Design & Research About
A whole new way to capture the best moments. Get a variety of meaningful and share-worthy photos and videos in a single tap.
About.
Sometimes a single photo or video just isn’t enough to truly capture the moment. Single Take, first introduced as the USP feature on the Galaxy S20 series, aimed to solve that problem. With revolutionary AI, it captures the best moments and simultaneously creates multiple photos and videos with a variety of effects. You can capture up to 15 seconds and choose the best style for the moment without having to reshoot it.
Role. I was a part of the team that first conceptualised the idea after which we collaborated with our design and engineering counterparts in Korea to finally produce Single Take. Our team worked on research, design proposals, AI algorithms and usability testing. As a designer and researcher, this project was very fulfilling as I was able to experience the process of coming up with a concept and evolving it while simultaneously working with multiple stakeholders to develop it as a flagship series USP.
Awards Samsung Annual Excellence Award- Outstanding Project of the Year 2020 & 2021
Discipline UI/UX, AI Algorithm creation, Qualitative Research, Usability Testing
The Brief:
Building a Powerful AI Experience
With growing competition in the mobile market, Samsung wanted to establish itself as an AI pioneer with all the core app experiences having a layer of intelligence in them. The brief we received was to create an AI camera experience that would be an innovative solution moving leaps and bounds.
After receiving the brief, we dove into our user research reports to collect the main pain-points users face while using the camera app.
The Solution:
Single Take, Multiple Clicks
Record once and Single Take uses Samsung’s multiple AI engines to give a variety of share-worthy outputs of the same capture using each of its cameras. It does the task of a personal video editor, chopping up, slowing down and stabilizing to create content that is instantly feed-worthy.
The user can capture upto 15 seconds of the scene afterwhich 10-15 outputs are generated in a tray, giving the user a great variety of photos and videos consisting of highlight video, candid collage, best photo, hyperlapse, slow mo, live focus, loop and more.
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Design Process
Initial Idea:
1. Best Shot
Our initial ideas were to capture 3 seconds before and after every click to give the ‘best moment’ but this was just an incremental solution and easily replicable by any other competitor. The same concept was later released by Huawei in mid 2020. Contributions: Ideation, concept execution, testing.
We didn't want to design an incremental solution but really innovate to solve the core problem at hand.
Proposed Concept:
2. SMART CAPTURE
The concept here was to introduce an intelligent layer in the Photo mode itself. User would capture in the photo mode and in the background, Smart Capture would create additional contextual outputs based on scene understanding. Not only that, but it would also use all the available camera lenses to produce a variety of angles and effects
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Scenario: Birthday; Indoor Celebration
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Scenario: Group fun; Outdoor
After this concept was approved, we went on to flesh it out and build the logic for it. We wanted this feature to go beyond what Samsung could already provide, so we began to research on different kind of outputs that were trending on social media and also looked into cinematic effects and the method behind their creation.
New Outputs and AI algorithms
Based on our study and experiments, we suggested many new outputs. Some have been released and some are currently under development. Contribution: I worked closely with the development team to define the logic for Highlight video and Candid Collage. We faced many limitations during development- some tech limitations and some performance and processing limitations. We went back and forth and altered our approach to refine the algorithms and get desirable outputs.
Concept based on Usability Testing
Tray Experience for Single Take
1A. Reel + Tray Experience
In this concept we provide a Reel+Tray experience with output names visible on all thumbnails.
Value:
- More focus on the Preview
- Output names help users quickly identify which outputs they want to see and share
- The Reel+Tray design provides a clear distinction between a Single Take Output v/s any other gallery outputs
- 'Star of the Scene' Filtering by clicking on a user profile provides content that focuses on that user and gives them more share-worthy outputs
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1B. Reel+Tray Interactions
To easily view the next and previous outputs within a Single Take capture- I introduced the side/edge tap interaction to quickly view all the outputs instead of scrolling and tapping in the reel or tray repeatedly.
Value:
- Quickly view the outputs with consecutive taps
- Since it is a known interaction, users can navigate easily
- Easily scroll between different Single Take outputs and other gallery outputs with lesser chances of error cases
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Role:
Based on the findings and opportunity areas from the usability study, I ideated using the 'scamper' method and created the Reel+Tray concept and prototype. The highlight feature of this concept was the 'Star of the Scene' filter which would provide more focused content for users.
The Impact
Single Take was launched as the Galaxy S20 Camera USP and later that year marketed as Monster Shot in the Galaxy M series. Both the launches saw great acceptance and accolades from users and tech bloggers.
Single Take became the second most used mode after Photo mode with a usage of 24% of all captured events.
Worked with Samsung Electronics
Image & Video Credits Samsung Pexels
Year 2019-2020
Team Swadha Jaiswal, Payal Arora, Zunaira Naqvi, Pradeep Vegireddi, Anupriya Gupta
© Zunaira Naqvi 2022