HP Palette: A Creative Hub
PRODUCT DESIGN
DESIGN SYSTEMS
HMW build an environment where creatives can be at their best: create, manage, edit, and quickly share their content with the world?
Company | HP
Role | Visual Experience (VX) Designer
Links | Forbes Article
Overview
HP Palette is a photo management app developed by the HP consumer software team in 2020. HP Palette delivers fast photo indexing, management, AI-based facial recognition, and object-oriented photo match features. In addition to special photo search tools, HP Palette links to other creative apps that increase your productivity.
HP Palette was shipped on millions of HP branded notebooks, AIO, desktops, and tablets in 2021.
Problem
The Creator Economy is booming and HP wanted to be part of that space. They wanted to solve challenges creatives face, including the problem of context switching between various software and multiple devices. It's time consuming and frustrating!
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Long Term Vision
The long term vision for Palette was a productivity-enhancing Creative Hub. HP wanted to help create an environment where creatives can be at their best: create, manage, edit, and quickly share their content with the world. Our goal was to drive demand for end-to-end software solutions for creators that handle everything from content creation to analytics and management.
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Short Term Goals
In the short term, the team was tasked with solutioning around an exciting new technology from HP Lab's computer vision team. This technology was aptly named Photo Match. By simply dragging and dropping a photo into Photo Match, it not only identified all faces within the image but also showcased every other photo in your library featuring those same individuals.
Given these priorities, our foremost task was to develop a photo gallery, embedding Photo Match within it, to assess the feature's viability and desirability. Our secondary goal was to create partnerships with existing software in the space: Duet Display, HP QuickDrop, Concepts, Adobe, and Dropbox.
Discovery
A Proof of Concept was developed by HP Labs, and our team had some initial questions.
Why might a person pick HP Palette over another app?
Do users even want to search for faces?
How often will they search faces specifically?
What else might people search for? Objects?
How might we effectively monetize?
How might we streamline users' actions post-search (such as with photo editing)?
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Research Artifacts
We were able to utilize our UX research team to get some context around these questions, as well as the goals, pains, and needs of our target audience. We created artifacts like personas and journey maps to help parse through that research.
Defining the Palette BETA
3 main design objectives for Palette BETA emerged:
Establish a central hub: a photo gallery
Highlight the innovative feature: Photo Match
Enable photo sharing and integration with other apps.
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System Architecture and UX Wireflows
We began to imagine task flows:
And brought them more to life with wireflows:
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Design System & Logo for Palette BETA
I was responsible for creating the design system for Palette. It was created to align with the existing design system for HP QuickDrop. I was also responsible for creating the new logo for the app.
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UI for Palette BETA
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Design Challenges
Once we released Palette, we quickly began testing and iterating on the experience. The following are some design challenges the team faced.
Challenge: Static screenshots were used instead of a dynamic tutorial for Onboarding.
Due to development constraints, we had to create a static “tutorial” to onboard users to the app, which is not sustainable or scalable.
Through testing, we found that users couldn’t understand the value of the app during onboarding.
Solution: Be more direct by showing the value props up front. Create a more scalable solution with teaching tips.
Challenge: Palette is installed on new PCs.
Users might not upload their photos upon first boot of their new computer—and if they do, those photos might not have people in them.
Solution: Build in a sample photo set with people in it for users to experiment with, and make it easy to delete.
Palette V2
There were many visual updates in Palette V2.
We added map & timeline views to the gallery, updated left navigation, added sorting by face & event clusters, and other file management tools.
We removed apps from the left nav as icons, and created an entire page for them, in order to increase scalability for the future.
We started incorporating elements of Microsoft Fluent design to help make development processes more consistent and easeful.
Results
HP Palette was shipped on millions of HP branded notebooks, AIO, desktops, and tablets in 2021. Though V2 remains in anticipation, the invaluable insights derived from Palette played a pivotal role in shaping the direction and objectives of the esteemed HP Print team.
Palette underscored the complexities of initiating a product based on a feature rather than genuine user demand. This experience fortified my advocacy for user testing, deepening my commitment to a user-centric design process.