The Problem

Missing out on good photo-ops when traveling could be frustrating. GramCity, which is initially a photo editing app that helps users quickly make their photos look awesome before sharing them on social media networks, is now exploring a new feature to help people find the most “instagram-able” locations to take photos in a city.

Solution

This new feature will allow users to quickly find physical locations with great photo-ops along with location information and directions. I will be following the Google Ventures Design Sprint method to create an MVP that can test this feature before it launches.

Monday - Map

I started by mapping out the potential customer experience for the new feature using the two personas that were provided to me: Nick and Sara.

• Nick - 24, traveler. Doesn’t plan ahead, wants instant results that are close by without missing anything good.
• Sara - 27, traveler. Plans ahead and wants to schedule her photo ops based off of what other people have been taking photos of and on which photos look the best.

Going through the map, I started to brainstorm on what areas need the most attention, how the overall experience can be enhanced while still keeping it simple.

The key aspects to a delightful experience for this application is largely based on:

• Being able to explore great photo-ops in any nearby city
• Checking out photo examples that other users shared to find inspirations
• Being able to save locations and photos to view at a later time

Tuesday - Sketch

Lightning Demos

Before sketching out ideas with pen and paper, I went through several existing apps to find great interactions that could inspire GramCity’s experience. Specifically, I looked at the functionalities that I found on Pinterest, Instagram, Yelp and Airbnb.

Crazy 8's

Once I found my inspirations and narrowed down what I wanted to design for, I spent 8 minutes hashing out 8 different variations for one of the most critical screens - the details screen for each location. This screen is included in both Nick and Sarah’s journeys. It would be where users get inspiration from others’ photos.

3 Panel Board

I decided to combine option 1 and 5 above to show just enough information about the location and a nice collage of inspirational photo examples.

My 3 panel board includes:

• The screen that comes before the critical screen
• The critical screen
• The screen that comes after the critical screen.

Wednesday - Decide

In my storyboard, I decided to focus on two main routes for Nick and Sarah:

• Choose a nearby photo location and get directions to that location.
• Save a photo location for a later time and then to find the saved location in the app.

Thursday - Prototype

For the visual design part, I followed a modern approach to convey excitement and playfulness while incorporating GramCity’s brand color. 

Home - discovery

Inspirations & Location info

Saves

Friday - Test

I tested 5 users to identify opportunities for improvements by giving them a few simple tasks to complete:

• Selecting one nearby photo location to go to
• Getting directions to that location
• Saving a location
• Finding the saved location in the app

Findings

All users were able to complete the tasks with ease. Some major findings include:

• Users would like to know where exactly the sample photos were taken. 
  ‍Potential design solution: Pinpointing on the map for users to get directions
  
• When going back to “list view” from “map view” on home screen, users expected to see a list of locations instead of going back to the original home screen.
• Users would like to see their current location in the map.
• Users were curious/confused about the lightbulb tab in the bottom navigation bar even though it was not part of the task flow. (This page is a real-time content curation that generates random photos based on users’ interests for them to find inspirations)

Conclusion

As a travel and photography enthusiast, I have always wished for something like the GramCity application. I dove into this design sprint with passion and excitement and had a lot of fun conducting it. While a 5-day design sprint could seem intimidating at the beginning, it allowed me to focus on the core of the problem and quickly create an MVP to generate the best possible solution for the problem. With the new discovery, inspirations and saving features, users will now be able to quickly find great locations to take “instagram-able” photos.
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If I should be able to continue and move forward with this project, I would definitely iterate my design based on my findings from the user tests to improve the overall user experience. I would also love to explore the filter option and create the user profile page.