BACKGROUND

SlidePick is an app to organize your photos on smartphones and cloud storage services through a simple gesture-based selection process. I was co-founder and lead product designer.

SCOPE

Build a mobile app to manage photos from different sources/devices in one place and on the go.

IMPACT

Unique Users / Daily Active Users

Average Session Duration

Popular Countries Among Users 

MEDIA COVERAGE

THE PROBLEM – INITIAL HYPOTHESIS

First-time parents who take a lot of photos of their children had no safe way to share pictures of their kids with their family and loved ones. We wanted to build a photo-sharing app that allowed them to do this quickly, efficiently, and privately.

RESEARCH PHASE

I conducted 10 in-context user interviews with young parents at a popular public park in Santiago, Chile. I realized that privacy wasn’t their main concern, instead, their biggest pain points were 3:

  1. They feel that the process of selecting or filtering photos is extremely time consuming and they never do it for that same reason.
  2. They fear losing their photos or not having them backed up.
  3. They don’t like having their pictures scattered or stored on different devices.

PERSONAS

Based on the interviews we were able to synthesize the following personas:

EMPATHY MAP AND CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Thanks to the interviews we uncovered more details on how our early adopters dealt with their pictures in different situations:

PROBLEM AND CUSTOMER VALIDATION

We A/B tested two landing pages to which we drove targeted traffic based on our personas using ads. On each landing page, we presented 2 different value propositions with a sign-up form.

Using the resulting sign-up database we sent a survey about photography habits and an invitation to talk about photography.

THE DESIGN PROCESS

We studied the photo organization/editing space with the following learning goals in mind:

  1. What is the most convenient way to present photos to the user during an organization process?
  2. How and in what contexts do these applications facilitate photo backup?
  3. In what ways do they try to speed up the process of organizing photos?
  4. What are the most popular design patterns in these applications?

EARLY LO-FI MOCKUP

After brainstorming & ideation sessions with the team we came up with an initial solution and we wanted to offer 3 main features:

  1. Simple and manual gesture-based selection process
  2. Management of different photo sources in one place (ex. Smartphone + Clouds)
  3. A mobile-first photo organization process

1st MVP RELEASE

To move forward with the first MVP on native Android we established the following development cycle:

Several interviews using our mockup unveiled that a fully gesture-based photo selection process presented a high learning curve, so we decided to simplify the feature using tinder-like swipes for the launch of the first MVP.

HOW IT AFFECTED THE DESIGN? – SLIDEPICK BETA

With our 1st MVP we started to get attention from reviewers and blogs:

GETTING IMPROVED FEEDBACK

We opened 5 different channels to get feedback and move towards the first stable version:

FIRST STABLE RELEASE – SLIDEPICK v1.0

With the feedback we got we defined that in order to improve the activation and retention of the app we had focus on the following areas:

  1. Create a new onboarding process (Sign-up / Log in).
  2. Incorporate a tutorial explaining the main user flows of the app.
  3. Incorporate material design to simplify the interface and facilitate the use of existing functionalities.

ALBUM MODE

Core feature of the app that allowed users to create albums combining pictures from clouds and other albums created locally.

CLEANING MODE

There was demand for a way to quickly delete photos from messaging apps, so we applied the swipe-to-pick process for file deletion.

INSTANT ALBUM

Using SlidePick’s camera the user could automatically create albums with all the photos taken at a specific moment or context.

 NEW ONBOARDING

Goal: Improve user activation by integrating Google ID and highlighting the key features of the app.

TUTORIAL

Goal: Improve user activation by guiding the user through the main userflows of the app.

MATERIAL DESIGN ADOPTION + UI RE-DESIGN

Goal: Improve visual clarity, user retention and include new features.

CONCLUSIONS

Creating a start-up around a solution like SlidePick was quite an adventure and certainly one of the biggest learning experiences I had in product design, but there’s always room for improvement.

Important Takeaways:

    • Making the team part of your product discovery process is key to have an aligned vision and a sense of direction.
    • A good relationship with the development team is built though good deliverables and making them part on how to execute certain features so you can “negociate” a solution that ends up in something that’s feasible, valuable for the user and aligned with business goals.
    • Having close contact with your final user and setting up different channels to receive constant feedback is crucial to understand your customers and their problems and shows you a path on how to achieve business goals.
    • Is important to make validation experiments all the time specially when you are evaluating the features that have a big impact on the business.