In continuing work on my capstone design, Give a Crit, I present the fourth iteration.
Expert Review and Critique
After my last iterations, I decided to have other designers look at my work and provide a review and critique. They gave me some great feedback that lead to more whiteboard sketching.
Designing through sketching
After a critique session by fellow designers, I headed up to a fantastic whiteboard room in our design studio. I went to work by sketching larger than life versions of my design. By sketching out my design in a larger-than-life fashion, I was able to notice patterns and details that I might have missed out by sketching in a small notebook. I was then able to pair these sketches, find similar elements, and find interesting deviations. This in turn sparked many new ideas which I promptly sketched as well. Furthermore, I had now read and reviewed multiple literature sources and theories that I was able to use in my designs. This helped inform my decisions and hopefully had lead to a better iteration.
4th Iteration
In this iteration I have pulled some interaction styles from Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop, with which most photographers are familiar. The screen shown below shows a critique in session. On the top right you can see a criticizer recording video and audio of his thoughts. Furthermore, this design allows for a criticizer to ‘edit’ photos in order to show what might work better for a particular photograph. There are selection, drawing, and note taking tools on the bottom right had side that allow criticizers to directly annotate particular features of a photograph in order to better explain their thoughts. A criticizer is also able to pull up two photos for side-by-side comparison or pull up ‘before edit’ and ‘after edit’ versions of the photograph being critiqued. My intention is to allow for easy and powerful critiques that the photographer or other’s can learn from and converse about.
Weaknesses
I think some potential weaknesses in this iteration could be non-scannable critiques (critiques take considerable more time to digest here), too little conversation between the criticizer and the photographer, and no real comparison of a set of photographs (besides the strip of thumbnails along the bottom of the screen). Furthermore, the design doesn’t really allow for a photographer’s intention to show through, which I’ve recently found through user research can be very important.
I would love further comments and feedback on this iteration, especially from photographers.
