EECE418 Project Paper Prototype

Team 2: Portable Digital Photo Album

• I. Team
• II. Overview of the Design Goal
• III. Flow chart of Interface Flow
• IV. Illustration of Interface Feedback at "Key" Nodes

I. Team

II. Overview of the Design Goal

We are going to design a standalone hand-held electronic photo organizer for home/business users, which allows for efficient retrieval, navigation, organization and archiving of digital photographs. The photo organizer device will serve as the central hub for a person or family's photo organizing needs.

From examining the current interfaces of photo organization packages, we feel there is a strong need for a dedicated digital photo album in the home. Even the most advanced photo organization software today still resides on the PC, making the process of sharing memories from a photo album very awkward, with everyone clustered around a monitor. Thus, there is a strong need to provide a dedicated device, such as a tablet, for people to view and organize their digital photos.

Besides the tablet form factor, we are also proposing the following functionality in our dedicated photo viewer:

• A temporally clustered view of photos that can be adjusted for granularity (e.g. viewing photos as a cluster by month, day, hour, minutes, etc)
• Simple creation of photo albums from a pool of photos

Our device is aimed to be a direct replacement for a physical photo album. Similar to a physical photo album, the digital photo album will not have facilities for touching up photos, cropping, or other photo manipulation functions. The user should view the digital photo album as a portable photo viewer supporting their basic photo viewing, search, and organization needs.

III. Flow chart of Interface Flow

We illustrate the interface flow in three main catogories: photo searching, album browsing and photo tagging.

Screenshots and illustrations are available by clicking on the corresponding node in the flowcharts.

Photo Search:

This flow chart illustrates a scenario where the user is looking for a particular photo or set of photos, but only has vague idea of when it was taken. Traditional folder organization schemes do not support any type of temporal search. Some software offers calendar views, though we feel that they do not do an effective job of summarizing grahpically when in a user's photo history exists large photo clusters. It will likely be in these clusters which a desired photo will be found.

Issues we would like to elicit feedback on for this flow:

1) Is the timeline method of navigation effective in showing the user when in their photobase exists large groups of photos?

2) Is the temporal zoom-in and zoom-out effective in helping the user narrow the time period a desired photo is likely to be found?

figure 1. Flowchart of Photo Searching

Photo Browse:

This flow chart depicts the steps a user would follow to view an existing album.

Issues we would like to elicit feedback on for this flow:

1) Is the use of the left and right gesture to proceed to the next or previous photo in fullscreen mode a natural usage? Also comments on the use of the up gesture to return to thumbnail view are welcomed.

figure 2. Flowchart of Album Browsing

Tagging Photos to Albums:

This flow depicts the steps a user would follow to add photos to an album. The user may be adding to an existing album, or creating a new album. One of the issues in the research literature about the way people deal with digital photos is that pictures are not sorted because it involves too much overhead. We concluded that a large cause of the overhead in existing software resides in the need to click and drag pictures to an album icon. Instead, the use of a fast hand gesture to denote a photo should be in an album is a possible solution we are investigating to partially solve the overhead problem when creating albums.

Issues we would like to elicit feedback on for this flow:

1) Is the use of the right and left gesture to add and remove photos respectively from an album a natural use for the touch screen mode of interaction?

2) Is the use of the timeline an appropriate method of navigating the potential photo pool to add to an album? Does the user prefer other alternative views instead?

figure 3. Flowchart of Photo Tagging into Album

IV. Illustration of Interface Feedback at "Key" Nodes

Our prototype utilizes hand gestures extensively for interacting with the application. In addition to pointing by finger and selecting by double tapping, we have developed the Left, Right and Up figure motions, or gestures, for more intuitive user interaction. The uses are illustrated in figure 1 - 3. Figures 4 and 5 below provide graphical illustrations of the gestures.

figure 4. left and right gesture [e.g. Node B and C in figure 1]

figure 5. up gesture for returnning to the previous screen [e.g. Node E to Node D in figure 3]

Below (figure 6 - 12)are the screenshots of the interface. They corresponds to the specified nodes in the flowcharts (figure 1-3).

figure 6. the main screen [node A]

figure 8. timeline view for adding photos to album [Node B in figure 3]

figure 9. full screen mode of a photo; up gesture or double tap on any part of the screen for returning to the original size [node C]

figure 10. album collections browse. The cover photo of each album is by default the first photo added to that album. [node D]

figure 11. album thumbnail browse [node E]

figure 12. create new album [node F]

~End of Prototype~

Last edited on May 9, 2004 4:38 AM