Web app design for an on-demand photo studio
My designs aimed to make the soona setup experience more approachable.
Project summary
soona’s mission is to make professional photography and videography accessible and friendly. By removing some of the barriers of traditional processes, they’re able to offer a high-quality product at a much lower cost. soona offers two ways to shoot: in person at their studios or online via their soona anytime platform.
With the 40 hours of development time, I prioritized building 6 new features. To illustrate how these features would work in context, I created an interactive prototype showing how these distinct features could work together in the booking flow.
My role
I collaborated with a team of designers to do a competitive audit and Kano analysis. I was solely responsible for creating two journey maps (one for the current state of the site and one for a future, proposed state) as well as high-fidelity wireframes and a clickable prototype.
Client
soona
Users
Primarily small business owners
Methods & Tools
Competitor audit, user journey mapping, rapid feature ideation, stakeholder interview, Kano analysis, Sketch, InVision Freehand, Figma
Competitor audit and stakeholder interview
Goal
Understand where our focus should be in ideating new features
Findings
From the competitive analysis we saw that soona’s anytime service, a software users can use to join their shoot live from anywhere, seemed to be a big differentiator. In addition, their pricing was very competitive and flexible compared to other companies who either asked for more up front or required a subscription.
Hayley Anderson, the CCO, highlighted to us that their customers are often new to this type of service and need help creating their shot list and understanding photography lingo like “flat lay.” She also said that their brand is built to be friendly and inclusive, so making sure there’s a low barrier to entry is very important.
Notes from competitor audit and interview with Hayley Anderson, CCO of soona.
Customer Journey map
Armed with this information about how customers currently navigate the booking and planning process, I documented a typical customer journey including the touch points, feelings, and challenges at each step.
Goal
Discover the biggest areas of opportunity
Next steps
From this, it was clear that the booking flow offered a big opportunity for improvement as well as the shot building process. The post-shoot photo review also could use some work.
I used post-its to create the initial outline of the customer journey.
This version of the journey map showed the soona experience when I started working on this problem space.
Sketched wireframes for new features
Armed with a map of the customer journey, I sketched 6 different product solutions that could help attack these problem areas. My team of designers also brainstormed solutions. We then worked with James Tucker, a software engineer at soona, to help us estimate the amount of engineering hours each feature would take to build.
Dot voting
From the 100+ ideas, we narrowed it down to 10 to test using a Kano analysis. From the dot voting, our team chose 3 of my ideas to include in the survey.
Goal
Come up with a range of different product solutions to test with users
Kano survey and analysis
To get a better understanding of how real users would react to these new ideas, we conducted a Kano analysis. This involved surveying users to understand both if they found the features desirable, but also if they thought they could live without the features.
Goal
Validate the desirability of product solutions
Findings
Users tended to like features that were:
Time savers: the highest performing features were the pre-made shot list and showing visual examples in context
Way-finding helpers: features that showed users where they were in the flow or clues to what state things were in (i.e. warnings about unedited photos)
Guided flows: features like “style quiz” that guided users through creating style guidelines performed well.
Recommendation with updated journey map and annotated wireframes
With the 40 hours of development type, I prioritized building 6 new features: adding a booking progress bar, giving a more clear clarification on what online-only shoots are, providing photo examples in context, giving users the option to use a shot list template, letting users take an interactive style quiz in lieu of uploading a mood board, and listing helper text that will give users insight into when photos have yet to be edited.
Summary
Currently, many potential customers drop off during the booking flow, so I wanted to add more clarity to that process.
In addition, soona has gotten feedback that creating a shot list and choosing photos from unedited versions were difficult tasks for less experienced customers, so I wanted to create a way to make both of those tasks more seamless.
Tools
Sketch, Google Slides
This is the updated journey map to show how adding new features could improve the customer experience.
Interactive prototype
To illustrate how these features would work in context, I created an interactive prototype showing how these distinct features could work together in the booking flow.
The user is a start up employee looking to create a marketing campaign around the launch of a product: a new seltzer flavor.
Tools
Sketch, Figma
