📚Albm.com

Digital photo albums

UX / UI Designer | Time-frame: 2011-2012
MacOS Desktop application

Goal

One of the FlippingBook’s trademark technologies was a graphical engine that could show a realistic page-flipping effect. Their main product was purely business-oriented, and the company decided to capture the end-user market with a photo album creating an app. One of the concepts, they were planning to pursue, was an added sellable photo album well-designed themes.

Challenge

Create a simple, engaging, non time-consuming app that will let create beautiful photo albums, that users will want to share with their friends and family through FaceBook and other social platforms.

The main challenge was to create an interface that people without any design background could use with ease. But at the same time, powerful enough, there will be no need to go out of this app to edit photos.

Solution

I have designed a clean and user-friendly dashboard that allows users to see all photo sources, drag and drop photos to your album, change album style, and select layouts inside the templates. The team has created several smart algorithms that could make autofill pages with photos, and automatically adjust color on the photos so that each page will look more seamless.

Part of the application was a "Theme Store" that let the user buy extra photo album themes through the in-app store. It was one of the first macOS apps that have utilized an "in-app" purchase system.

Process

My first task was to organize the structure of the dashboard. I listed all parts that we wanted to place. I created simple user steps in order to understand how the user will interact with the app.

I also explored some other apps (as shutterfly) where the user loads photos/pictures to see what users can expect from our app.

Wireframes

The wireframes I have created were focused on having access to different photo sources, various layouts for pages, and seamless WYSIWYG UI. I have decided to work with a bigger album view, so users could see the album in detail.

I didn't want to add extra photos loading step, so additional side panels worked well for selecting and dragging and dropping photos to the album pages.

Visual design

I started choosing some wood and paper textures to match the existing style of a flipping book editor and new macOS skeuomorphic design style, which was extremely popular at that time.

After defining style elements, I finished mockups and prepared assets and specs for developers. I also created several books templated for testing how a user interacts with the app. After some testing, we removed some photo editing functions and made a sharper focus on layouts selection and editing.