Google Photos
Memories
Background
As the Stories UI pattern was sweeping across various mobile apps, we realized that it was perfectly suited for viewing suggested sets of photos.
The main difference being that for most story features, each story was curated and posted by a different user. For Google Photos, the content would be your own photos.
We had ideas for lots of curation themes, but the more specific the concept, the narrower the impact became.
We landed on a version of the popular Rediscover This Day that would guarantee the most possible fresh content each week.
Memories as milestones
We then took those more creative Memory concepts and created new Memory surfaces in the context of the source photos.
Month headers
I then designed month headers, which used Memories to summarize each month of photos.
We made sure to give users control to change the titles or even remove the Memory if they didn’t want to to be there.
Milestone scrolling
These Memories in the grid now served as milestones of the key events spread across the years.
I improved on the existing fast scrolling UI by introducing the concept of jumping by milestone while dragging the fast scroll handle. Each jump was then accompanied by subtle haptic feedback to further improve the experience.
Impact
I worked on all aspects of the project
UX/Visual design
Prototyping
Motion design
User studies
Product naming
Content curation