vt
Content
Group Photo Sharing
Jieyin Cheng, Elke Daemen , Pinar Erik Paker, Roel Vossen, LeeChin Yeo
User-System Interaction
Eindhoven University of Technology
P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
E-mail: {J.Cheng, E.M.L.Daemen, P.ErikPaker, R.J.Vossen , L.C.Yeo }@tm.tue.nl)
ABSTRACT
Ever since digital camera becomes popular, people tend to
have thousands of photos easily. They want to share their
photos with family and friends. However, it is always
difficult to sort the photos in an organized way to make the
sharing more easily and fun. Moreover, privacy might be in
concern while sharing photos in a group. We designed six
different group photo sharing concepts to gain deeper
insight into how people share photos. Six usability
interviews were conducted with twelve participants for this
purpose. The results from the interviews were used for
developing a final design. Further studies should be carried
out in order to obtain more detailed feedback of the final
design.
DESIGN CONCEPT
During the brainstorming session, we came out with six
different design concepts. The interface displays would be
on a desk top, mouse and keyboard are used for uploading
or browsing the photos. The six concepts are discussed as
follows:
Concept 1: Cubes
Keywords
Group photos sharing
Figure 1. Cubes
This concept has as many cubes as the members in the
group photo sharing system. The photo of each member is
shown on every cube. Each member is also recognizable
through his/her own color. Every cube has 5 free surfaces.
Each surface will represent one category like family, hobby,
etc. The member can then choose how many sub categories
he/she wants. For example, in the family category, he/she
can have four sub categories like brother's wedding,
Christmas party, mother's birthday and birth. Each of the
sub categories is clickable. All the photos for that sub
category will be shown when the sub category is clicked.
We used the degrees of interest technique here. You can
choose the person you are interested in and then browse
further to the category you want to see.
INTRODUCTION
Digital camera becomes more popular nowadays and it is
easy to get more than hundreds of photos just after one trip.
How to organize these photos is an interesting and
challenging problem, especially when people what to share
these photos with their friends and families. There are
several ways to solve this problem, such as MSN space
(http://spaces.msn.com/ )and Flickr online photo sharing
(http://www.flickr.com/). However, these solutions are
unorganized and rather dull to use under certain
circumstance. For instants, viewing other people's photos
might turn out to be an unpleasant experience due to the
difficulty of finding particular interesting photos.
Concept 2: World Map
Design Statement
We design a platform which enables small groups to share
their photos in an easy, organized and pleasurable way.
This platform not only support online access like normal
online photo sharing system but also put more focus on
small groups' usage. Our target users can be a group of
classmates or colleagues who want to share their personal
photos.
Figure 2. World map
The second concept is based on a map. In this concept we
used the technique of distortion and the magic lens. Every
1
member in the group photo sharing system is displayed on
the country of origin. The member is represented by a tree
with his/her photo on it and rooted in the country where the
member comes from. Magnifying glass is used to zoom in
on the map and look at a specific tree of one person. Every
branch of each tree represents a category that the member
defines, such as family, hobby, friends, party, etc. The
photos of that specific category are placed on the branch.
There can also be sub branches on the tree that can
represent sub categories within a category. For example, in
the family category you can have sub category like mother's
birthday, brother's wedding, etc. There are also airplanes on
the map. They represent the traveling of all the members in
the group. When the airplane in Canada is clicked, all the
members who went to Canada are shown. If their photos are
clicked, a detailed view of all the photos he/she wanted to
show the other members will be shown.
the categories to view the photos. If you click on USA you
will find the photos taken in USA for the person you
clicked before, (Figure 4, chart on the right) and these
photos will be rotating. If you want to view you need to
click on the small photos and that photo will appear fixed
and enlarged in the center. In both charts on the right and in
the middle in Figure 4, you can click on the names of the
people and view their photos. In this concept stepped
interaction is used since the user can reach the photos by
selecting relevant categories. Since the photos will be
rotating in each category rapid serial visual presentation
was used.
Concept 5: Photo Calendar
Concept 3: Memories Sharing
Mem
ber :
Lee
Chin
Figure 5. Photo calendar
Figure 3. Memories sharing
In the photo calendar, the desired information is presented
via degree of interest. If you rotate by your cursor the two
pie charts above in Figure 5 to the desired category and
person, and adjust the year in the list of the years, you will
be viewing specific person's photos in a specific theme and
year. By using degree of interest, the irrelevant details will
be removed from many photos.
The memories sharing concept has five different categories.
Each category has its own sub categories and menus. For
example, if an icon 'traveling' is selected, a world map is
displayed. The world map indicates where the member has
been by placing a 'tick' symbol on that country. By clicking
on the 'tick' symbol you can see the photos that the member
took there and you can scroll through them. For this
concept we used stepped interaction.
Concept 6: Rainbow
Concept 4: Friend's Pie
Figure 6. Rainbow
Figure 4: Friends' pie
The Rainbow concept used rainbow's bows to represent
each member in the group. As can be seen in Figure 6, if it
rains on a specific country on the map that means
somebody has recently visited there and they uploaded their
photos. If you click on the rain an umbrella appears. On the
umbrella there are the names of the people visited that
country. The width of the each section of the umbrella
shows the amount of the photos under that name. If there
In this concept a pie chart is used to illustrate each member
in the group. In Figure 4 on the upper left chart, if you click
on the red center of the pie chart with names, another pie
comes with name, password and catalog option. If these
options are filled, new photos will be uploaded. If you click
on the names on the pie chart, the chart in the middle in
Figure 4 will appear. On this chart you can click on any of
2
are new photos on a specific person's name the colored part
will be blinking. You can also turn the umbrella to see every
person. If you click on the bow, the bow will be magnified
as can be seen on the right of Figure 6. Since each bow
represents a person, the photos of that specific person in
chronological order will appear. You can scroll on the bow.
Each part of the bow represents an event and if you click on
them. you can view all the photos about that event. This
concept uses scrolling as presentation method and also
magic lens since you can magnify the bows of the rainbow.
restricted viewing to a select group of people ranging from
one person or a group of people sharing a network.
USABILITY INTERVIEW METHODOLOGY
Concerning viewing the photos of others our participants
were interested to know what the context of the photos is.
People are interested to know about their friends'
experiences, so a photo on itself is less interesting as
knowing what is happing before, after and during the photo.
Related to this is the need for knowing who is on the photo.
One participant quite remarkably stated that the way people
organize photos for themselves does not necessarily have to
be the best way for others to view them.
The organization of the photo's was quite diverse among
our participants. Some used a theme or event based way of
organization. Related to that is context based organization
(one of our participants described it as "When and where it
happened). One even mentioned going as far as naming
individual photos. Date and time was used as well as a
means of organization, though it is interesting to note that,
to our knowledge, all digital cameras give the photos a date
and time stamp when they create a digital file.
To gain deeper insight into what people think about our
design concepts, we set up a usability interview. Our
participants were twelve current students of TU/e. Five
females and seven males took part in the interviews. Due to
time constraints, each interviews consisted of two
participants instead of one. After welcoming the
participants, we asked the participants to fill in a short
questionnaire about his/her habits on sharing photo. Then
we showed and explained all the design concepts to the
participants. After the participants were clear about the
design concepts, they were asked to rank the design
concepts. Each session took approximately 15 minutes.
Rating Scales on the Understandability, Usability and
Future Use
After showing our six concepts to a group of twelve
potential users, we asked them to rank their three favorite
designs on seven aspects of understandability, usability and
future use. For usability we asked them more specifically to
rank the concepts on the ease of being able to understand
them, how easy they thought it would be to view the
photos, to sort them by social group, to sort them by event,
to sort them by time and location, to share photos with
others and which platform they would use.
INTERVIEW RESULTS
Questionnaire Results and Discussion
The questionnaire consisted of two parts. In the first half of
the questionnaire the participants indicated their preferences
concerning sharing photos, their favorite categories in
which to sort the photos and lastly whether or not they
preferred to receive comments on their photos from people
who have seen them. The results of the second half of the
questionnaire all pointed in one direction. Our memory
sharing concept scored best on all but one of the aspects of
the questionnaire. This logically led us to decide to follow
up on the concept of the memory sharing system.
The results are summarized in the graph below. We added
the ranks, so the lowest score indicates that a certain
platform performs best and a higher score indicates that it
performs worse. The best three platforms got respectively
score one, two and three. The rest of the platforms shared
rank four five and six. This method also allowed us to
easily correct for missing values. The data shows that the
memories sharing concept scores relatively best on all
concepts, except for the sharing of photos. Since the sharing
photos function is an important one of our platform we will
have to seriously consider improving this function. This
confirms our initial lack of attention to peoples actual
sharing habits.
Open Ended Questions About Peoples Habits on
Sharing Photos
In order to probe for peoples sharing habits we devised a
questionnaire. We designed six concepts without paying
much attention on peoples sharing habits. Naturally this
needed attention in future versions of the platform.
All of our participants had some experience with sharing
photo's via e-mail, MSN-messenger, website (BLOG), CDROM or DVD or simply the old fashioned way via
printouts. Those participants who indicated they had little
experience with sharing photos (2), mainly used ways that
3
Figure 8. Final design
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
Figure 7. Performance of individual concepts
We design a platform for small groups to share photos in an
easy, organized and pleasurable way. Six various concepts
were made in the first design phase. We conducted six
interviews with twelve people for feedback of these initial
concepts. The results from interviews helped us to
understand user's requirement and to develop the final
design. But we acknowledge that this is an initial study and
much more needs to be done.
FINAL DESIGN
Results from the interviews led us to decide to follow up on
the concept of the memory sharing system. The concept is
enhanced by using a camera metaphor. We used the
memory sharing concept as a basis. This concept has as
well five different categories; these are represented by the
digital cameras. Each category has its own sub categories
and menus. For example, if an icon 'traveling' is selected, a
world map is displayed. The world map indicates where the
member has been by placing a 'tick' symbol on that country.
By clicking on the 'tick' symbol you can see the photos that
the member took there and you can scroll through them.
The functions on a camera like zooming and browsing are
incorporated in the system. Figure 8 shows the final design
for the project.
In general, people like to share photos and a simple
information navigation system is preferred. Stepped
interaction, as well as residue and breadcrumbs are more
acceptable for navigation when they try to view photos.
Based on the interview result, we picked up one of six
initial concepts. A final design was build up deriving from
this concept.
Further study should be conducted in order to obtain more
detailed feedback of the final design, such as, How many
themes do users want? Which themes do they prefer?
We learned that it is better to not use too many concepts in
one interview. We had six concepts in total and for some
participants it was difficult to keep track of them while
answering.
Sarawak
4
Jieyin Cheng, Elke Daemen , Pinar Erik Paker, Roel Vossen, LeeChin Yeo
User-System Interaction
Eindhoven University of Technology
P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
E-mail: {J.Cheng, E.M.L.Daemen, P.ErikPaker, R.J.Vossen , L.C.Yeo }@tm.tue.nl)
ABSTRACT
Ever since digital camera becomes popular, people tend to
have thousands of photos easily. They want to share their
photos with family and friends. However, it is always
difficult to sort the photos in an organized way to make the
sharing more easily and fun. Moreover, privacy might be in
concern while sharing photos in a group. We designed six
different group photo sharing concepts to gain deeper
insight into how people share photos. Six usability
interviews were conducted with twelve participants for this
purpose. The results from the interviews were used for
developing a final design. Further studies should be carried
out in order to obtain more detailed feedback of the final
design.
DESIGN CONCEPT
During the brainstorming session, we came out with six
different design concepts. The interface displays would be
on a desk top, mouse and keyboard are used for uploading
or browsing the photos. The six concepts are discussed as
follows:
Concept 1: Cubes
Keywords
Group photos sharing
Figure 1. Cubes
This concept has as many cubes as the members in the
group photo sharing system. The photo of each member is
shown on every cube. Each member is also recognizable
through his/her own color. Every cube has 5 free surfaces.
Each surface will represent one category like family, hobby,
etc. The member can then choose how many sub categories
he/she wants. For example, in the family category, he/she
can have four sub categories like brother's wedding,
Christmas party, mother's birthday and birth. Each of the
sub categories is clickable. All the photos for that sub
category will be shown when the sub category is clicked.
We used the degrees of interest technique here. You can
choose the person you are interested in and then browse
further to the category you want to see.
INTRODUCTION
Digital camera becomes more popular nowadays and it is
easy to get more than hundreds of photos just after one trip.
How to organize these photos is an interesting and
challenging problem, especially when people what to share
these photos with their friends and families. There are
several ways to solve this problem, such as MSN space
(http://spaces.msn.com/ )and Flickr online photo sharing
(http://www.flickr.com/). However, these solutions are
unorganized and rather dull to use under certain
circumstance. For instants, viewing other people's photos
might turn out to be an unpleasant experience due to the
difficulty of finding particular interesting photos.
Concept 2: World Map
Design Statement
We design a platform which enables small groups to share
their photos in an easy, organized and pleasurable way.
This platform not only support online access like normal
online photo sharing system but also put more focus on
small groups' usage. Our target users can be a group of
classmates or colleagues who want to share their personal
photos.
Figure 2. World map
The second concept is based on a map. In this concept we
used the technique of distortion and the magic lens. Every
1
member in the group photo sharing system is displayed on
the country of origin. The member is represented by a tree
with his/her photo on it and rooted in the country where the
member comes from. Magnifying glass is used to zoom in
on the map and look at a specific tree of one person. Every
branch of each tree represents a category that the member
defines, such as family, hobby, friends, party, etc. The
photos of that specific category are placed on the branch.
There can also be sub branches on the tree that can
represent sub categories within a category. For example, in
the family category you can have sub category like mother's
birthday, brother's wedding, etc. There are also airplanes on
the map. They represent the traveling of all the members in
the group. When the airplane in Canada is clicked, all the
members who went to Canada are shown. If their photos are
clicked, a detailed view of all the photos he/she wanted to
show the other members will be shown.
the categories to view the photos. If you click on USA you
will find the photos taken in USA for the person you
clicked before, (Figure 4, chart on the right) and these
photos will be rotating. If you want to view you need to
click on the small photos and that photo will appear fixed
and enlarged in the center. In both charts on the right and in
the middle in Figure 4, you can click on the names of the
people and view their photos. In this concept stepped
interaction is used since the user can reach the photos by
selecting relevant categories. Since the photos will be
rotating in each category rapid serial visual presentation
was used.
Concept 5: Photo Calendar
Concept 3: Memories Sharing
Mem
ber :
Lee
Chin
Figure 5. Photo calendar
Figure 3. Memories sharing
In the photo calendar, the desired information is presented
via degree of interest. If you rotate by your cursor the two
pie charts above in Figure 5 to the desired category and
person, and adjust the year in the list of the years, you will
be viewing specific person's photos in a specific theme and
year. By using degree of interest, the irrelevant details will
be removed from many photos.
The memories sharing concept has five different categories.
Each category has its own sub categories and menus. For
example, if an icon 'traveling' is selected, a world map is
displayed. The world map indicates where the member has
been by placing a 'tick' symbol on that country. By clicking
on the 'tick' symbol you can see the photos that the member
took there and you can scroll through them. For this
concept we used stepped interaction.
Concept 6: Rainbow
Concept 4: Friend's Pie
Figure 6. Rainbow
Figure 4: Friends' pie
The Rainbow concept used rainbow's bows to represent
each member in the group. As can be seen in Figure 6, if it
rains on a specific country on the map that means
somebody has recently visited there and they uploaded their
photos. If you click on the rain an umbrella appears. On the
umbrella there are the names of the people visited that
country. The width of the each section of the umbrella
shows the amount of the photos under that name. If there
In this concept a pie chart is used to illustrate each member
in the group. In Figure 4 on the upper left chart, if you click
on the red center of the pie chart with names, another pie
comes with name, password and catalog option. If these
options are filled, new photos will be uploaded. If you click
on the names on the pie chart, the chart in the middle in
Figure 4 will appear. On this chart you can click on any of
2
are new photos on a specific person's name the colored part
will be blinking. You can also turn the umbrella to see every
person. If you click on the bow, the bow will be magnified
as can be seen on the right of Figure 6. Since each bow
represents a person, the photos of that specific person in
chronological order will appear. You can scroll on the bow.
Each part of the bow represents an event and if you click on
them. you can view all the photos about that event. This
concept uses scrolling as presentation method and also
magic lens since you can magnify the bows of the rainbow.
restricted viewing to a select group of people ranging from
one person or a group of people sharing a network.
USABILITY INTERVIEW METHODOLOGY
Concerning viewing the photos of others our participants
were interested to know what the context of the photos is.
People are interested to know about their friends'
experiences, so a photo on itself is less interesting as
knowing what is happing before, after and during the photo.
Related to this is the need for knowing who is on the photo.
One participant quite remarkably stated that the way people
organize photos for themselves does not necessarily have to
be the best way for others to view them.
The organization of the photo's was quite diverse among
our participants. Some used a theme or event based way of
organization. Related to that is context based organization
(one of our participants described it as "When and where it
happened). One even mentioned going as far as naming
individual photos. Date and time was used as well as a
means of organization, though it is interesting to note that,
to our knowledge, all digital cameras give the photos a date
and time stamp when they create a digital file.
To gain deeper insight into what people think about our
design concepts, we set up a usability interview. Our
participants were twelve current students of TU/e. Five
females and seven males took part in the interviews. Due to
time constraints, each interviews consisted of two
participants instead of one. After welcoming the
participants, we asked the participants to fill in a short
questionnaire about his/her habits on sharing photo. Then
we showed and explained all the design concepts to the
participants. After the participants were clear about the
design concepts, they were asked to rank the design
concepts. Each session took approximately 15 minutes.
Rating Scales on the Understandability, Usability and
Future Use
After showing our six concepts to a group of twelve
potential users, we asked them to rank their three favorite
designs on seven aspects of understandability, usability and
future use. For usability we asked them more specifically to
rank the concepts on the ease of being able to understand
them, how easy they thought it would be to view the
photos, to sort them by social group, to sort them by event,
to sort them by time and location, to share photos with
others and which platform they would use.
INTERVIEW RESULTS
Questionnaire Results and Discussion
The questionnaire consisted of two parts. In the first half of
the questionnaire the participants indicated their preferences
concerning sharing photos, their favorite categories in
which to sort the photos and lastly whether or not they
preferred to receive comments on their photos from people
who have seen them. The results of the second half of the
questionnaire all pointed in one direction. Our memory
sharing concept scored best on all but one of the aspects of
the questionnaire. This logically led us to decide to follow
up on the concept of the memory sharing system.
The results are summarized in the graph below. We added
the ranks, so the lowest score indicates that a certain
platform performs best and a higher score indicates that it
performs worse. The best three platforms got respectively
score one, two and three. The rest of the platforms shared
rank four five and six. This method also allowed us to
easily correct for missing values. The data shows that the
memories sharing concept scores relatively best on all
concepts, except for the sharing of photos. Since the sharing
photos function is an important one of our platform we will
have to seriously consider improving this function. This
confirms our initial lack of attention to peoples actual
sharing habits.
Open Ended Questions About Peoples Habits on
Sharing Photos
In order to probe for peoples sharing habits we devised a
questionnaire. We designed six concepts without paying
much attention on peoples sharing habits. Naturally this
needed attention in future versions of the platform.
All of our participants had some experience with sharing
photo's via e-mail, MSN-messenger, website (BLOG), CDROM or DVD or simply the old fashioned way via
printouts. Those participants who indicated they had little
experience with sharing photos (2), mainly used ways that
3
Figure 8. Final design
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
Figure 7. Performance of individual concepts
We design a platform for small groups to share photos in an
easy, organized and pleasurable way. Six various concepts
were made in the first design phase. We conducted six
interviews with twelve people for feedback of these initial
concepts. The results from interviews helped us to
understand user's requirement and to develop the final
design. But we acknowledge that this is an initial study and
much more needs to be done.
FINAL DESIGN
Results from the interviews led us to decide to follow up on
the concept of the memory sharing system. The concept is
enhanced by using a camera metaphor. We used the
memory sharing concept as a basis. This concept has as
well five different categories; these are represented by the
digital cameras. Each category has its own sub categories
and menus. For example, if an icon 'traveling' is selected, a
world map is displayed. The world map indicates where the
member has been by placing a 'tick' symbol on that country.
By clicking on the 'tick' symbol you can see the photos that
the member took there and you can scroll through them.
The functions on a camera like zooming and browsing are
incorporated in the system. Figure 8 shows the final design
for the project.
In general, people like to share photos and a simple
information navigation system is preferred. Stepped
interaction, as well as residue and breadcrumbs are more
acceptable for navigation when they try to view photos.
Based on the interview result, we picked up one of six
initial concepts. A final design was build up deriving from
this concept.
Further study should be conducted in order to obtain more
detailed feedback of the final design, such as, How many
themes do users want? Which themes do they prefer?
We learned that it is better to not use too many concepts in
one interview. We had six concepts in total and for some
participants it was difficult to keep track of them while
answering.
Sarawak
4
