Problem Space
Freelance Photography
According to the IBISWorld Industry Report, photography is a $1.3 billion industry. As the world becomes more digital, the industry is becoming larger and more profitable. However, the industry lacks process innovation, is highly volatile, and unstructured. While a few individual photographers have developed solutions to combat their problems, most still struggle with the inefficiencies of the process.
That's why we chose the problem space of freelance photography. Many in the group, being freelance photographers ourselves, realized that it was a broken industry and wanted to find a solution to some of its common problems.
We believe that creating a marketplace platform connecting photographers and freelancers with a focus on effective communication has great potential.
Design Process
We followed the 5-step design thinking process. My contribution to the team was highest in the defining and prototyping phases. In this case study, I will walk you through all the steps we took while highlighting the challenges and trade-offs we made along the way. To skip to a section, click on one of the links below.
Empathize
Semi-structured interviews with photographers & clients
We decided to interview people from these 5 groups:
- Freelance Photographer - Novice
- Freelance Photographer - Professional
- Client - Personal Work
- Client - Professional Work
- Client - Model
We cast a wide net to understand the industry from different perspectives and find the various problems plaguing the industry. This diverse group would also help us design a solution that could assist the most users.
Since this research was exploratory in nature, we decided to use a semi-structured interview format to allow room for discussion and tangents. So, we scripted a few questions that would help guide the conversation.
Interview Questions - For Freelance Photographers
Interview Questions - For Clients
Our next step was recruiting interview participants. We reached out to friends of friends or contacted professionals via LinkedIn to ensure unbiased interviews. We then screened them to make sure they fit our target groups and representing both clients and photographers effectively.
Once we were confident in our participants, each of us chose one of them and conducted a virtual interview. During the interview, some us took notes, while some preferred to record the interview and transcribe it later.
To summarize these interviews and clarify our interviewees’ pain points, we created user personas. These really helped us draw out exact pain points and jobs to be done for each type of user.
I was in charge of interviewing the novice freelance photographer and created a user persona based on the interview. Over the course of the project, I became an advocate for this type of user and made sure that the product could support their unique needs.
Define
The Problem - Ineffective communication between photographers & clientsGiven the multitude of pain points each type of user expressed during interviews, we found it helpful to condense them using a Venn diagram. Communication emerged as a primary theme for all our user groups.
Currently, clients often resort to a multitude of platforms to convey their ideas to photographers. Each aspect of the process is scattered across various applications, leading to a fragmented experience. Issues can stem from factors like an information gap, lack of effective project management, fragmented communication, lack of feedback mechanisms, and technological barriers.
How Might We Statements
Building from our research insights, we came up with our HMW statements
How might we streamline the presentation of photographers' work to captivate potential clients?
How might we ensure seamless communication of the shoot's vision between clients and photographers?
How might we simplify logistics planning for photo shoots to enhance coordination?
How might we empower clients to effortlessly convey their brand identity and vision to photographers?
These statements helped us ideate our list of requirements and also served a measure of success. During the ideation phase, the team kept coming back to these statements to see how well we solved them.
I was fully in charge of this phase of the process. That meant summarizing research insights from all the user personas, creating the diagram and the HMW statements.
Ideate
Primary Concept
What if there was an app that helped connect freelance photographers and clients and made communication between them easy?
Tentative List of Requirements
We broke down our HMW statements into simple tasks and features to draw up a list of requirements for our app. The process began with an open team discussion and brainstorm.
We then formalized this list and sorted it via an impact-effort matrix into must, should, could and won’t (the MOSCOW framework) to create our tentative list of requirements:
Crazy 8s
Now that we had a list of concrete features, we did our best to come up with innovative ways to implement them. So, we broke out our pens and paper and created crazy 8s to help us brainstorm various implementation ideas.
Storyboards
We also created low and high fidelity storyboards to better understand and communicate our user’s journey through the process. Later in the process, the high fidelity storyboard helped us map early iterations of the user flow.
Our Potential Solutions
Our Potential Solutions
- What if clients submitted a project and were matched with a photographer by our algorithm?
- What if the client is able to add a brand kit and inspiration photos to their profile for reference?
- Clients swipe left or right on photographer’s pictures.
While not all of these were used, our brainstorming helped us think out of the box when creating our prototypes. In fact, you may even see their influence in our prototypes.
Feedback
Once we were happy with the range of ideas we came up with, we went back to our user groups from the interviews for feedback. Here is some of the feedback:
- Once we were happy with the range of ideas we came up with, we went back to our user groups from the interviews for feedback. Here is some of the feedback:
- Clients wanted to see the photographers' previous work to check for alignment.
- Photographers wanted to showcase their variety of styles, not just one image.
Feedback Analysis
We realized that beyond all, our users needed simplicity. They prioritized a simple flow with maximum user control. Simple design would also help us accommodate the most people. Not everyone used the same terms, process or selection criteria so we had to design in a way that would let users make their own decisions.
Armed with feedback, we moved onto the prototyping phase to develop the best ideas.
For this stage of the process, I helped create the list of requirements and gather feedback on our potential solutions by consulting with novice photographer from our interviews.
Prototype
The butchering of scope 😱
Pretty early on in the prototype phase, we realized that we may have been a little too ambitious in our list of requirements. Given the time remaining, we cut down the list. To do this, we prioritized the biggest pain points from user interviews and the feedback that we got after the ideation phase.
Low-Fi Interactive Paper Prototypes
We created multiple paper prototypes for desktop and mobile versions of the app. This helped us properly map out the user flow before moving to digital high fidelity prototypes.
Project Booking Flow - Client's Perspective
Testing our paper prototypes - Cognitive Walkthrough
To ensure optimal usability, the rest of team the conducted a cognitive walkthrough of the interface. Since I made the prototype, I decided to sit this one out to avoid introducing any bias. Here is what we found:
A reflection on the cognitive walkthrough
Here is some of the primary feedback from the cognitive walkthrough:
- Booking details page layout dense; considering splitting into two pages, reducing icons.
- Confusion with "View Booking" and "Edit Booking" button.
- Navigation could be simplified.
High Fidelity Prototype
Due to time constraints, we were only able to design the client side of the interface for the course. This involved flows for booking a shoot, creating brand guidelines for photographer’s reference and messaging the photographer.
Building our design system and component library
To ensure future scalability and ease of design, using a design system was crucial. From the colours and fonts we decided on as a group, I created local styles in our Figma file. To build out our component library, I took inspiration from Google’s Material Design components since they have a proven track record of usability and simplicity.
Introducing Photobooth!
To explore the working Figma file, click on the link below. If you want to experience the mobile version of the prototype, keep scrolling to the Figma embed.
View in Figma
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Considering Accessibility
While designing, I placed accessibility at the forefront. From basics like checking colour contrast ratios to including context wherever possible, we made sure that our app could be used by many more people.
For this stage, I created the desktop version of our paper prototype. Once the cognitive walkthrough was complete, I also created the entire high fidelity prototype, including mobile and desktop versions. This included setting up the design system, font styles, colour styles and the component library.
Test
While we prioritized continuous testing throughout the process, we used this phase to validate our design decisions and go back to our original user groups for feedback. We conducted 2 forms of testing:
Heuristic Evaluations
Our experts (UX professors and upper year students) helped us catch some overlooked parts of the UI that could cause usability issues down the line. Our experts went through Nielson’s 10 heuristics while we presented our prototype to to assess the severity and frequency of issues. Here is what they said:
Based on their feedback, we made a few changes:
Summative Evaluations
Finally, we went back to our users with the finished prototype and set of tasks to assess the usability of our app.
User Tasks
We received tons of positive feedback and a few suggestions to improve on.
For example, one of the users noted that they might want to edit the project details after submitting. Here is the change we made based on that recommendation.
I conducted 2 heuristic evaluations with experts. However, I opted out of leading the summative evaluations to avoid potential bias, given my role as the designer of the prototype under scrutiny. After testing, I was also responsible for editing the prototype based on their feedback.
Key Takeaways
🧪 The Importance of Continuous Testing
Having to test at each phase of the process was extremely tedious, but looking back, we were able to course correct and modify so many solutions that would not have worked for our user group. Testing early helped us catch a lot of issues early on. For example, we wanted to present all photographer options on one page like common freelance marketplace platforms. However, early user testing immediately helped us rule out that idea, and many users expressed a feeling of overwhelm when presented with hundreds of options. Photographers were also concerned about the added pressure to stand out from the crowd, especially since clients typically required very standard work.
🛣️ Why We Create UX Artifacts
While I had known how to create artifacts like user personas and HMWs, this project highlighted a whole new reason to use them. Beyond just helping me understand the user and problem better, these artifacts also helped align the team and reduce misunderstandings despite our remote work environment. In the era of remote work, the importance of these UX artifacts is so much more apparent.
Conclusion
The project received a 93% score and a lot of positive feedback from our professor and TA. As a group, we were extremely proud to have done a project at this scale within 3 months.
If we had more time…
There’s a lot of features we weren’t able to add due to the time constraints, however, in the future, we’d love to speak to more users and expand functionality to make photobooth the one-stop-shop for freelance photography.