PhotoWorks (2019)

Role

Product Designer

Responsibilities

UX/UI design
Qualitative user testing
Quantitative user testing

Background

Photo tasks are the most popular task type in GoSpotCheck’s mobile auditing feature set. They account for over 40% of all tasks completed in the platform. As of late 2020, the new photo reporting product was processing over 1.5M photos per month averaging 50k/day. Clients rely on the visual confirmation of the work being done, which gives them a window into the market they serve. Even more, it provides our clients insights into their business so that they can learn and adapt their operations.

In order to report on and analyze all of the photos, Photo Album–newly re-branded as PhotoWorks–was originally designed to aggregate every photo captured in a single photo gallery where subscribers could quickly review, filter, and analyze photos. They could then consolidate and share select images with stakeholders and teams in different formats like individual JPG, PPT, or PDF file formats.

However, Photo Album had its user experience, architecture, and performance challenges. As much as it helped clients analyze photos, there were:

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 managed by users to meet their needs

Due to the high usage and revenue opportunities, we prioritized this work and approached it as a net new product with plans to sunset the old one as soon as possible. The existing Photo Album solution was one that was free to customers but a huge financial cost for maintenance, processing, and storing the captured photos. Photo Works would be a new upsell for existing clients and accounted for with new pricing packages for new clients. With a huge shift in pricing model from free to paid for this product, the stakes were high to prove to clients that it was worth paying for. We planned and roadmapped for a complete redesign and re-architecture with a beta release 9 months from when the initiative started.

Goals of the project

Create a delightful experience for user
Reimagine the UX to accommodate customizable data
Create a mobile responsive experience for computers, tablets, and phones
Cut task completion time by 50%

Choose two filters
Export report of chosen file type
Given a user with ~2,000 images, average time of completion was 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)

Design and user testing

As part of the redesign, we analyzed product usage metrics via Pendo and had insights into user patterns and feature usage in the existing product. In addition to knowing common usage patterns, the product manager collected feedback from internal and external stakeholders and organized a backlog for the necessary feature sets.

Starting with a product inception meeting, we discussed:

Hypothesis to test
Problems to solve
Personas
Stakeholders to keep informed
Core team
Values we needed to deliver
Constraints
Additional ideas
Minimum viable experience
Target metrics of the new solution

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

Once general layouts for all key pages were established via wireframes, I created a high-fidelity, interactive prototype for the major functionality of the application. With this interactive prototype, we prepared both qualitative and quantitative testing to be executed at our company’s annual customer conference, Reimagine. At the 2-day Reimagine conference we hosted hundreds of customers and put on keynote presentations, had different attendee tracks, and multiple interactive experiences. One of which was a UX Lab where people could come and test out new feature sets and product offerings. For two days my product manager and I ran 1:1 usability testing sessions where we learned the likes and dislikes of the application along with collecting feature requests and suggestions for improvements.

In addition to the qualitative sessions, we had a post-conference survey to gain more feedback for anyone who participated in our usability testing sessions. In total, my PM and I hosted ~40 1:1 sessions with customers, and nearly all of them requested BETA access for our launch.

Absolutely loved the new photo album.

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)

Results

As a result of a successful UX lab and word traveling amongst customers organically of the new product, we had a list of 80+ customers who volunteered to be apart of our beta product before our general audience release.

After a successful launch of the product with a conservative time period for customers to opt-in, we had the majority of our few hundred clients migrated to the new platform with minimal friction. We were also able to upsell existing clients on to the new product who weren’t previously using photo reporting at all. PhotoWorks ended up being a key piece in the 2020 acquisition of GoSpotCheck who’s majority assets were acquired (including PhotoWorks) in a divestiture by FORM.com. Having a photo reporting tool as powerful and simple as PhotoWorks was something that complemented FORM.com’s product offering to their clients.

In the end we achieved our goals we set out to accomplish

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