BAND Photos Redesign
Developed Enhancing an interactive gallery experience designed to improve user engagement and foster community, I analysed data and user surveys to identify key needs and pain points. This insight enabled me to transform the platform from a passive gallery into an engaging space where users can actively share and discover memories, strengthening connections and reliving special moments together.
Role Lead Design
Platform iOS, Android, PC, Mobile Web
Year Jun 2024 - July 2024
Background
Group community spaces for sharing and communication are crucial in digital life. Every month, 78M+ posts are uploaded on BAND, with 712M+ photos uploaded. Sharing photos is one of the most significant features in BAND, where you can enjoy, organise, record, and share all your memories.
As someone with a large family who loves to archive and organise family photos, I'm particularly passionate about this project and keen to work on enhancing the user experience. We noticed that people were struggling to manage their photos and videos, storage was disorganised, and finding specific photos was challenging. We designed BAND Photos to solve these problems.
Design Process
Here is an overview of my design process, which spans from planning to shipping the product. The iterative design process allows us to foster collaboration and conduct usability testing with prototypes from peers and stakeholders. I believe that this approach takes our design to the next level in an agile manner, improves productivity, and elevates overall design quality. Through this process, we ensure that the final design meets the highest standards of usability and quality, providing comprehensive and detailed user-centric experiences.
Problem
1. Sharing Photos, But Not Using a Photo Album
There are two ways to create an album and upload photos in BAND:
1. User posts photos directly on the feed, without accessing the photo albums tab.
2. User clicks to the album tab and upload photos for each album or all photos.
Currently, new posts including photos and videos are about 82% (1.4 million), while photos uploaded to the album are about 7% (1.2k) as of February 2024, which shows significantly low numbers. This means people upload many photos but don't necessarily use the album tab to upload, except when looking back old photos.
The album tab shows a stay time of 0.2% (2,045 hours) and a PV (page view) of 0.5%, which indicates a low click-through rate.
Additionally, our team conducted a user survey on overall BAND satisfaction to understand pain points and needs for each group. We segmented groups into Admin (87 people) and members (358 people). As you can see from the graph of Album, satisfaction is low, while dissatisfaction is high for both users. To constantly engage users with photo albums, there should be a clear reason to use them, providing a seamless UX, so it doesn't feel like a bothersome task.
2. Lack of Consistency in User Experience
We found critical issues while performing these two main features.
1. The same buttons are repeated but with different styles and separate flows. For instance, using various button styles for creating albums and uploading content can cause confusion and fatigue for users.
2. Finding specific photos was challenging, requiring constant scrolling. There was no clue any date or details on the photos, so the only way to find a photo was to continuously scroll.
3. It Looks Like a Dead Space
During a design audit and research, I found that many of the photo album tabs had an unattractive design, merely piling up photos in the "All Photos" section without any organisation or visual appeal. The current design fails to intrigue users with archiving or organising photos (The last design updated is 10 years ago). Additionally, it's difficult to notice if someone has liked or commented on a photo, as the system doesn't notify members about these interactions. The photo album has the potential to become an engaging space where users can spend more time browsing, leaving comments, and sharing photos. To encourage content activation, there is a need to provide additional triggers for users who currently use photo albums solely for simple archiving purposes.
Project Goal
Building on three key problem areas, we aimed to redesign a dynamic, memory-focused space where albums make it easy for users to find and share their most cherished moments.
Wireframe
Wireframe is an essential part of my design process, transitioning from low-fidelity sketches to high-fidelity designs.
Type A Offer a single tab for recent and popular photos, videos, GIFs, etc, categorised by topics, emphasising browsing photos by themes.
Type B Create a space with organised and shared albums centred around memories. The wireframe was followed by design implementation.
Solutions
A Smarter Way to Browse Your Photos & Videos
The Photos and Videos tabs are now more easily accessible, eliminating the previous display of all recent photos at once. Within the "All Photos" section, the main tab continues to house all your photos and videos, but they are now automatically sorted into distinct Video and GIF tabs. This update allows users to quickly browse and navigate photos and videos.
By adding functionality to filter photos added by members, it makes it easy for users to find specific photos by members. BAND is used in personal and family spaces, as well as by hundreds of people in organisations. This feature is essential for efficiently organising and locating photos, enhancing the overall user experience.
A New, Simplified Experience
We've simplified the user experience, enhancing the interface to make it easier for users to upload, manage, and share photos. In the previous design was that four different UI button exist for uploading photos, which we've consolidated into a single button and the same page, allowing users to upload photos more efficiently. We streamlined the process so that users can upload photos and create albums from a single UI page.
Design to Improve User Accessibility and Engagement considering main target.
The primary users of BAND are in their 30s to 60s, representing a substantial user base. Therefore, it is essential to optimise the design for ease of use across various ages and skill levels. A more intuitive design was necessary, featuring clear labeling and iconography to ensure a seamless user experience. We offer different album view options: one with high contrast, larger text, and bigger thumbnails for senior users, and a compact view that displays three albums in a row for users with a large number of albums. This allows users to choose according to their preferences and usability and enhances efficiency. Additionally, we incorporated overall web accessibility design such as adjustable text sizes and enhanced colour contrast.
We believe displaying reaction shouts and comments with a bold approach encourages engagement and fosters user interaction. At the top of the album home page, notifications are prominently shown. In the photo viewer, a nudge of comments comes up while browsing the photos or videos, giving an impression of liveliness.
A real-time notification system was implemented, transforming the photo album into an active communication hub rather than just a storage space.
To create a more visually appealing and engaging experience, I enhanced the interface by incorporating album identities into the feed.
I introduced new visual layouts and design elements while maintaining consistency to achieve a balanced integration with other design components.