Problem Space - New Value Proposition

This is an exploration and future envisioning project where we looked for market opportunities and consumer trends in the imaginary innovation area, defined a new value proposition and created a blueprint solution to introduce the value proposition to the market as a market leader.

Coming from our design research and market research, we in the Planning & Design team noticed the growing interests in imaginary innovation & picture sharing applications - both the emerging web services & social trends reveal the great market potential. The company has a well-recognized and unique position in the imaging market and what we wanted would be to leverage the company digital portfolio and created new experience to form innovation force in the area.

Project Outcome

I led the beginning-to-end discovery and design journey, from the initial research, tons of ideation phases, engaging with stakeholders, wireframing, to final visual and content ecosystem building.

The initiatives were planned holistically while the executions were through stages:

• -   The phase I was to build the foundation experience in Camera, Video Recorder and Photo Editor with preinstalled style contents;
• -   The phase II was to open up public API, receive external resources and build a content ecosystem, which will keep users active in the app and prompt Sony online store for content consumption.

The complete design deliverables include: wireframes that outline the overall concept and the interaction for style portrait capturing and video recording in Camera, and photo editing with styles in Photo Editor, visual design and style content design, which form the architecture, appearance, and contents separately.

My contribution was providing product experience direction, design direction and overseeing the user experience value delivered through a single app design and content ecosystem design.

Research

Consumer Trend Study

I led the team to conduct extensive research and card sorting sessions to discover the contents that people enjoy sharing on social media and analyze the main themes. Although the themes can be arbitrary and vary from people to people, culture to culture, generation to generation, we found below themes are still commonly popular across demographic groups: pets, selfies, family&friends, travel, foods and shopping.

Ideation

Inspired by Editorial design style, my team created conceptual sketches to showcase how the experience can be, where we want to play around different ideas:

• -   how we can detect accent color from the background in realtime and generate geometric shapes;
• -   how we can change typography styles depending on the themes/scene automatically;
• -   how we can change deco, filter and effect by color scheme, objects, contrast, temperature etc;
• -   how we can play with editorial style and make the foreground and background layers in interesting Parallax effects.

Feasibility checking

After rounds of Feasibility Study by the internal and external technology team, we landed on the track to focus on:

Key user benefit

When directing my team, the key value and user benefit in my view is not to position our app as a portrait retouch app, instead is to free people's imagination, to allow user to experience differnt styles so that they can see different possibility in themselves!

WIREFRAME

After I approved the direction, my team started working on the detail concept. The overall idea is to introduce styles both in Portrait mode and Video recording mode under Camera, and also allow users to apply styles to regular photos in Album.

On top of the use case of applying styles, we also envisioned to allow users to download and create new styles.

Following through the above use cases, the high-level wireframes were created.

#1. Style Portrait Capturing

In consideration of company image, product traits and design trends, I created two visual concepts.

#2. Style Video recording

#3. Portrait Editor

Final Mocks

#1. Style Portrait Capturing

#2. Portrait Editor

#3. Portrait Creation

Content Design

My team spent tremendous efforts on exploring and designing style themes since our target was the global market, however, earlier studies had indicated that each culture has different styling preference. Based on the recommendations from the designers and the product owner, I agreed with the team to create both a global set and a local set (since we will launch in APAC in the first release).

Also I advised the designers to balance out the gender, age, and scenes, so that we can meet the needs of majority user groups. Most importantly, I would like to still see the elegant design and creativity reflected in the styles.

An interesting approach we took was we experimented to work with makeup stylists when creating the styles, and they provided us great insights on the global and local styling trends.

Meanwhile, we worked with the Development team to build open API so the content creation can be supported by external designers and developers.

This mobile app turns out to be a great success in the market and was positioned as the key selling point of one device model our company launched in that year.