Intel
Strategy & Innovation
Photos & Social
Intel hired Blacksquare to lead product innovation for Intel Gallery Group's Storytelling Initiative’s native Android photo apps. Working closely with a team of Intel product, technology, and design experts, we developed future-looking prototypes, drawing from trend forecasting, user research, UX, product design, motion interaction, interactive multi-modal cross-platform rapid prototyping, and data/algorithm design.
Highlights (automatically curated photo collections)
Challenge
At the time of this project, personal mobile photo collections were growing exponentially, but tools to discover and manage them had not caught up. We identified this user need as an essential opportunity for Intel’s native photo app.
Result
Highlights, our photo browsing and discovery app concept, was selected for inclusion in the native apps. Highlights featured automatic data augmentation and custom curation algorithms to generate and present a simple, beautiful photo discovery experience. We designed and built a working prototype and handed off full specs to the internal Intel team. Highlights become meaningful starting points for storytelling and memories, generated from clusters around concepts and data like recent, trending, excitement, people, places, events, themes, patterns, dates, and time of day.
We uncovered eight key mobile photo trends during our research and discovery phase. Our Highlights app addressed four: mini-tasking, augmentation, simple & great, and discovery.
Further product explorations combined anticipation, social content, and ad hoc group sharing.
SmartStories Video Walk-Through
SmartFeed Social Photos
Future Ideas
As part of Intel’s future-thinking initiative, we rapidly developed prototypes and lo-fi concepts for discussion, internal presentations, and exploration. One exploration was SmartStories, which augments content for beautiful storytelling. Another was SmartFeed, a consolidated social media feed app integrating Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp into a single view, simplifying an individual’s social engagement and ability to manage their sharing and group interactions.