Muse

As a design exercise, I was tasked with creating a theoretical app from scratch. What I came up with: Muse, a high-quality photo sharing and organization app that has wide-ranging uses. It’s perfect for museums that want to digitize their collections, photographers who need to showcase their work, or just people who have way too many photos sitting in their phone archives.

The Problem

There have been a number of cloud storage services gaining prominence in the past several years, like Google Drive or Dropbox, but these services are generalized and better utilized for file sorting and sharing. Photo-sharing apps like Instagram and Pinterest have a narrower focus, but lean heavily towards the social media aspect and don’t provide high-quality photo storage and organization tools.

The Solution

Muse focuses on high-quality photo storage that allows users to upload and organize multiple photos at once. You can curate collections, use tags to organize them, and share them easily with other people. They're photo books for the digital age.

The Process

Research & Discovery

The first step in this process was to gather crucial background information. I crafted a survey that would determine which cloud storage apps people used the most, what features the liked the best, and what their biggest frustrations were. I also wanted to gauge how interested people would be in a photo organization/sharing app, and collected responses from people across all genders, age groups, and professions.

Key Takeaways:

Respondents were most frustrated with price, storage space limitations, and quality limitations (e.g., photo resolution)
Users wished for better organizational tools
63% reported having various amounts of difficulty in organizing their personal photos and would like a single platform to organize and share them

Competitive Analysis

Out of all the cloud storage services on the market, Google Drive is the most cost-effective and has many native apps for creating content, such as Docs and Sheets. It also boasts robust real-time collaboration features, but since its launch, users have found the interface difficult to navigate. Dropbox is great for businesses and is better at integrating content from the web, but has fewer ways to create content and has also suffered from security concerns over the years. Finally, Pinterest has a much more visually-focused interface, but it's seriously lacking in collaboration tools and other organizational tools.

User Personas

I made two user personas to represent real-world users with varying desires and frustrations: Marisol Lee and Gus Menendez.

User Stories

Next, I developed user stories in order to visualize what different users would want to accomplish. These were from three different perspectives: a new user, a returning user, and all users, and ranked in importance of high, medium, or low.

User Flows

With all this information in hand, the user flows covered onboarding, uploading a file or folder, organizing a group of photos into a collection, sharing photo(s) or collections, and setting up a folder to sync with. Figuring out the details of these processes is an important step in determining scope.

Wireframes

The next step was to create wireframes for each screen in the user flow. These were first drawn by hand, then tweaked in Figma.

USer Testing - Round ONe

To test these proposed user flows, I created a task-based usability test. Users were to walk through creating an account, uploading a photo, and organizing a few photos into a collection. The basic tasks were completed with largely few issues, but some suggestions cropped up throughout the testing. The dashboard was rearranged to be more efficient, and a “Home” link was added to the navbar.

Switched from a vertical to a horizontal nav bar

Branding

Once the wireframes were done, I turned my focus to the branding. At heart, I wanted Muse to be clean and sleek, so as to better showcase the images. I also wanted the product to be approachable and not overwhelming. With a predominantly calm, dark grey background, the logo needed to stand out, so I overlaid whole logo on a vibrant watercolor texture to make it more dynamic.

Logo brainstorming

Logo iterations

Final logo

Hi-Fi Mockups

High-fidelity mockups were created in Figma to show what the finished product would actually look like. These mockups followed the patterns in the style guide to keep a consistent feel throughout the product.

User Testing - Round Two

Of course, the finished mockups had to undergo another round of user testing to determine if we’d actually accomplished all the high importance user stories. Basic tasks were easy enough to complete, but button styles were changed to something that would be less overwhelming and the picture selection process was made clearer. Help text was also added to an empty dashboard for first-time users to guide them through getting started.

Conclusion

Going through this journey was a process and an extremely valuable experience for me as a designer. I learned a lot about the importance of each step of the process, especially the research-gathering phase. The research you do is the foundation of what you design, and the more information you gather, the stronger your foundation.

The most difficult part of this process for me was creating the high-fidelity mockups. I knew what feelings and messages I wanted to convey with my design, but I had trouble translating that into a tangible finished product. What I found was that it was easier to step away for a quick break and a mental refresh every so often, or look for inspiration in other places, instead of mulishly trying to push through it. Sourcing opinions from others with A/B testing and usability testing was also invaluable, and a good way to get back on track.

By being thorough in my background research and gathering the requisite information, I’ve positioned my product to fill a space in the current market. By going through several iterations of designing and collecting user reactions through multiple rounds of user testing, I’ve created an experience that is intuitive and easy for people to use.