On day one of the project we were introduced to Nick Sandham, a senior designer at SeymourPowell, who spent the morning at DMU introducing the project briefs to us. I took the opportunity to talk to him briefly before he left and explain to him my degree project and it's similarities to the project. It was reassuring to hear him talk about many of the problems I had identified in my research, and after showing him my concept models he passed comment on how I had come up with a great solution... for enthusiasts who know about setting control. For the average user, he highlighted that my design would confuse and alienate them. This is something I am well aware of, and I have always specified enthusiasts and advanced amateurs as my target market for my major. However listening to him talk help to highlight to me the opportunity there was to develop a camera which solved the same problems as my major, but at the mass market consumer level.
With my head now clear and an opportunity begging to be investigated, I returned to my user observation research and focused in on the average consumer. I spent a long time whilst writing my viability study looking at how digital had changed the way people use and interact with their cameras. At the low end of the market, dominated in the past by compact cameras and currently being increasingly dominated by smart phones, there are many observable trends both good and bad which open up great scope for new designs:
Positive Mass Market User Observations
- Thanks to the convenience of digital technology, almost everybody has access to a digital camera of some variety.
- The ease of taking photos has led to people taking an interest in many thing, helping to create many new niches. These include:
- Pet photos
- Food photos
- Selfies
- Photobombing, Planking and other such sudden fad trends
- People are becoming more and more visual, recording their daily activities through photos and social media services like a sort of visual diary.
- There is a rising trend of social photography, where friends and family use photography as a tool to document and enjoy social events.
- Many new social media networks and services have been created, including companies such as Instagram, 500px, tumblr, Vine, Snapchat etc
- People are increasingly choosing to contact friends through photos rather than purely text based interfaces. Examples include mobile apps such as Snapchat
 |
| Instagram is well known for niches such as pet and food photos. |
 |
| Snapchat revolutionised the messaging words by allowing users to send photos which has a life span of only a few seconds |
Negative Mass Market User Observations
- People take an excess of photos. They take many photos of different things which end up stored together and mixed up.
- With the rising quantity of social media network services, managing your photos and who can see them is becoming more difficult
- As users move from device to device, photos become distributed across many different storage units eg, laptop, SD cards, phone, portable hard drives, CDs. Could we use the networks and tie in with new cloud services and apps?
- Photos are getting harder and harder to manage as they grow in size and quantity. Managing where they end up is becoming more difficult.
- Some users find themselves living through the lens of the camera, taking many photos as their own method of living through the moment. This can result in many meaningless photos that are just taken for the sake of it.
- Finding and enjoying photos of real value is becoming more difficult as photos become harder to find, buried among badly sorted files and folders.
 |
| Folders full of hundreds of unsorted photos are common place and make it hard to find the photos that have real value to the viewer. |
