Wireframes & Initial Designs
Explore trending photos
I chose to separate the app into 3 distinct sections, all accessible from the bottom navbar. The Explore is where a user can browse all the top photos from other photographers, including ones they follow. The Profile tab is where a user can see their own content and edit their profile. The Capture leads to the camera or gallery where a user can upload photos or videos.
Capture, stream, or upload from your gallery
The Capture process needed to be broken into different options, since there are distinct processes for each method of uploading. Capture opens the basic camera interface. This is intended to be the de-facto option since I want to encourage users to shoot with the built-in camera app. Otherwise, users can upload from their phone's gallery. The third option is specifically designed for live-streaming (think Periscope), and uses a unique camera UI.
Streamlined camera experience
I spent most of my time on the camera UI, the most important part of the original app. The hardest part was deciding which options I should keep or exclude. I spent hours taking photos with multiple camera apps in different rooms and lighting conditions, and implemented the most intuitive gestures I found. I wanted to provide options that would help a user capture better images (WB, HDR, flash), but not distract from the moment or slow them down.
Publish to your Profile
It's possible a user may already have photos they want to share. For those cases, I created a flow for batch uploading from a gallery. Users can easily tap on as many photos as they want to upload, then apply titles and metadata to each post individually. This process works much like Instagram, but removes the additional step for adding photo filters.
