Page History

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• Grandmother: Has not learnt how to use a computer, but due to the simplicity of the iPad, can browse through pictures of family. Her family can take care of setting up the Facebook account.
• Parents: Like the simpler interface just for browsing pictures as a way to say connected with children.
• Facebook Photo Downloader: Just wants an easy way to download photos from Facebook as an album (or a smart album) containing photos uploaded by friends or the user himself or herself.

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User Interviews

We interviewed three users from both of our primary user classes: Facebook Photos power-users and Casual Facebook users. The first two interviews were done on a Mac, and the third was done on an iPad. Note that Facebook’s interface is nearly identical on the Mac and iPad, so the same issues noted on the Mac also apply to the iPad. The final interview notes some of the usability issues a user found that were specific to the iPad.

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1. Finding all the photos that a particular friend was tagged in
   1. Before she began the task, she asked us what it meant to be “tagged” in a photo. Indeed, Facebook uses the term “tagged” frequently in the interface, and she had trouble understanding the term.
   2. She first identified the friend on the Facebook home page (she did not use search) and went to the friend’s profile.
   3. She saw a line of five photos at the top and thought her friend had only uploaded 5 photos. We told her that there were more photos to find.
   4. Eventually, she found the “Photos” link in the sidebar and clicked on it.
   5. Wiki MarkupThe Photos page was divided into two sections: “\[Friend’s name\] Photos” and “Photos and Videos of \ [friend’s name\].” She did not understand the difference between these two sections (the former shows photos the friend has uploaded, and the latter shows photos the friend is in).
2. Viewing a photo
   1. She identified a photo she found interesting and clicked on it.
   2. The photo viewer HUD window appeared, which she found intuitive.
   3. She navigated between photos easily using the arrow buttons and used the back button to go back.
   4. After viewing several photos we asked her to close the photo viewer and return to Facebook. She could see the Facebook page behind the HUD window but had trouble reaching it. She did not notice the “Close” button, marked by an “X” glyph. She eventually decided to hit the back button in her browser several times until she reached the Facebook home page.
3. Finding a specific album
   1. We asked her to find an album containing Hanukkah photos. She quickly decided to try searching for “Hanukkah Pictures” using the search field at the top of the page.
   2. The search did not find photos; it only showed names that sounded like “Hanukkah” and Bing web results. She looked around the search page for awhile trying to find photos.
   3. She tried different spellings for Hanukkah with the same results and gave up.

Frequent User

We interviewed a 20 years old college student who has over 900 Facebook friends. He uses Facebook on average 45 minutes every day to get news about his friends by going through the news feed and their profile pages, and to communicate with them. We asked him to perform the same tasks as for the first interview, but it was clear that he was experienced enough to navigate his way successfully. We thus asked him some other questions:

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Explore photos and albums

Prerequisites: User has logged in.

1. Decide how to browse albums (by date, friend, etc).
2. Choose an interesting album and open it.
3. Decide how to browse photos in the chosen album (by date, caption, etc).
4. Open an interesting photo.
5. Advance to the next photo, or go back to browsing sets of photos.

Find photos and albums

Prerequisites: User has logged in and knows some piece of information about the photo or album they want to find, such as the title/caption, the person who uploaded it, a person who is tagged in it, or the date it was uploaded.

1. Search for the desired photo or album using the known information.
2. Look through the results and possibly open potential matches.
3. Verify that the right photo/album is being displayed. If the desired photo or album was found, perform actions on that photo or album, or exit. Otherwise, go back and try a different result or try searching with different information.

Share a Photo or Album

Prerequisites: User has logged in and found photo or album to be shared.

1. Decide how to share the photo (download to iPad’s Camera Roll, Twitter, email, etc.).
2. Tell the application how the photo should be shared.
3. Fill out the information for sharing (Twitter username/password, email recipient and subject).
4. Wait for application to finish performing the appropriate share operations (such as downloading the photos, uploading the photos to Twitter, etc.)
5. Cancel the share operation while it is in progress if desired.

View a Photo Set as a Slideshow

Prerequisites: User has logged in and found a set of photos

1. Tell the application how the slideshow should be played. For example, specify music, transitions, and timing.
2. Start slideshow.
3. Manually advance slideshow if needed, or go back to previous photo.
4. Pause slideshow if wanted.
5. Exit slideshow early, or wait for it to finish.

Other Possible Tasks

• Find photos matching several conditions. For example, find photos that contain several known people together.
• View photo comments and “likes.”
• Comment on or “like” a photo.

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