Shared Libraries • Google Photos • 2017-2018
Effortless photo sharing with your favorite person
Summary
Shared Libraries was designed to solve for the problem of one person being the main photographer in most relationships. Before Shared Libraries, the non-photographer would have to constantly ask the photographer to share the photos.
With Shared Libraries, parents can automatically share photos of their kids with each other, and partners can easily fill out each other’s photo library from shared experiences.
“Some people have a special person in their life for whom it is still kind of annoying to [ask] to hit share”
— David Lieb, Director of Product at Google Photos, The Verge, May 17, 2017
Context
Our SVP came to the product team with a user need that he thought would resonate with our users. He came to work every day and most of the photos he took were work-related: whiteboards, test photos, etc.
Meanwhile, his wife stayed at home with their two young daughters. She took lots of photos of them, but they were all on her phone, and in her Google Photos account. She would sometimes send a couple of the photos to him, but he wished he could just get them without having to ask her all the time.
Partner A has mostly work photosPartner B takes the family photosPrinciples
Private photo gallery
When Google Photos split off from Google+, we put a major emphasis on reinforcing to users that their photo library was private, not shared.
Frictionless access
Adding to the goal of not needing to ask for photos, we also didn’t want it to be hidden behind multiple taps.
Privileged sharing
A Shared Library is only viewable by a single partner of the user’s choosing.
User control
Everyone has photos they don’t want to share. Allow users to control what types of photos get shared, in order to exclude receipts, screenshots, whiteboards, private photos, etc.
Success metrics
Accepted invitations
The feature doesn’t work without invitations being accepted. Monitoring this number will help us improve the sign up flow.
Reciprocated invitations
Most initial invitations will be sent by the partner with the least photos, driven by the need to get more photos. Reciprocation closes the loop to solve the initial user need.
Photos shared per day
One of the key org-wide success metrics for Google Photos at the time.
Team
UX Designer (Me)
Product Manager
UX Researcher
UX Writer
10+ Engineers
(Android, iOS, Web, Backend)
Only 6 months to launch
Leadership wanted us to target Google I/O for the initial feature launch, meaning we needed to operate in a lean, startup-like fashion in order to go from concept to launch in that short timeframe.
Research
We started with quick surveys to cast a broad net and quickly learn how users would react to this type of photo sharing.
All numbers are estimated, because I don’t have access to the original research data.
Personas
Casual Consumer
16
photos/week
Mostly functional photos
Family Photographer
80
photos/week
Mostly family photos
Design
Initial setup
It takes two people to set up shared libraries, but it all starts with one invitation. One person (usually the person who’s motivated by wanting to get photos from their partner) needs to find the feature and send an invitation to their partner.
User needs
Sender
Feature discovery
Understand the feature
Easy way to invite partner
Share some or all photos
Trust that only they can share their library
Receiver
Understand the feature
Trust that sender is who they say they are
Find feature for future access
Save some or all photos
Early sketch for sending an invitation
Early sketch for accepting an invitation
Early sketch to toggle shared photos in main gridWireframes
Saving photos
Users could save shared photos to make them part of their own library, meaning that they would be shown alongside the rest of their photos in the main grid.
Many users found it tedious to have to manually select and save the photos they wanted to keep.
We had automated the sharing part, but the user still had to remember to take action in order to have the photos shown where they wanted them. We needed to do more to solve our goal of reducing friction.
Solution
We added an auto-save feature with the same face-filtering options that we provided to the sender. The receiver could now choose to auto-save all the shared photos, or just the ones with their favorite people in them, and they would automatically be added to their main grid as soon as they were shared.
Launch
We launched Shared Libraries at Google I/O 2017 as part of the keynote session. Along with broad, extremely positive press coverage, users were quick to sign up.
In the first month, Shared Libraries led to over 1B photos shared per day, quickly becoming the source of the majority of photos shared in Google Photos.
Shortly after launch we did deep dives into the invitation flow funnel and improving reciprocation based on real-world data and follow-up user studies.
The feature is still going strong, still operating on the core designs that I made in 2017-2018.
My impact
Drove key product decisions
My quick conceptual wireframes and prototypes helped us to drive alignment with top-level team leads and the SVP.
On-time launch
Worked closely with my PM and ENG partners to successfully land the feature at I/O within 6 months of the project kick-off.