Improving the User Experience of a Mobile Photo Gallery by Supporting Social Interaction

Abstract

Today, photo gallery applications on mobile devices tend to be stand-alone and offline. For people who want to share photos with others, many add-on tools have been developed to connect the gallery applications to Internet services to enable photo sharing. The author argues that photo-centric social interaction is best supported when the gallery application is fully integrated with an Internet service. In this case, no additional tools are needed and the user’s image content is fully synchronized with the service. To research the topic, Image Exchange, a service-integrated mobile gallery application with a corresponding Internet service, was designed and implemented. Moreover, a field study was conducted with 10 participants to compare Image Exchange with a state-of-the-art gallery application combined with an add-on photo sharing tool. Image Exchange was preferred by most participants and it was especially appreciated because of the user experience. Above all, the results show that social activity increased amongst the participants while using Image Exchange.