How many times have you found yourself eager to capture a moment at a highly photographable location, but you happen to be alone or in a group where no one is willing to take one for the team and sit this photo op out? Besides being generally inconvenient, asking strangers on the street to take your picture is a time-consuming, oftentimes fruitless, and sometimes even dangerous exercise.
Best-case scenario: you get stuck explaining how to use an iPhone camera to someone else's grandma and then having to pretend to like the blurry, ill-lit mess of a composition she created until she walks far enough out of earshot and you can be sure you're no longer hurting her fragile grandma feelings by asking someone else.
Average-case scenario: you get flat out rejected by some business-type in a suit that doesn't even slow his pace or make eye contact (at which point you will probably feel disheartened enough to settle for a selfie).
Worst EVER case scenario (UGH -___-): you get it all wrong and give your phone to someone who looks nice until they literally run off with your phone, never to be seen again, and you find yourself spending 7 months teaching some teenage boy who bought your phone off a taxicab driver in Peru how to push your pictures to the Cloud...in Spanish.
Yep, you guessed it. That last one was a personal anecdote (#never #give #up #on #your #dreams #nunca #renuncies #a #tus #sueños). Needless to say, I believe there is a real market for a product that would address these problems.
Enter [app I'm going to develop].
My vision is for a social, community-based photographing (not photography) application that will take the disappointment, awkwardness, and danger out of asking strangers for pictures.
The app will have "photographer" (default) and "subject" (switch-operated) modes. Users will switch on subject mode when they are looking to have their picture taken, which will send out a request to [my app]-ers nearby who are on photographer mode. Once the request is answered, the photographer and subject will meet and have a brief photo encounter where the photographer uses his or her own phone to take pictures of the subject within the app. For privacy reasons, the photographer's phone will not retain any of the photos. Instead, the photographs will be allotted space on the app's cloud, where the subject can view and download them to his or her phone within 24 hours after they are taken, no annoying watermarks, no reduced quality.
Beyond that basic model, I expect to tweak and add to the concept as I move forward in the development process.
One of the things I know I have to think about looking forward is how to feasibly grow a user-base for this kind of service. Many apps where quality and convenience are based on voluntary participation, such as Waze, for example, launch an Alpha-user strategy to generate the critical mass of users that the app needs to be actually useful. I will also have to consider various photographer incentives (maybe a points or rewards system of some sort) to ensure that people will actually be motivated to partake in my model outside of an immediate need to have their photograph taken.
This is a lofty project, but I hope to see a full degree of functionality at a basic level within 16 weeks. As far as I see it, this would mean a working implementation of two broader functions of the app: finding and connecting with users nearby and authorization ("handshake") exchange. That is my goal this semester. Timeline/milestone specifics are TBD. So far, my efforts are exploratory, and I am learning a lot.
In terms of technical specifics, I am working on my fluency in Swift and X-Code, as I believe from my research that this will be the easiest path to GPS-integration. I have no prior formal UX/UI experience under my belt, so I am still experimenting (and very much open to recommendations, as well as input and collaboration opportunities). For now, I am most comfortable using Xcode's built-in Storyboard, and I have looked into using the Instagram API with Origami, since I would ideally like for users to have the option of linking account profiles to Instagram feeds.
I believe in my idea because traveling solo shouldn't have to translate to a poorly-documented trip and because, sorry to break it to you, selfies are tacky.
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