Apple Photos Redesign: A Case Study

Sometimes, as I spend the usual amount of too-much-time scrolling around on my phone, I find myself nerding out at tiny, delightful design moments. I often keep these moments to myself, as the amount of time and effort it would take someone else to understand that fleeting moment of joy I experienced is almost never (my friends would probably just say never ??) worth it.

After I went to a music festival a few weekends ago though, I took the time to write up a case study in an effort to explain some of the awesome moments I experienced with the new Apple Photos app redesign. Sharing it here in case anyone else wants to nerd out about it with me ??

The Use Case

I recently attended a music festival with a friend, and created a shared album to collect all the photos we took. I wanted to grab pictures from my own photo library as well as from the shared album, collect and organize them in a local album on my phone, and then post on them on Instagram.

The Steps

• Open shared album named "Festival Photos."
• Find a picture I want to add to the local "Insta" album I'm using to gather photos for my Instagram post.
• Discover there's no option to "Add to Album" - I take it this means I have to save it first.

Moment #1 - This distinction of needing to save photos from a shared album to your local Photo Library was not particularly clear here, but the important context is that it never has been, and didn't change during the redesign. This is a great example of being able to live with a sub-par interaction in the spirit of not messing with a workflow where you don't have to. I rolled my eyes at this the same way I always do, and moved on.

• Save image to my Photo Library.
• Back out of the shared album and try to find the image I just saved.
• Look in my Photo Library, and can't find the image.

Moment #2 - Previously, when you saved images they appeared in your library using the date and time you downloaded it, so it always appeared as the most recent image in your library. Now, it saves with the date and time the photo was originally taken, so it gets saved at a seemingly random point in your library. This was an improvement in my day-to-day use of the photos app - it keeps my photos organized by event, rather than having a bunch of pictures out of order just because i saved them a week after they were taken - but it's a problem in my use of trying to curate albums, because getting photos out of one album and into another becomes a nightmare of trying to remember when each picture was taken.

• Discover the "Recent" section in the Photos app, with a whole area dedicated to photos that were recently saved to your library. This let me quickly find the photos I downloaded.

Moment #3 - This type of feature could easily have been cut when considering the scope of the project, but when looking at a project from the lens of the end user, you can determine when these small features become absolutely critical to making a workflow possible. Like here, this feature saved me a lot of headaches and likely giving up on this little project altogether.

• Find the photo I downloaded, need to add it to my "Insta" album.

Moment #4 - You can "Add to Album" the way that's always been there, which opens a popup asking you to select the album to add it to, but Apple introduced a flow improvement here by adding the option to "Add to [Last Used Album Name]". This is another powerful display of understanding your audience. At Apple, it would seem that they observed people adding photos to one album multiple times in a row, likely adding photos that are scattered around different areas of the app, like I was. They recognized this can be extremely time consuming, and introduced this low key feature that really made a difference in my day.

• Fill out my Insta album, organize, and post!

The Takeaways

The flow I went through here is quite complex, and very imperfect. There are a thousand ways I might redesign or restructure the app to make this a much better experience, and a thousand different ways the designers at Apple would probably prefer I go about completing my task.

What's important here though is the context - I would guess this flow is not a primary use case for the app, so structurally there will always be things in my way when it comes to managing my photos the way I did. As a designer, you can go around in circles trying to solve every single design problem you encounter in the spirit of creating a great experience, but what's more impressive is to know your audience so well that you can design it perfectly for the primary use cases, pick and choose powerful places to enable your secondary use cases, and proactively say which use cases you are not supporting.

Based on the many assumptions I made about Apple's decision making here, there seems to be a very good balance of not blocking me from getting my task done, while not completely supporting the thing I was trying to do. (If by some chance you're reading this and worked on this project at Apple, I welcome any callouts on things I misinterpreted!)

To me, this is the most powerful kind of design, and it often goes unrecognized. So here's to all the designers doing the hard work to make these little choices every day ??