[School project] FM35 film photography App
Project Overview
This is a phone app I designed for film photography sharing. Users can upload photos or videos to the platform, follow and communicate with friends postings, like an Instagram but specialized in FILM photography.
I wish to help film photographers discover equipments and photo inspirations in a most convenient and efficient way.
My motivation in designing FM35 is that I myself also take a lot of film photos, but find it hard to discover the right film camera or film roll to use, which is a common case for my other film photographer friends too. Unlike digital photos, equipments and roll specifics are much more essential to producing a good photo.
Challenge & Solution
Challenge
Information scatteredness
Users have to search about camera/roll on separate and various platforms.
Disconnection between practicality and results
Textual reviews full of jargon with no demonstration of photo results.
Lack of film community
Hard to find a film photographers group to communicate with!
Solution
Film equipments specs all on one platform
Equipment registration and identification
A social media app designed just for film photographers
Design Process
01
02
03
04
05
User Research
Ideation & mood board
Lo-fi sketch
Design specifics
Hi-fi Prototype
User Research
Research methods:
Crowdsourcing on Google Survey with 51 data points
In-depth interview with 3 film photographers
01 Google Survey
In order to diagnose the needs of my potential users, I designed a set of questions to ask on Google survey to collect responses online.
While the google survey link is shared directly to the University of Toronto Viewfinder photography club, it is assumed that most of those who filled out the survey has an age range from 18-25, attends university, and does photography on a regular basis as a hobby or profession.
Out of 40 responses from film photographers (excluding enthusiasts):
70% of them chose social media as a film photography inspiration source
80% of them chose social media as film-specific information seeking source
Out of 50 responses from both film photographers and enthusiasts:
98% of them have a clear purpose when when they look for film photos from online, mostly associated with inspiration and information seeking, as demonstrated from stats on the last slide.
02 Interview
“It’s hard to know other people’s user experience of a camera, unless to talk directly to the photographer.”
“I wish there is some sort of database for all the film camera models, lenses, film rolls so I don’t have to do research everywhere.”
“[When inspiration seeking,] I just follow accounts that does film photos, I also search for certain hashtag relevant to that account.”
