Results from First Outing of Photo booth

[jasonwong]

Hey Tim,

I took my booth out for it's first outing to a neighborhood bbq. There were kids and adults super interested in it and I'd like to share what I noticed and what could possibly be improved.

First - the biggest thing - when there hasn't been much activity, somehow the iPad loses connectivity to the camera. I'm using a Canon 6D using the built in camera wifi to connect to wifi booth and the camera is set to never go to sleep. I have to constantly monitor the booth. The camera literally is sitting right above the iPad so there shouldn't be a distance issue. I think this may be out of your control and I know in your help section you recommend not to use the built in wifi but the genius of this is total freedom to put wherever I want it to be without relying on a power supply or router.

Overall, the application is very intuitive and people really got it. by themselves they figured out to email themselves, delete photos, take the photos etc. However there were a few bugs that I think can be addressed.

First - the button to take the photo should be larger and in the center of the screen. I saw someone try to push the black outlined camera icon on the center of the screen. In fact - if you just take that black outline logo and give it a red background with a button look it would be perfect.
3,2,1 cheese is cute but frankly something that says "Push the button to take a photo" would be better - the the countdown could say 3, 2, 1, cheese!

Second is on sending people the photos. People click on the individual photos - as it seems like the thing to do - and they then click on the email icon. To them, they believe they have sent only the photos they selected - so when they want to send themselves more photos, they take more, then try to send again, but they get an error message saying that their email has already been inputted. We all know that in the end they will get all the photos thru the dropbox link but at the time they get confused. I think the confirmation to the email sent could say "You will get a link to all the photos!" and then when they try to enter it again say, "We already have your email, you'll get a link to all the photos!" - something like that instead of an error message.

Third- after they send their photos - the last collage stays on the screen and people get confused on how to take more photos. So after someone emails themselves photos or a collage - the collage should go away and refresh back to the 1,2,3 cheese page.

Fourth - I think overall there could be more "tooltips" - little arrows that point to things to tell people what they can do - like - pinch here to adjust and crop your photo - and we can toggle on and off this. Some events you have sophisticated young people but some events you have kids and old people so it would be good to have a little helping hand.

Fifth - when something goes wrong - the message should say "Oops! Something is wrong, please find your photographer and he'll fix it right away" so that they will try to find me to fix it. I know that can get complicated but it was embarrassing for people to read out loud that the camera lost it's connection! haha

but overall, a really really great beginning. Thank you Tim for creating this for the iPad.

[tim]

Hi Jason

Thanks very much for the feedback! I look forward to going through it in detail -- at the moment i'm in the middle of a big fire with Instagram (check the announcements: facebook has decided to take away access from all apps like mine, so i'm replacing it with twitter, which is a lot of work), but I will come back to all these points ASAP.

Just addressing the first point at this time -- did I understand it right that the ipad is connecting to your camera (your camera is the hotspot) ? If so, then that explains the disconnecting: in order to save battery, your camera is intentionally dropping the hotspot after a few moments (ie. 30 seconds or so) of inactivity. AFAIK there's no way to change that. That's exactly why I recommend you connect to a portable wifi hotspot. I highly recommend the little "plug"-style hotspots from DLink, they work really well ... once you configure it, you literally just plug it in and the ipad finds it. Here's the old one I use (I am sure there is a newer better model): http://www.amazon.com/D-Link-All-in-One ... d-link+505
Let me know if that helps

[jasonwong]

Hi Tim,

Of course no thank you for listening. I saw your bout with Instagram. Honestly for my purposes it's not a big deal. I run a business in France and although people use Instagram they don't use hashtags and ... oddly enough ... they tend to keep their phones in their pocket when socializing. Go figure.

Yes you are correct about the camera hotspot. I did a test setting it all up connecting through my home network and yes you are right it stays linked.
I saw that there is the d-link 600 version that is battery powered - I've never seen these before actually. So the idea here is that it essentially creates it's own network allowing the camera and ipad to connect to it and transfer photos?

[tim]

Yeah, I wish people would keep their phones in their pockets here too

Correct! The little D-Link unit just makes a wifi network that all of your devices can connect to. It works very well for WiFi Booth. I'm not sure if i'd go with a battery one, as I imagine that might be bandwidth or feature-limited. Cameras transferring images to ipads actually consumes a lot of bandwidth and therefore a lot of power. So if you can, i'd go with one you plug in. Hint: the plug does NOT have to be in the same location as the camera or ipad! You can have the photobooth (camera, ipad) running in one location in a room, and then plug the D-Link plug into the power outlet in another corner of the room. The range is pretty good on those things.

[tim]

Hi Jason I'm just getting to your feedback.
I can implement most of them, but one I have a question about -- for this feedback:

I think the confirmation to the email sent could say "You will get a link to all the photos!" and then when they try to enter it again say, "We already have your email, you'll get a link to all the photos!" - something like that instead of an error message.

... the error message pretty much already says exactly that: it says "Hmmm, I already know that email address! You only have to give it to me once, for all the photos". How exactly would you improve it?

[jasonwong]

Well I'm not sure what the proper message should be. All I noticed was that when people click on the photos they are thinking that they are selecting them (even if they go into a collage) and when they click on the email button, they believe they are sending only those specific photos to themselves. Which isn't a bad idea really -
Then when they take more photos, they want to send those other photos to themselves too. The message, even though it explains clearly what is going on, is a bit too much for someone to deal with when they just want to be having fun at a party. So yeah i'm not sure what exactly it should say but I think perhaps it can just be dumb and say "Thank you!" then after a few seconds go back to the 1,2,3 cheese screen. What do you think?

[tim]

The problem with having no error message (like it was in earlier versions): I was at a wedding where one person spent literally TEN MINUTES on the ipad, entering their email address 100 times for every photo, ignoring the huge line of pissed off people behind them.