User Centered

Looks interesting. Ah, the joys of tech-o-nology.

Yum

Until there is built-in Wireless transfer of images to a more "management friendly" PC or laptop, enter the Eye-fi: http://www.eye.fi/cards/

Management of pictures is not the strong suit of digital cameras. It's similar to the problems one has on many mobile phones...small screen, non-obvious buttons, multi-labelled buttons, confusing modes.

What digital cameras are good at is capturing digital images. What they need to get better at is capturing the decisions people make after reviewing their image.

People rarely want to simply "keep" a 5 meg picture on their mobile phone. What people really want is to do something with the image. That's the step that still "gets in the way" in most solutions.

Stripped down to it's bare essential actions, it's this:

• Take picture


• Review picture -- Decide if picture meets your needs, based on the situation


• Decide what to do with the picture -- Normally a few limited choices

For the "Review picture" step, I've seen a recent Canon that tries to find faces in your image and shows a zoomed-in thumbnail of one of them so you can check focus at a glance. Nice.

For the Decide what to do action, Eddie's Send...Don't Save article shows that what exactly happens to the file afterward is very situation dependent, but no device I know of makes that decision step the minimal "one click" action at the point of decision. There are countless times that my wife and I review an image of our son on the back of the camera and say "Grandma would love that picture." (decision made: send to Grandma) But since there is no "show this to Grandma" button, we end up forgetting, and Grandma loses out on a lot of great pictures.

I love the concept of the eye-fi products. I've had them on my "to get" list for awhile now.

automatically deleted after a period of time?

Sounds scary to me. Designers need to be more cautious with auto-delete. Delete only if you can make sure that the user is in control, that he knows exactly that his input will trigger a deletion, and what exactly will be deleted (some meta-info can help, if the filenames are too cryptic).

If any items are to be auto-deleted, at least the container needs a clear label such as "trashbin", indicating that it's not a safe place.

Otherwise we end up with people building wrong expectations.


Last time this happened to me was thunderbird deleting emails from the server after a checkout. Absolutely not what I wanted, and hard to get them back on the server (there's a "mail redirect" addon which is supposed to solve exactly this problem, but my email provider does not like thousands of messages sent back to the server).


The same about "send don't save" for mobile phones. If a user expects the picture to be kept, we have a design problem. And what if the sending didn't work? What if the receiver deletes the file and asks to re-send? What if you want to send it to more people? This could even happen if you deleted it on purpose!


"Shoot, send and delete" can make sense, if well labeled, but there are other possibilities. Here's what I imagine:

- Better control interfaces for cameras. (question is, whether or not people are willing to pay for that) Touchscreens, more and better labeled dedicated buttons or mechanic wheels and switches, instead of arbitrary modal architectures. Improved controls allow to give more possibilities to the user, be it for picture management or optical settings.

- Improved dialogs for picture management, especially with meta information. Imagine you want to delete all the pictures from your brother's wedding (you know you put them on your harddrive some time ago). For this specific use case, sorting by date / location meta info can help a lot.

- "Quick tagging" at the time you shoot. Agreed, it can make sense to "delete on the spot". But often I am too undecided to do that. The idea is that after you click, you put in some info about the purpose of the picture. The trick is to design a quick and easy interface, where people feel comfortable to "quick tag" really every picture. That's a hard design task.

- "Late tagging" as you review your pictures. Again, more comfy input controls will make this much easier.

- Once we have better controls, we can also make it easier to adjust ISO values, exposure time, flash on/off etc, without diving into menus, and without having to learn cryptic icons.

Usually if I get a cam I have not used before, I will only use the "automatic" mode, often making it hard to shoot good night photos, just because the controls are hard to learn.


Maybe the cameras of the future will look more like an iphone.. (I have never used mobile phone cameras, my own mobile's camera is unusable)

Schneemann,

I agree, there needs to be a clear understanding of what will happen to the picture, but in "Send...don't save," which focused primarily on phones, not dedicated cameras, my point was (it's changed a bit these days) that more often the images weren't really things we wanted to keep around.

My point there was (again, it's changed) that the mobile device isn't a good place to store/keep/review images. those that I felt I wanted to save, I always, immediately send it off to an email account or other means to preserve it since doing so on my phone was pretty bad.

But for a digital camera, like is posted here, I think you're absolutely right in that there's a different mindset- I think there's less use for a "clipboard mode" on your camera than I do on a mobile device. But this is all a grey area of convergent devices and functionality such that, as with everything in life, it's a matter of degree and personal preference.

I like the idea of a folder for images you might want to refer to. I have such images myself, e.g. photos of some technical info for my camera so I can check something using the camera itself without carrying the handbook or pieces of paper with me.

On this subject, why don't cameras have their instructions embedded instead of supplied as PDF documents which require a computer to view? OK so many cameras have some explanatory prompts for individual settings, but not more detailed info, nor general usage instructions.

Wow, topic expansion.

Why did I take a picture of that? Because I saw something I wanted to save.

However, I might not have actually captured what I wanted to save, I might only want to save it till I get somewhere or till I can do something else with it or till I get a chance to look at it and delete it.

But again, what purpose does deletion serve?

Organization & Memory Management. I can't think of any other functions deletion serves. Organization is important and includes the "I don't want anyone to ever see that pic of me throwing up from my nose," or the "I took a picture of the sidewalk, again."

This problem has already *partially* been solved with the "trash bin/recycle bin" holder model but when considering limited memory space, a trash bin that doesn't automatically delete (at some point) is useless for memory management. You are most equipped to deal with a picture's desirability ("to save... or not to save, that is the question") when you have just taken it and viewed it. Your short term memory can easily access what has just happened and you are in the context of the situation where you took the picture. Having to go "empty your trash bin" is unnecessary silliness.

Whether the pic sends (or attempts to send) or is only needed for a temporary amount of time I'd favor two types of "delete" that

1. Delete (or Trash) - File is tagged for deletion as more memory is needed but still readily accessible unless memory is running out.
2. Delete Forever - It's gone, completely destroyed, irretrievable by any means.

This capitalizes on the grey space that human beings actually exist in. I can answer truly, "I might want to save that photo" -- and if I only end up taking a few dozen more pics and the memory is there, it'll still save and I can evaluate it later.

I can also still permanently delete a file that is obviously worthless and I never want to see again.

How many times have you had those odd, unexpected clicks of the camera, weird angles, turn out to be precious shots? That's what I want my deletion model to take into account.

Yum

Yum- I like the delete model you're proposing. That would fit pretty well with the way I would want to manage pictures.