Irista is Canon’s cloud-photography platform. It keeps all your photos and videos together – in one safe place – and makes them accessible from any device to view, print and share.

Irista is available on the Web and through native apps for iOS, Android and Apple TV. The platform includes dedicated uploader apps for Mac and Windows and a Lightroom plugin, and WiFi-enabled Canon cameras can upload images directly. Irista has over 1.2M registered users.

One of the issues with digital photography is the sheer volume of photos, making it difficult to find joy in them. To address this, the product team at Canon Digital Services was tasked with designing and building a new feature that allowed users to create photobooks.

This required not only the design of a new web app, the book builder, which would be used across multiple Canon products, but also an end-to-end service for Irista, Canon's photo cloud service. We needed to consider how users would discover the photobook feature, what steps they would need to take to create a book, and have the feature ready for Christmas, with only a couple of months to get something out.

As lead product designer, I worked with our product owner to make this happen.Research

We began by inquiring users about their experiences creating photobooks with existing products. We wanted to know what they liked and disliked, and what they would like to see improved. We collected this feedback and used it to inform our design decisions. All responses were collected in June 1, 2020.

Insights

• Photobooks are often stories, such as weddings, a baby's first year, or holidays.

• People prefer simpler products that are easy to use.

• People want to add text to their photobooks to provide context for the photos.

• Photobooks are often created as gifts.

• People are frustrated with the final quality of existing photobooks.

The book builder

We decided to focus on the book builder first. I designed a programme of design thinking based workshops with the team to decide what features we’d want to include initially.

We benchmarked existing photobooks to help us decide what we’d need to have a functioning product.

We were able to make a prioritised list of features that would be essential to launch.

This Includes

• Adding photos to the book

• Changing the layout

• Changing the background color

• Moving photos on and off the page

• Zooming in on a photo

• Adding text to the book

• Adding a cover and title

• Ordering the book