Who doesn’t love clicking photos?

Google's Pixel camera is already best in the business, but with Pixel 4 we added some cool features that improved the camera to make it even better 😁 📷 🤳 

Pixel Camera app is known for its simple but extraordinarily powerful capture experience. 

I was the UX lead for scale pillar on camera app team where my role was to simplify the user flows for switching between different modes and  to 1P and 3P apps from the main camera app. I also led the effort for scaling the single camera UI on all 8 Pixel devices with different screen sizes, camera features user education, social sharing on 3P apps, and camera settings.

Immersive UI

The goal of this project was to make the camera UI more immersive so that we could experiment with 16:9 aspect ratiojust for Pixel 4. This meant more of an immersive experience for taking and reviewing photos. The new design also supports quick change of aspect ratio to 4:3 and 1:1 using the new options bar design.

I led the design for this change to scale on all the Pixel devices sizes.  I made quick prototypes and worked in collaboration with UX researchers to test on all 8 Pixel devices before engineering implementation. I worked very closely with Eng to provide them high-fidelity specs and constantly kept communicating minor details: animations, transition, error states, and corner cases.

4:3 aspect ratio on all pixel devices

16:9 aspect ratio on all pixel devices

Quick social share

30% of photos shared on Instagram are captured outside Pixel Camera app. Also, 30% of photos taken are shared immediately. Hence, the goal was to make sharing from camera app  to social media radically fast, so that there’s no reason to ever leave Pixel’s default camera app.

I owned the end-to-end experience which involved creation of high-fidelity prototypes, iterations, testing assumptions in UX research studies, and working with PM and Eng to get this feature built.

Current flow for sharing images to 3rd party apps

Proposed flow for sharing images to 3rd party apps

Options modal

Users don’t change options much, so why clutter the UI with them all the time. To provide an immersive camera experience with minimal distractions, we push the options off the screen so the user can focus more on things that matter the most: capturing photos.

I identified issues with current options bar design, proposed new design, worked with UX researchers to get early feedback and understand how users navigate using the new design. Later I worked with engineers to get this implemented. I did some motion design nudging work to teach users new gesture to access these options.

User Education

Users often take poor photos (e.g. bad lighting or amputations), resulting in bad outcomes despite Camera’s quality. Contextual user education should help users to take better photos through light weight contextual nudges.

I created concrete experiences for FTU education, contextual suggestions, mode switching, and settings suggestions. I owned UX from concept to completion.

Contextual nudging: feature education

Recent projects 😍 🔥

December 2017

WhatsApp Business

Designed a concept app for Small Businesses in India which enables better customer engagement. 

August 2019 - Present

YouTube Watch

August 2018 - July 2019

Google Pixel Camera

More projects 💁‍♂️