Jordan Schwartz

Biography
While I earned my Master’s in Social Psychology from the University of Washington, I have been in working in user experience teams at Microsoft in various capacities over the past eight years. My role has evolved from usability engineer to senior program manager, designing and driving the implementation of a variety of software products including the MSN e-mail client, instant messenger features, and digital photography features for Windows. Most recently, I have been working on digital photography as it relates to mobile devices. In my spare time, I blog my beekeeping experience at http://www.hive-mind.com/bee/blog/.

Position Paper
The cameraphone was a mistake, an artifact of coincidental development. Digital photo technology reached the point where it could be manufactured so cheaply it could be included as a cheap feature upgrade to an existing device, and cell phones happened to be the device with sufficient market penetration to attract the feature. The fact that it was a marriage of convenience is the prime reason the integration between the two functions is so weak.

There are a few obvious problems with the cameraphones as implemented. For example:

The process of sending a photo to one person is incredibly difficult, requiring up to 20 clicks or more per message sent, depending on the phone’s UI

MMS only works within provider today, so the sender must know which service provider the receiver has, and must be using the same provider, if they are to have any hope of successfully sending a picture

That is unfortunate, because there is a sound and compelling pivot on the combined feature set: a camera and display that is ubiquitously connected to the cameras and displays of all your friends and family. It has the potential to have as powerful an impact on the way people communicate and coordinate as e-mail or the cellphone did. In light of experience roadblocks describes above, rather than tut-tutting at the low penetration rate of picture messaging, one should see the fact that people send picture messages at all as a testament to how very compelling picture messaging can be.

Once it becomes as easy to send a picture as it is to take the picture, we will see an explosion in the uses of picture sharing from mobile devices. Already, a number of scenarios have emerged. For example:

People sharing exciting events by showing key visuals, such as a diploma in hand Friends enticing one another into social interactions by sending snapshots of their surroundings, like an active party People coordinating practical aspects of their lives by sending pictures of items at stores, perhaps for opinions Family members reaching out for social contact, perhaps by sending banal but personal images from their day-to-day life, such as what they’re having for lunch.

Again, what is striking is that these uses have emerged into the commonplace in spite of existing affordances. When the user interface and the technology matures, these types of uses will seem quaint and restrained. Fortunately, we can expect that the growing penetration of smartphones will provide a development platform for solutions to experience problems of today, and thus open up the connected / mobile photo space to the kind of explosive innovation that comes from thousands of small development shops working on a problem from different perspectives.

Looking forward, the research and development community should be asking:

• What novel scenarios does real-time photo sharing enable? How do people use photos at an event to enhance the experience?
   
• If we layer social networking concepts such as FOAF on the mobile photo experience, how will people use it? What does it mean that I can see what my friends’ friends are looking at right now and what do I want to do with that information?
   
• If we layer location awareness on the mobile photo experience, how will people use it? Does it effectively extend people’s line of sight out through the eyes of their social network? What implications will this have on how we organize our days?

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