Nick Conflitti: PhotoWorks Case Study

Image demonstrating the new PhotoWorks is responsive for desktop, tablet, and phone.

Background

GoSpotCheck provides mobile workforce management solutions to a variety of industries, including retail, consumer goods, and manufacturing to streamline field operations, improve compliance, and gain better visibility into their field activities. The platform is designed to help businesses with field operations by allowing them to collect, share, and analyze real-time data from their mobile workforce. Key features include:

Task Management: Creating and assigning tasks to field teams to ensure consistent execution of activities.
Data Collection: Utilizing mobile devices to capture data such as photos, surveys, and forms in the field.
Analytics and Reporting: Aggregating and analyzing the collected data to provide insights and improve decision-making processes.
Customizable Workflows: Allowing businesses to create and modify workflows to suit their specific operational needs.

Issues to Solve

Clients rely on the visual confirmation of the work being done, which gives them a window into the market they serve. In order to report on and analyze all of the photos, Photo Album–newly re-branded as PhotoWorks–was designed to aggregate every photo captured in a single photo gallery where subscribers could quickly review, filter, and analyze photos.

However, Photo Album had user experience, architecture, and performance challenges:

Performance issues of long delays from time of capture to time of reporting.
Limited data that accompanied the photo through the data pipeline.
Searching and filtering by different dimensions was painfully slow and unreliable.
A rigid roles and permissions schema that could not be altered by customer admins to meet their needs.

Product Requirements

Create a delightful experience for users.
Reimagine the UX to accommodate variable and dynamic data.
Create a mobile responsive experience for computers, tablets, and phones.
Cut task completion time by 50% on main user flow:
Choosing two filters.
Exporting a report of chosen file type.
Given a user has ~2,000 returned images, average time of completion should be < 1:50 seconds.
Redesign the UI for filtering and searching while accommodating relational filters and unlimited dimensions to filter by.
Account for different permutations due to a new roles and permissions schema.
Create a new UX for creating and sharing photo albums (a new concept in this product), while having the choice to make them public or private.

Planning

As part of the redesign, we analyzed product usage metrics via Pendo and gathered insights on user patterns and feature usage in the existing product via available database queries. In addition to knowing common usage patterns, we collected feedback from internal and external stakeholders--most importantly from our main persona, Abby the Analyzer.

Product Inception Meeting

We discussed:

Hypothesis to test.
Problems to solve.
Personas.
Stakeholders to keep informed.
Core working team, roles, and responsibilities.
Values we needed to deliver.
Constraints and dependencies.
Additional ideas.
Minimum viable experience.
Target metrics of the new solution.

Wireframes and IA

After the inception, we moved on to working on card sorting exercises for a new information architecture given the new features and requirements, and mocking up wireframes for proposed layouts.

Usability Tests

Once wireframes for key pages were established, I created a high-fidelity interactive prototype to showcase the main functionality of the application. At our annual customer conference, Reimagine, my product manager and I ran 40 1:1 usability tests in the UX Lab, gathering feedback on likes, dislikes, and feature requests. Nearly all participants expressed interest in joining our Beta launch.

Absolutely loved the new photo album!

Rebecca,
Hensley Beverage Company

Validating Priorities and UX Patterns

With the feedback we gathered from the customer conference, we confirmed that we had the right feature set, and it helped us prioritize the features we needed for an MVP from an engineering and design aspect. The sessions helped us validate:

UX patterns for maximizing the real estate between filters and scrolling for photos.
The needs around sharing and the different formats needed.
The configurations needed to improve exporting of documents (PDFs and PPTs).

Image Recognition Integration

In designing the PhotoWorks application, we needed to account for all of the data captured by our Image Recognition product. Data captured included brand, brand family, category, supplier, size, count and much more.

$850K

New ARR within six months of launching the app

~65%

Faster task completion of primary user flow

80+

Customers who volunteered to be in Beta program after one demo

Outcomes

PhotoWorks ended up being a key component in the acquisition of GoSpotCheck by Form.com after it launched to all customers in March 2020.

New, engaging user experience designed to give speed, accuracy, and control working with photos.
~65% faster task completion from time to search, find, and export reports.
Average time to completion was down from 1:50 min to ~40 seconds.
Near real-time syncing of photos that populate as soon as the workflow was submitted and processed.
Powerful, customizable, new filters that enabled faster search capabilities on any dimension.
Enabled the product to be mobile responsive for ease of reporting on any device
Improved roles and permissions structure, along with a “spaces” architecture to create work groups, so that customers could customize segments of user access.
New ways to share photos and albums via shareable, private URLs.
Better exporting and report building with more control over sizing, quality, formatting, and data point selectivity.

Image of user using looking at a single photo detail view on a laptop

PhotoWorks: Photo-Based Analytics App