gallery

Understanding the needs and desires of open source photo album users, and redesigning the system into a visually compelling, modernized, highly usable interface.

Gallery is an open-source photo album system that allows users to host ‘their photos on their website.’ The Gallery team was working on substantial product changes and wanted the software to be customizable by users themselves. The goal was to understand the Gallery users’ needs and redesign the system into a visually compelling, highly usable interface like Flickr, Picasa, etc. I collaborated with a team of three other designers to carry out the research and design of Gallery interface. In-depth information about our process and findings are recorded on the project website. 

I was the Lead Visual Designer, and I also participated in the end-to-end user centered design process, starting from user research and personas, through hi-fi prototyping, and usability testing. 

User Centered Methods

Operating in a tight, four-month time frame, we followed user-centered design methods, which involved iterations of contextual inquiry, affinity diagramming, persona creation, sketching, prototyping, and usability testing.

Reaching Out to the Middle Ground Users

Our team first performed an in-depth study of Gallery "help" forums, chat logs and mailing lists to figure out the problems users faced. Since these conversations were limited to either expert or novice system users, we reached out to 'average' users i.e. "experienced individuals who are using Gallery on their sites, but who are not involved with Gallery development community." Extensive surveys, e-mails, and phone interviews with international users followed.

Select Findings and Design Focus

Our initial findings defined the focus of our design:

• Users choose Gallery over its alternatives because it is free, open source, and offers greater control over content. However, for editing and configuring, alternatives are preferable.

• Because of the requirements for server integration, Gallery installation process is a major barrier to adoption for non-technical users. Updating Gallery is problematic because it is unstable and technically difficult

• Gallery interface is generally cluttered, clumsy to use, and suffers from a lack of feedback and poor visual affordances.

• Also, users desired modern features such as drag-and-drop, region tagging and AJAX-like animations.
  

Scenario Based Prototyping

We developed a scenario to guide our prototype development. The scenario allowed us to step through each activity that our persona would conduct. The scenario provided us with a good starting point and forced us to think about each screen the user would encounter.

Design Solutions

Rather than fill the interface with an abundance of "features," we sought a clutter-free layout focusing on the experience of image browsing. Clean lines, and bold color accents have been chosen to give interface a modern 'ajax-like' look as desired by users.
With increased focus on image browsing, three options of image browsing were provided for different user preferences reveled in user interviews
Notification-based scenarios added "narrative" and "conversational" metaphors to the interface
Drag-and-drop region tagging persuades users to provide metadata in a fun way, which is useful for later retrieval, a problem noted by users in current interface

Results

Usability testing found that users could immediately comprehend the site structure and complete tasks without confusion. Across the board, users reported a positive association with the look-and-feel and features. Gallery developer community instantly accepted our solutions, and are currently in the process of making some of them go live.