📟 BlackBerry: Usability Testing of Phone Cameras

Project: Conducted a usability study for the camera experience with the Blackberry Passport against competitor phones.

Goal: Leverage existing technical benchmarks that define the quality of smartphone cameras to ultimately fill our gap in knowledge for what a truly great mobile capture experience looks like.

Role: User Researcher

Process:

1. External Research: Secondary research on technical benchmarkings of camera phones, looking at hardware specifications.
2. Internal Research with Camera Team: For my main project at BlackBerry I was tasked to find the best camera experience on the market. It was a very broad topic so I talked to the Camera Team at BlackBerry to narrow my search. This helped me establish the camera markets and the Camera Team’s technical benchmarks. The camera nerd in me was thrilled because I was shown all the nifty equipment to test the cameras (all custom made!).
3. Primary Research: I designed a study where each participant would test out three competitor phones and go through a series of fun tasks. I have illustrated the tasks users went through below. Each task depicted tried to capture different aspects of the user's camera experience. For example, the sharing task assesses the ease of sharing photos.

Impact:

• Improved photo sharing UX: optimized sharing photos experience through feedback from a usability study. Tested with external users. See study design above.
• Improved hardware ergonomics: Assisted software and hardware engineers to test and calibrate BlackBerry Classic’s trackpad, which led to a significant increase in beta satisfaction scores.

Learnings: I learned how important it was to tailor my message in compelling ways to various stakeholders, such as teams of designers and engineers. By presenting the finalized data in a visual way, I was able to communicate facts in a clear manner so that the audience didn’t feel overwhelmed by numbers.