User Feedback Based Mobile Camera Application Development

Transcription

1 User Feedback Based Mobile Camera Application Development Aunnoy K Mutasim, Rakibul Alam, Bruce Poon, M Ashraful Amin Abstract - This paper presents a study about consumers requirements of mobile applications. More specifically, mobile camera related uses. An application was developed because Mobile Phone Camera users demanded a faster photo taking facility, especially while user requires use of mobile camera when they are moving. The paper also presents how and why people adapted the application in their daily lives. The application when launched will start taking photos automatically in the Burst mode (capturing a series of photos one after the other) until the user manually stops it. Index Terms - Affinity analysis, burst mode, mobile application development, mobile phone camera. I. INTRODUCTION Mobile applications are changing every day. Modifications of an application as simple as the keypad are very common these days since users demands are changing on a regular basis due to the fast changing mobile technology. To meet the demands of the users on mobile phone apps, we ran an extensive study to identify the area of mobile apps which needs improvement. After conducting an affinity analysis [1] on the data gathered from a field study which was a combination of semi-structured Interview [2] and Contextual Inquiry [3], [4] we came to the conclusion that modification of the Camera app will turn out to be very interesting. In this study, one of the most important points stated by the participants of the study were that taking out the mobile phone from the pocket/purse, unlocking it, opening the camera application and then clicking a photo was a very time consuming process when trying to capture a moment which was This work is supported by a research grant from Independent University Bangladesh (IUB). We would like to thank all the participants for their time and cooperation because of which we were able to successfully conduct our study. Special thanks to K. M. Jamshed uz Zaman who had encouraged us throughout the study and was also one of the participants in every study we conducted. Aunnoy K Mutasim is with the Computer Vision & Cybernetics Group, Bashundhara, Dhaka 1229, Bangladesh ( [email protected]). Rakibul Alam is with the Computer Vision & Cybernetics Group, Bashundhara, Dhaka 1229, Bangladesh ( [email protected]). Bruce Poon is with the School of Electrical & Information Engineering, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia ( [email protected]). M. Ashraful Amin, is with the Computer Vision & Cybernetics Group, Bashundhara, Dhaka 1229, Bangladesh. ( [email protected]). changing fast. This could be a child s cute smile or his/her adorable yawn, or a fabulous fast travelling car on the road, etc. Time is undoubtedly a problem in such scenarios and that is why Motorola, HTC, iphone, etc has provided different but close solutions to this problem. Motorola s Moto X [5] has a trick for getting to the camera fast: twist your wrist twice and the camera turns on, HTC has placed a shortcut of the camera application in the unlock screen and iphone s ios software version 7.1 [6] has introduced a shortcut way (i.e. swipe the finger upwards) in the unlock screen to launch the camera application. To solve the problem stated above, we decided to build an application that would take photos as long as the user did not stop it. The application, which we named "InsCam", when launched, starts capturing photos automatically one after the other (known as Burst Mode in photography) until the user manually stops it. This will not be a problem in terms of storage since mobile phones nowadays are equipped with pretty large memory storage. II. GENERATIVE STUDY A field study was conducted to identify which domain of mobile applications we should work with that needed an improvement or a modification and also to identify what that improvement or modification was. Initially, we decided to pick four domains, namely, Cameras, Video Cameras, Alarm Clocks and SMSs. When we started the research, we quickly realized that Video Cameras, SMSs and Alarm Clocks did not hold a brighter future for us, i.e. there was nothing much to improve in those domains. After conducting the affinity analysis, we found that our hypothesis was indeed correct. Fortunately, the themes we found in the domain of Cameras were pretty interesting and the idea of this particular application, InsCam, was derived from one of these themes. The other reason to choose the Camera domain is because mobile phone camera has turned out to be very important these days for users in determining which phone to buy [7]. A. Participants involved Our respondents have given us restrictions when disclosing their personal information and respecting that this is what we can say about them. There were two females both of whom have recently completed their undergraduate degree. One of the male respondents is a retired government officer. All other male respondents are undergraduate students; two are in their freshman or first year and one in his third or minor year.

2 B. Methods used and questions asked The methods used in the research conducted were a mixture of the two semi-structured Interview and Contextual Inquiry. The Contextual Inquiry part was mainly focused on still Cameras in which we asked our participants to imagine as if they were travelling in a high speeding vehicle (preferably) on the highway and asked them at what event or circumstance are they going to take a photograph using their Smartphone? Also, we added the conditions that they were not driving and they were not in a position to have the luxury of stopping the vehicle (for example, travelling on a public bus) to take the photograph. Questions that followed this were: 1. Can you briefly describe all the steps that you will take from spotting a potential picture to actually taking the picture, i.e. walk us through all the steps? 2. Can you think of any problems or difficulties you might face in such a situation (if any)? 3. Do you think Time is going to be an issue here? (Most of the participants wanted to take a photograph of a subject on the road, so, we presumed, event should pass away before the camera is ready to take pictures). 4. Things you wish your phone had? Respondent 3 had similar point of views. Phone may not focus properly said respondent 4. She also said, Pictures might come blurred. Respondent 2 s comment was The camera has to be cybershot. People have also pointed out the problems regarding zooming, aperture, slow auto focus, light in the background, etc which also falls in the distortion or noise part. D. Major findings Each of the response of the respondents was noted in a different piece of paper on which an affinity analysis was conducted (see Figure 1). The major findings from this analysis are stated below: 1. Taking out the mobile phone, unlocking the phone, opening the camera application and then clicking a photo is very time consuming and in the process the event/potential picture passes away and 2. Clicking multiple photos is again time consuming as the camera takes time to save the picture and return to the user interface. To summarize, keeping the time constraint in mind, the idea of the application, InsCam, was generated which, once launched, automatically starts taking photos in the Burst Mode until the user manually stops it. 5. Any suggestions you have for us other than the ones you already mentioned? These questions led to answers that addressed number of camera problems and also led to some fantastic ideas. C. Findings From the Contextual Inquiry part (which was on Cameras), the themes found were the most interesting ones. Since we had put them in a situation where they were travelling on a high speeding vehicle and since they wanted to take a photo outside on the road, the problem stated by almost all was the time required to take out the phone, unlocking it, opening the camera application and then clicking the photo was enough for the event to pass away. Quoting respondent 1 s comment, It takes a long time to start the camera. Event passes away before the camera is ready. Respondent 2 responses to the problem by saying I wish I had a wireless camera attached to a body part/clothing. She also said I wish there was something that would take a picture when I looked at it. Taking out the camera is a lengthy process. Respondent 3 and 4 had similar replies as well. Respondent 1 also added When a photo is captured, phone takes a long time to save the photo. Multiple shots of the same event are very hard to take. When we asked why he used a video camera, he said, I use video camera when I find taking still photos is not fast enough to capture the moments. Since there will be time factors, having voice recognition for controlling zoom features will be cool, respondent 6 suggested. Therefore, theme number 1 is taking a photo at such a situation is very time consuming and therefore something fast and/or fancy is preferable. Theme number 2 is, since they were travelling at a high speeding vehicle, the other common problem stated was distortion or noise in the image. Respondent 5 said, Camera can t take photos when the motion speed is very high. Fig. 1. Affinity analysis III. INSCAM An application would not be able to save the time required to take out the phone. Getting past the unlocking part is possible. For devices using Android OS, save a shortcut of the camera app in the unlock screen. For ios devices, swip upwards on the unlock screen will start the camera app. The one implemented by Motorola Moto X (stated in the Introduction) is by far the best solution. However, that is beyond the scope of this paper. For addressing the time issue, slight modification that we did was, when the application is launched, it automatically starts taking photo one after the other (known as Burst Mode in photography) until the user manually stops it. This will save the time of clicking the photo and also, with the help of threading (since most of the smartphones nowadays have multi-core processors), the time taken by the camera to save a photo and then come back to the user interface of the camera can also be reduced. This application has no requirement for using any servers or the Internet.

3 A. User interface design or Paper Prototyping When the app is launched, user will be able to see an interface like the one in Figure 2(a). Until the user presses the Stop button, the app will automatically take photos continuously one after the other. When he/she presses the Stop button, the user will be presented with the screen like Figure 2(b) with a new button Start. If Start is clicked, the app will start taking photos and the same process (described above) will be repeated again. Couple of images of the final application deployed in Sony Xperia Z [8] was implemented using the Eclipse IDE [9] integrated with the Android Developer Tools (ADT) plugin [10] for Android OS version 3.0 or higher is demonstrated in Figure 4 which also depicts the major use of the application which is take continuous photos as long as the user wants. (a) When photos are being (b) When photo capturing is captured stopped Fig. 2. Capturing photos B. Usability Analysis To check whether the app s user interface was user friendly, we interviewed 5 people (3 males and 2 females) in which we asked them to do certain tasks (described below) in the app and observed them while they did it. After completion, we took a few notes on where, how and why did they struggle to navigate. One of the female participants is a university lecturer (aged 28, respondent 3) and the other (aged 23, respondent 4) is currently working as an intern in a Bank in Bangladesh, i.e. she is in her senior year in college. Among the male participants, one is a retired government officer (aged 60+, respondent 1) and the other two (aged 21, respondent 2 and 5) are in their sophomore year in college. The tasks, mentioned below, were chosen for evaluation since these are the major use cases of the application. 1. Start the application to take several photos. 2. Stop capturing when user is satisfied. Respondent 1 navigated through the screens quite comfortably but at the end of the interview, he suggested, When I am here to take photos of an event which is going to take place in a short while, I wish I could directly press a button which will delete the photos taken on startup. Thanks to him, the modification in Figure 3 was included. (a) Before (b) After Fig. 3. Introduction of a "Stop and Delete" button Interviewing respondent 2 and 3 led to couple of more minor modifications. Whenever there was a modification required/suggested after completion of that particular interview, the modification was implemented immediately and the rest of the interviews were conducted. This is why respondents 4 and 5 faced no trouble to navigate through the tasks. Fig. 4. Take continuous photos IV. FIELD STUDY We distributed the application to 12 participants and asked each of them to use the system whenever they find it appropriate for 2 consecutive weeks. A. Participants involved Among the 12 participants, 6 were male and 6 female. Two of the male participants are Junior Lecturers in a university in Bangladesh (one of these two graduated from college 3 years ago and the other graduated 1 year ago). A retired government officer (aged 60+), an Associate Professor (in his 40 s), and two undergraduate students (one in his freshman or first year and the other in his minor or third year) were the other four male participants in my field study. Among the female participants, one of them finished their undergraduate degree recently and one of them is in their final or major year doing her intern in a Bank in Bangladesh. Two of the other female participants are in their High School and the final two are in their sophomore or second year in college. B. Method There were number of methods implemented in the field study to find out how and when people use the system (InsCam) in their daily lives. The first method was Instrumentation in which the software logged each every button click, the number of times the application was started, the number of photos captured every time the application started or every time the user stopped the photo capture and restarted it using the Start button from the camera interface. Every log had a timestamp along with it so that when which part of the application is used can be understood. All these logs were saved in the phone s SD card. At the end of the study, these files were collected manually from the participants involved in the study.

4 The participants were asked to kindly give us a call (Voic Diaries) whenever something unusual happened, e.g. if the software did not do what it was supposed to do, or if the software crashed all of a sudden, etc. We also requested them to give us a call whenever they were able to do something which without the application would not have been possible. With their permission, we recorded whenever such a call was made. Finally, when the field study ended, we had a semi-structured interview session with each of the participants in which we asked two major questions: 1. What is your feedback on the application? Did you like it or hate it? 2. Did you feel if something in the application was different, your experience with it would have been much better and that the software would have fit into people s daily lives more easily? C. Limitations Since internet in mobile phone provided by network providers is pretty expensive in our country, it was impossible to transfer the data logged over the internet at runtime and therefore, had to be saved in a file in the SD card of the mobile phone. Call rate is not as expensive but is not cheap as well. Asking people to give us a call for our own benefit for a number of times is therefore not ethical. This is why, after a few days have passed after the start of the study, we told our participants to give a miss call whenever they wanted to contact us and we called back. The city in which the study was conducted is filled with traffic jam 24/7. Meeting in person with 12 people requires at least 6 days. Because of this reason, most of the semi-structured interviews were conducted over the internet (skype and facebook). Some of them were conducted over the phone and unfortunately only two in person. However, the biggest limitation is that, people captures photos on special moments and/or occasions which do not happen every day. This is why the data clearly depicts that there were number of days in which people did not even open the application. D. Findings On the very first day, people experimented with all the features of the application and omitting data of the first day in deriving conclusions is not going to be irrelevant. Some of them were still on the experimenting side on the second day while others started the application on the next day as well. Frustration starts from the third day as the number of times the application was launched (Figure 5) decreases substantially (i.e. zero). It is only on the days 6 to 9 that the usage of the application was substantial. This is because, luckily on these days, two of the participants went on a trip to Cox s Bazar (which is tourist spot since it has the world s longest beach) and these two participants had a large contribution to the data (presented in Table I). Although people did not start the application many times, they fortunately took a lot of photos using the application (see Figure 6). There were a couple of our participants who, other than the first two days never used the application as they did not find any suitable occasion in these 14 days in which they would have used the application. They also mentioned that not only did they not using the application they also did not use the mobile s preinstalled camera application as well, i.e. they did not take any pictures during the two weeks. Table I. Major findings in the field study Stop and App delete launched pressed Photos captured Day Fig. 5. Visual representation of number of times the application was launched by participants Fig. 6. Visual representation of number of photos captured on each day Number of times the application crashed and it was reported over the phone. Whenever the application took about 50 photos, the application crashed. This is because, when photos are captured in Burst mode, the camera stores the images temporarily in the heap. Once photo capture is stopped, it then saves the images in SD card. Unfortunately, all the photos were lost whenever this happened.

5 One of the participants, who is a car fanatic, called us up number of times just to express his gratefulness towards the application and therefore to us. It was more than overwhelming. V. DISCUSSION People do not take photo every day since photos are captured on special occasions, at unusual events, when someone is on a trip or vacation, etc. Because of this reason, field study to see how a camera application has been accepted in people s daily lives should be conducted over a longer period of time to get a better insight on how and why people accepts/rejects to use the application in their daily lives. Since the application crashed whenever the user captured about 50 photos, the modification which can be done is limiting the maximum number of photos that can be captured to about 30 so that the app can attract a wider audience, i.e. people using phones which do not have a big heap size. In these days, most of the smartphones have a limited heap size. Hopefully, in a couple of years and thanks to rapid improvement in technology, almost everyone will be able to capture up to 50 photos in a row. With HTC s feature which gives its users the luxury to place any software s shortcut on the unlock screen, application like InsCam will definitely have an increase in terms of its usage rate. If something like Motorola Moto X s solution can be implemented, there is a huge chance that this application will be one of the most widespread used camera application in the world. Things that came out positive is that people finds it pretty cumbersome to get the camera ready in time and even small contributions, like the one offered by InsCam, is heavily acknowledged by all. [5] Motorola Moto X, 4-camera.html [6] iphone User Guide for ios 7.1, [7] Samsung Edges HTC in New Android Phones, [8] Sony Xperia Z, [9] Eclipse IDE, [10] Android Developer Tools (ADT) plugin for Eclipse IDE, VI. CONCLUSIONS From the study, it can be easily concluded that almost everyone feels getting the camera ready to start taking photos is a time consuming process. People are extremely enthusiastic to take continuous photos at certain scenarios and appreciate if the capturing of continuous photos is an automatic process. In the future, we would like to create an app which will not only capture photos automatically in burst mode on startup, but also after the user stops the capturing process to automatically filter the inevitable motion blur (due to camera shake or when image captured in motion) in the images captured. REFERENCES [1] F. R. Bentley, S. Basapur and S. Chowdhury, Promoting intergenerational communication through location-based asynchronous video communication. UbiComp '11: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing [2] S. Price and C. Jewitt, Interview approaches to researching embodiment. CHI '13 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [3] Y. Cui and V. Roto, How people use the web on mobile devices. WWW '08 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web [4] J. Kjeldskov and J. Paay, A longitudinal review of mobile HCI research methods. MobileHCI '12: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services