AOL Pictures was partially integrated with AOL Public Galleries because users could put any private picture that resided in their AOL Pictures album(s) into their Public Gallery, thereby making that photo public.

Now that some photos within users’ private albums were public and some were not, and additionally, some photos could now be tagged within the Public Gallery management system, we needed a way to communicate this information to users within the AOL Pictures application. Furthermore, the Add To Cart functionality within AOLP had always been problematic because users had no way to tell which pictures had already been added to to the shopping cart, and could click “Add to Cart” multiple times for any one picture.

And while we were at it, we wanted to allows users to take commonly-performed actions on pictures more easily and quickly.

Solution: I was tasked with coming up with ways to better communicate information about users’ individual pictures. I did this by adding an “info” icon to each picture upon mouseover, and with a click of this icon, users could see information about each picture. I also added a shopping cart icon to the bottom right corner of each picture that was currently in the shopping cart. Lastly, I added menu functionality to each picture that allowed users to perform common actions quickly.

My Contributions: I created several explorations, and later an interactive prototype to see how the interaction felt when really using it. Initially, I was thinking along the lines of using iconography to communicate information about each picture, but in the end, the icons became more clutter than information. I proceeded to explore using the info icon to solve the clutter issues, and kept the shopping cart icon present for pictures that were already in the cart to avoid multiple clicking of the “Add to Cart” button.