UX Case Study: Anthology-Share Your Photography With The World

Overview

What if there was a photography platform that had it all?

Ambitious you say?

Meet Anthology, a photography website that bridges the gap between the artist and consumer, engaging, promoting, and advancing your creative passion.

Today, photographers from enthusiasts to professionals have to navigate no less that half a dozen tools to participate in this high demand industry. Being able to empathize with the photography community, our team conducted a research report to build the foundation of Anthology. We were able to surface the needs, goals, and pain points of individuals, who engage in the current market, and competitors in the industry. Our research methodologies included:

• Competitive Feature Analysis

• Competitive Matrix

• Business Background Research

• User’s Interview

• Affinity Mapping

• Synthesizing Insights to Features

• Persona

• Journey Mapping

With our clients desired MVP features in mind, we were able to test out and get a glimpse of what people really wanted out of a photography site, something different than just another Instagram or Fiverr. Our team was then able to iterate on the design of the site, which housed the ability to connect, network, establish trustworthy sales, include gamified rewards, and ultimately maximize assets to gain the most out of their hobby and career.

Responsibilities

To launch Anthology, I was alongside 3 other talented UX designers, Olana, Julie, and Zhen. We all equally collaborated on the research analysis, as well as, the design portion of the project.

Problem Space and Opportunity

To understand the relationship of photography in the lives of professionals and hobbyists, we wish to learn about their tools, the types of platforms they use, and where improvements can be made for exposure. Our CEO came to us wanting to discover new places to take photographs and as a team, we unlocked the burdens of what photographers go through when surrounding that problem, understanding the pitfalls they encountered and how to solve for them.

The road to launch a successful career in photography is not always easy and requires a significant amount of exposure and publicity. They not only need resources to find the hotspots to shoot photos, but also to maximize their exposure to expand their professional network and earn income. This drove us to question, How might we create a digital space to find the best and accessible hotspots for photoshoots, expanding professionals’ exposure while earning income?

We had to also find a way to bridge the gap of desired features for the enthusiast and professional photographer. How do we create a platform that can host both with maximum satisfaction, and connect the two to foster a growing community of photographers?

Research

We plunge in the research process, first understanding the current market and how our clients website could be differentiated. We identified similar websites that were direct competitors to Anthology. Instagram and 500px were leaning towards social engagement in their platform, while Upwork and Fiverr were leaning more on the job board spectrum. Together, we wished to unite these sites together, picking and choosing the best attributes. We had to uncover those attributes that people liked and what people wanted, so we conducted interviews from participants within the photography field.

From our interviews, our insights were:

• Users want to be able to sell their work online, and value being able to showcase work for sale.
• Users feel taken advantage of on the current selling platforms, and have a desire to have more control over the way their art is displayed and sold
• Users have a goal of a successful career in photography with both a digital and in person presence
• Users utilize different types of cameras, and only update when they have something new to share.
• Users want to be able to network with other photographers and potential clients and need a way to share professional portfolios
• Users search for locations and research to find places they want to take photos, and have a specific style or concept they emulate.
• Users want to share their photographs details

This new perspective gave way for Anthology’s opportunity. We wanted to honor and respect photographers’ work, as well as, created a fun and engaging social platform that made people feel connected as well as helpful, which ultimately would get users to come back.

Research Analysis

From our data analysis, we created two personas, the professional and the enthusiast

Our professionals’ pain points were having to navigate the many applications of personal and professional sites for photographers, having to update those chosen applications on a frequent basis, and having to deal with negative experiences when selling work. Goals to maintain a professional job as a photographer, included networking with followers and potential clients on a friendly and professional site, and have control over the pieces of work they were selling.

Our archetype of the enthusiast user included, not being able to find new places to take photos, lacking networks, inability to find practical knowledge of camera settings to improve skills and be able to do all of it on one friendly site. Anthology hopes to deliver on these goals.

We wanted to create beneficial features to implement into our design. We began to ideate our top key features. Our first key feature was a marketplace for safely buying and selling photos digitally and physically, which will potentially expand exposure to users’ work and salvage the integrity of their photos. Our second feature was a portfolio feature for professional users to share and highlight their best work. Thirdly we included an explore feature. This map and corresponding list view aims for an easily scannable search that would connect directly with Anthology’s App game where you can play games to earn coins. Finally, when users voiced their opinions about sharing photography details as a learning tool to educate, we created a detail upload feature where users can add details about how they exposed their photography when uploading their artwork.

Proceeding into our design, we thoroughly ideated our visual concepts for Anthology

Design

Since we understood our problem space and the demographic of our users, we conducted a Design Studio with our team. We began with sketches and critiques, taking the best ideas to build ideal screens. We unanimously resulted in low fidelity sketches, guidelines for our mid fidelity prototype.

For our landing page, we wanted a carousel of hero images to flip automatically on the home screen. Moving down the page, we sectioned off what Anthology offered in three parts — games, portfolios, and a marketplace. We included a personal profile, so users can upload images as well as their own personal shop channels, so they can also earn money through the site. The explore page includes an interactive map so people can discover new locations to take pictures- an exciting feature for any wanderer.

In terms of our round 1 usability test, users determined the ease of use and functionality of our site. They were timed on how fast they completed each task and determined the difficulty, indicated by a scale — 1 being the most easiest to 5 being the most difficult. A pressing issue we felt necessary to address was for Task 4 and Task 5 as users failed to complete them. As well as a few indirect responses, indicated by the yellow stamp. We wanted to improve upon these numbers by making improvements from our user feedback

From our Mid-fi results we wanted to iterate on the following: • Findability of users current location on explore page • Expand the access for more search feature on explore page • Further define hotspots and incentivize users to explore those hotspots • Further define the “edit” button of user profiles Confusion with using usernames and actual names

• Findability of users current location on explore page (We switched the search bar with the location filter to incentivize users to put in their location first)
• Expand the access for more search features on explore page (We switched the search bar with the location filter to incentivize users to put in their location first)
• Further define hotspots and incentivize users to explore those hotspots (We made the hotspots more defined by making heavier trafficked spots larger and darker in color)
• Further define the “edit” button of user profiles (We consolidated the edits on each line in the profile and placed the edit button under the profile picture so users can edit by clicking one button)
• Confusion with using usernames and actual names (We chose to simplify the the language in our site by letting people have only one name)

Outcomes and Beyond

Moving forward with making changes from mid fi to hifi we saw significant improvements across the board. This time around, there were no failures. We were able to increase the overall direct success of the functionality of Anthology. In particular, participants for Task 1 were able to complete it 32 seconds faster than our midfi. For Task 4 the overall success rate was increased by 20% and for Task 5 the success rate was increased by 30%. From this we can confidently say that by listening to our user feedback and fine tuning our design we made a successful product.

We can now feel reassured that these tested features we developed and implemented into the design of Anthology meet the goals of our MVP.

For the Future of Anthology we would like track overall satisfaction of this site through key performance indicators (specifically the analytics of tracking engagements) Monitoring the frequency of picture uploads and the time on pages, as well as sign up members through each subscription plan we can track the conversion rate from a basic plan to a professional plan.We can nurture the business growth of Anthology as well as performing future usability tests to make sure we hit our goals and make sure users are happy. We are excited to continue working with Anthology to further propel them to new heights in the photography industry.