IT ALL STARTED WHEN…
Samsung’s Consumer Experience Lab worked with Yves Béhar and Fuse Project to develop an award-winning television that is not just smart but a true masterpiece. A beautiful design that blends with your home, Samsung Frame is designed to complement your space, no matter what your style is. The Frame functions as a normal TV but also displays museum quality artwork or personal photos when you're not watching TV content. The Frame is designed to look like a framed piece of art hung on the wall until turned on, thus replacing the black rectangle on the wall - the regular TV.
In 2017, when Frame was launched it was all about the idea of replacing the TV with a piece of art. A whole new system architecture and user interface had to be created for the Art Mode of Frame as it was a very different experience from the TV mode and UI of existing Samsung smart televisions. The Frame UI was designed to be a minimalistic and fluid interface that showcased artwork and finding art.
When we were designing Frame 2018…
our was to enrich The Frame by refining existing feature sets and defining new features to make it more personal and customizable for users. This meant creating fluid ways to add and display personal photos, creating personal collections and building a recommendation system based on user preferences.
My Role
Interaction Designer
Year
2017 - 2018
We wanted to tweak the way users uploaded personal content in to The Frame to display it. This might include photos or personal collection of artworks that are not on the Frame. What did we already know about displaying personal content?
A simple, guided and fluid upload process
The process of uploading photos and artworks to Frame should be simple and intuitive. The process should also be capable of taking care of notifying users about the required resolution and quality required. Provide a branched path, based on the needs, to help users to complete their requirements with minimum number if steps.
Displaying Galleries
Often times, when displaying personal photos, we often display multiple photos creating a photo gallery. Frame had to support display of multiple photos through collages for users to create galleries.
The “FRaming” process
In order to mimic a framed art, the photo upload process should consist of the traditional framing process like adding a mat and also “instagram” like filtering and cropping process.
One Thing that bugged us…
was that in the existing model of Frame, even though users could display personal photos, the styles were very limited. Frame only allowed the users to display a maximum of 3 photos at any given time due to the limited number of mat layouts available. We wanted to provide more flexibility and styles to the users to display any number of photos they wanted and to customize it.
The Frame TV is accompanied by the Samsung’s smart tv mobile application. The mobile application helps users to upload photos onto the Frame using the Art Mode.
WIREFRAMES AND DESIGNS
SOMETHING THAT STILL BUGGED US…
was the limited number of photos that could be added to the Frame. Given the time constraints we were only able to add mats for collages with up to three photos. While this was a great start, we could see that this had to be improved. So as we finalized the designs with up to 3 photos for Frame 2018 we still explored possibilities with more photos for the next iteration.
One thing we often did in our team is…
to not limit our designs to the most practical and obvious choices, but also to experiment on fun features and interactions along the way. As part of research and experimentation our team had an interaction that was made sometime back. It was shelved and was waiting for a feature that could showcase it. So when we were thinking of redesigning Frame Photos, we also included an experimental design to include this new interaction. This case study focuses on this experimental design.
So, what was this cool new interaction?
Transferring media from phone to the TV by tilting the phone. This interaction was fun and seamless and did not require the user to go through a traditional upload process. Users could also point and select images from the TV and using touch gestures on the phone, manipulate the image on the TV or rearrange it.
We tried out incorporating this interaction into the collage creation and photo upload process.
The new interaction experiment tested positive with the users. The simple method of 'pouring' photos on to the TV and then using the mobile pointer to view the photos proved to be a good solution for social photo sharing between family and friends. It was similar to looking through physical photo albums and sharing memories. It was decided to design photo sharing as a new feature separate from collage maker. Thus the new design goals were split into two based on the following needs
Decor: Design a collage maker flow to provide users a way to decorate their space using personal photos.
Utility: Design a solution for a collaborative photo sharing on TV.
PHOTO SHAIRING
We played around with a collaborative photo sharing process by “pouring” photos in to the TV and using a mobile “wand” or pointer to select or view photos on TV. The users were of two main types. The master user, who would have many different types of available interactions and guest users who could mainly contribute by adding in more photos
