Problem Space — New Value Proposition
This was an exploration and future-envisioning project: starting from market opportunity and consumer trends, defining a new value proposition, and building a blueprint solution to bring it to market as a category leader.
From design and market research, our Planning & Design team noticed the rapid growth in imaging innovation and picture-sharing applications — both emerging web services and social trends pointed to significant market potential. Sony had a well-recognized position in the imaging market; the opportunity was to leverage that and create new experiences that could form a genuine innovation force in the space.
Project Outcome
I led the end-to-end discovery and design journey — from initial research through multiple ideation phases, stakeholder engagement, wireframing, and final visual and content ecosystem design. The work was planned holistically and executed in stages:
Phase II — Open a public API, receive external developer contributions, and build a content ecosystem that keeps users active and drives consumption through the Sony online store.
The complete design deliverables include wireframes for the overall concept and interaction design, visual design, and style content design — covering architecture, appearance, and content separately.
Research & Ideation
Consumer Trend Study
I led the team through extensive research and card sorting sessions to identify which types of content people most enjoy sharing on social media, and to analyze the dominant themes. While sharing preferences vary across demographics and cultures, we found several themes consistently popular across groups: pets, selfies, family & friends, travel, food, and shopping.
Ideation
Inspired by editorial design, my team created conceptual sketches to explore what the experience could look like — experimenting across several directions:
Changing typography styles automatically based on scene or theme detection.
Changing decorations, filters, and effects based on color scheme, objects, contrast, and temperature.
Playing with editorial layouts and foreground/background layer parallax effects.
Feasibility Study
After multiple rounds of feasibility studies with internal and external technology teams, we converged on a focused direction:
My core direction when guiding the team: the key value isn't to position this as a portrait retouch app. It's to free people's imagination — to let users see different possibilities in themselves.
Wireframe
The overall concept introduces styles in Portrait mode and Video mode under Camera, and allows users to apply styles to existing photos in Album. Beyond applying styles, the design also envisions letting users download and eventually create new styles.
#1 — Style Portrait Capturing
#2 — Style Video Recording
#3 — Portrait Editor
Final Mocks
#1 — Style Portrait Capturing
#2 — Portrait Editor
#3 — Portrait Creation
Content Design
My team invested heavily in designing the style content itself — targeting a global market where, as our research confirmed, styling preferences vary significantly by culture. Based on designer and product owner recommendations, we created both a global set and a local APAC set for the first release.
I guided the team to balance gender, age groups, and scenes to cover the needs of the majority of user groups — while keeping elegant design and genuine creativity at the center. An interesting approach was collaborating directly with makeup stylists, who provided invaluable insight into global and local styling trends. We also worked with the development team to build an open API so external designers and developers could contribute to the content ecosystem.
This app turned out to be a strong success in the market and was positioned as a key selling point for the device model Sony launched that year.