photo Gallery
Once users take their picture, they are shown a preview on the phone as well as on the photo booth screen
Users can swipe through the gallery to see all the pictures they took and send the ones they like to their email.
The hackathon was a great experience. I got the chance to work with 4 great software engineers that were very capable. For our presentations, we were able to remotely take pictures and show a live feed from a camera Canon provided us, onto a screen to show how our idea would work. After 2 rounds of presentations, we got through to the final on-stage presentations and placed 2nd in our challenge at the hackathon.
While it was a great experience, there were some challenges I faced as the sole UX Designer in our team. The biggest challenge was that I had to balance conducting research to make well informed design decisions, along with creating the wireframes for all of our designs. While this usually wouldn't be a problem, we only had a day to complete our project and none of us were familiar with photography so I had to conduct a lot of prior research. Despite these challenges, I enjoyed it because it felt like a test of my skills and how much I could accomplish in such a short time. I'm proud of what our team was able to accomplish, and look forward to working with these fine gentlemen in the future.