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PhotoTalk
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Group Members
- Brendan Fay
- Warut Suksompong
- Panupong Pasupat
- TA: (???) Tsung-Hsiang (Sean) Chang
Problem Statement
There are myriad photo-hosting services on the web, but some users wouldthere are plenty of users who want to, rather than post an entire photo album, post a single, meaningful picture as a means of sparking a conversation.
(Note to group: This is temporary and needs to be revised. I will try to add more info and write it more clearly and then we should all make edits to it until it's good).
(Note to group: This is Brendan's original e-mail message that sparks up this project...
"One idea would be to make a website where people can post photographs. Obviously this has been done a thousand times, but if I thought of a variation on the traditional implementation, which I think might be interesting. We could make a website where the emphasis is on posting pictures as a means of starting a conversation. To be specific, a user can post a photograph with some tagline and then other users could post comments below the picture, but also post photographs in response to the original photo, thus creating a dialog between a community of users that both includes prose and photography. Rather than having an emphasis on creating photo albums, we could make the emphasis on posting a single photograph that conveys some specific idea or captures some specific event. To add to this atmosphere, we could make it so that the location of the photograph is stated along with it, so that people could look at photographs based on geography. Similarly, a user could state an event that the photograph documents, if applicable. For example, a user could tag his/her photo as being "Cambridge, MA" or, even more specifically, "MIT", so in our case we could look at all pictures being posted from MIT and get a chance to see what other people are capturing. Another example is that during the heart of the winter when we were hit with all that snow, it might be of interest for people (especially those not living in New England) to see the impact of the storm and so users could tag this as an event."
to be viewed and appreciated by itself. Though there are certainly various venues through which a photographer might attempt this, these venues lack the desirable aspects of a service that would be conducive to:
- Showcasing an individual photograph
- Making that photograph accessible through search
- Allowing the photograph to spark conversation between users
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Target Users
- Photo-posting users: photographers and casual photo-takers with average computer experience and a desire to share individual photographs as a catalyst for dialog.
- Viewers: users with average computer experience who simply want to view meaningful photos and read the resulting conversation.
- Commenters: users with average computer experience who would like to be able to make comments on photos in addition to simply viewing the photos.
(Note to group: This is temporary and needs to be revised. I will try to add more info and write it more clearly and then we should all make edits to it until it's good).
Proposed Solution
(Note to group: I haven't had time to write anything for this, so I will leave it blank until we finish our task analysis and interviews).
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Proposed Solution
In order to offer photo-sharing users and photo-viewing users an opportunity to engage in an enjoyable dialog, the service must provide the environment in which to do this. This will be achieved through an interface which:
- Allows registered users to post photographs to the website along with associated information, including, but not limited to:
- Photographer's Name
- Location of Photograph
- Event Captured in Photograph
- Creates individual pages for each posted photograph, displaying along with it any supplied information
- Allows any visitor to the site to:
- Search for photographs by certain criteria
- View photographs
- Allows registered users to:
- Post comments on photos