User Experience Architect
You may have heard of The Big Picture. Its a hugely successful photojournalism blog that regularly features a group of about 30 photos on a single topic or event from anywhere around the globe. Alan Taylor, its creator, carefully selects amazing photographs from among the thousands that stream down the news wires. The result is impactful and has taken off so much that its the Boston Globes biggest single driver of traffic – and draws in audiences from around the globe.
In 2010 we decided to build an iphone and iPad app that presented the photos in a way that was true to those platforms but also kept the essence and simplicity of the original Big Picture blog.
My role on this project was to design the user experience through detailed wireframes.
In this case I took my wireframes almost to the final design, since the application was all about photos and the wireframe wouldn’t work if it didn’t work well with the actual photography used in the Big Picture. I decided early on that to keep the timeline shorter we would limit the app only to horizontal orientation on the iPhone.
Wireframes for iphone I made a full map of all the screens with some annotations. Click to see at full size.
Options for the main screen Our developer had a hard time getting the app to behave how I wanted it to, the result was a confusing main screen. So I developed some alternative approaches that I hoped were easier to build.
The most requested feature of the app, after it was released on the iPhone, was for an iPad version. Of course this seemed like a perfect fit for the Big Picture and Apple agreed, because they featured the app in the iPad store for several weeks.
main screen portrait orientation This app would work in both orientations and after a lot of sketches this layout was my favorite.
Main screen landscape mode
The intro screen Each entry started with a quick intro which I thought was very important to the app so I wanted to make it essential to the viewing experience to see the text.
A photo screen We decided that the photo had to be as big as it could be, and the text would be modal so users could hide it if they wanted to.
Dana Giuliana is a UX Architect based in Boston, MA (USA). I'd love to hear from you.
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