A solution for cityscape photographers that minimises the research & planning phase and uncovers the potential of known & knew locations.

Intro

Spending couple of years around hobby photographers around Amsterdam and learning about their motivations, habits and frustrations gave us an idea to design an app, that could tackle it all. The project was a 4 weeks sprint.

What we’ve done

1. UX Research

2. Strategic Discovery

3. Mobile application design

4. Component-based UI-kit

5. Microanimations

6. Branding

Assumptions to validate

First step — setting aside following assumptions by research:

1. It’s not easy for hobby cityscape photographers to find new locations

2. It’s time consuming to plan the photo shoot, where lot of factors (sun position, weather, distance) need to be taken to consideration

3. It’s time consuming to predict the light conditions

Research

To gather insights about the user we conducted following research steps: online survey, interviews, competitors analysis and , because the project itself happened during the 2020 lockdown, to observe we opted also for netnography.

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Survey results

From an online survey of 53 Dutch respondents we learned about the age, level of experience as well the Brand loyalty of our target group:

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Interviews

We conducted 5 Interviews with 4 hobby cityscape and landscape photographers, as well one professional. We learned a lot of helpful information about their current process of preparation, research, methods and tools used, as well about their workflow. We learned, that most of the more experienced photographers at this moment use Google Street-view to research the location at different times of the day and year to try to guess the sun position. They use weather app to predict the weather conditions and Instagram for the inspiring locations.

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Persona

Meet the persona, Jos Burger, 32.

Problem Statement

“Cityscape hobby photographers struggle with planning their photoshoots and finding new locations. Our platform should deliver quick and easy solution for them, so they can focus on improving their skills.”

Scenarios

The research conducted was also inspiring to understand 3 different scenarios for which our platform would be more than handy:

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Competitors Analysis

Comparing currently available apps, that came out of research, gave us an idea of our platforms market positioning. We discovered, that there are apps like Really Good Photo Spots, that consist photo-locations with short information about the place, or very hi-tech apps like Plan it Pro, that help with predicting the sunrise, sunset or moon-phase, once the exact GPS location is known. There is currently no solution that would combine the two.

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Solution

PhotoSafari App contains following features:

Localities for new cityscape locations
Prediction of the sun positioning, golden hour, blue hour, sunrise and sunset at the precise time
Prediction of the weather conditions
Photographers experiences and tips
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Design

UI Moodboard

After conducting visual analysis of other platforms, that our persona comes into the contact and brainstorming about branding, the UI Moodboard was created.

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UI Styleguide

Logo, iconography, typography, material design.

Prototyping

Testing many different ideas and user flows with 5 users rapidly improved our prototype. Once that the main flow was clear, we designed the MVP using Sketch and Adobe XD.

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High Fidelity Design

During the onboarding the user selects the preferred type of photography, camera model, lenses used, and created an account or uses Instagram to login.

The app works with APIs from Google.

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