CHI 2007

2006 • Experience Report AprilApril

22-27,28-May
2006 •3,Montreal,
2007 • San
Quebec,
Jose, CA,
Canada
USA

Early Research Strategies in Context:

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Grace Kim Abstract

Strategic Research Group In January of 2006, Adobe Systems introduced the
Global Market Research public beta of Lightroom, a digital imaging solution
Adobe Systems Incorporated designed specifically for professional photographers and
345 Park Avenue serious amateurs [1]. The appeal of Lightroom is that it
San Jose, CA 95110-2704 USA offers a modular, task-based environment that flexibly
gkim@adobe.com supports a complete photography workflow. This paper
describes two foundation-setting research strategies
pursued during the early concept and definition phases
of Lightroom. It discusses why certain research
strategies were undertaken by the placing the decisions
to pursue these strategies within a broader context,
including the stage of Lightroom’s development, the
evolving assumptions of the Lightroom team, product
positioning issues, time and resource constraints, and
stakeholder engagement. To emphasize the context in
which specific research approaches were crafted rather
than simply executed, the term research strategies is
used in favor of research methods.

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2007, April 28 – May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA.
ACM 978-1-59593-642-4/07/0004.
Keywords
User research, research strategies, qualitative methods,
concept design, new product development, digital
imaging, user-centered design

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ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.2. Information interfaces and presentation: User
Interfaces.
Exploring the Workflow of Photographers
In 2002, Mark Hamburg, the second engineer to join
the Adobe Photoshop team and the product’s main
architect, began exploring an idea for a new digital
imaging product designed specifically with
photographers in mind. Hamburg experimented with
two early concept prototypes - Pixel Toy, an image
editing tool in which adjustments were made by
painting on snapshots rather than layers, and Shuffle,
an image organization tool based on the metaphor of a
photographer’s light box. Both early prototypes
represented Hamburg’s desire to create an intuitive,
photography-centric application. In order to pursue his
ideas more fully, Hamburg put together a small team
consisting of a Project Lead (Andrei Herasimchuk), UI
Designer (Sandy Alves), and User Researcher (myself).
The project was code named Shadowland.
As the team was built, questions from around the
company were posed to the group. How did the goals of
Shadowland differ from the goals of Photoshop? Was
there room and opportunity for another Adobe solution
in the digital imaging space? With Photoshop capturing
the professional photography market and Photoshop
Elements serving photography hobbyists, the need for
Shadowland became the subject of lively debate.
Clarifying the overall purpose of Shadowland and
exploring how the concept fit into the digital imaging
solution space would be one of the driving goals in the
formulation of the first phase of research. The other
driving goal would be based on the team’s evolving
assumptions about the concept itself.
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Hamburg and Herasimchuk had already begun crafting
some working assumptions about what Shadowland
should be. First, Shadowland should address the
complete workflow of photographers. Second, from an
architectural standpoint, the application should be
modular and task based. Specific ideas about the
workflows and tasks of photographers were at the very
heart of these assumptions, yet no systematic research
had been conducted to explore the following questions:
What were photographers actually doing? Who were
they working with? What goals were they were trying to
accomplish? What kinds of tools were they were using?
It was Spring 2003, and with less than full-time to
devote to the project and a timeframe of three weeks
to complete the research, I decided to explore these
questions by conducting a combination of site visits and
phone interviews with professional and serious amateur
photographers. The goal was to quickly provide the
team with a reasonable understanding of the workflows
and tasks of photographers and to explore how the
current solution space supported or failed to support
photographers’ activities and needs.
To speed things along, I relied on the industry expertise
and contacts of several Photoshop alpha testers to help
in the recruiting process. After explaining my interest in
gaining a broad understanding of the workflows and
tasks of photographers, the Photoshop alpha testers
came up with a list of individuals who represented a
wide range of industry work – sport event, editorial,
news-journalism, portrait, catalog, fashion, fine art,
landscape architecture, and serious amateur
photography. Their personal introductions enabled me
to schedule 4 site visits and 8 phone interviews in a
matter of days. Site visits were conducted with
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photographers located in the S.F. Bay Area, and phone
interviews were conducted with photographers based in
Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C. and New York. I
spent two hours with each photographer walking
through and discussing the activities and tasks of their
most recent job or shoot.
figure 1. Workflows and task groupings were presented in a
multi-level, visual format that highlighted sequence of tasks,
type of photographer engaged in the tasks, tools, pain points
and recommendations.
Encouraging photographers to focus on activities at
both the beginning and end of a shoot or job was more
challenging than I suspected. Knowing I was from
Adobe, many photographers immediately jumped to the
image editing portion of their workflow and were eager
to discuss their experiences using Photoshop. Various
techniques were used to ensure focus and depth of
detail across the workflow, including starting with a
high level timeline of the recent job or shoot and
explicitly conveying a timeframe for discussing each of
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the activities, e.g. “I’d like to spend the first half hour
talking about these activities.”
The impact of this first phase of research was threefold.
First, the team now had a general framework for
understanding the workflows and tasks of a wide
variety of photographers (see figure 1). How and why
certain workflows were similar or different, enabled the
team to refine their initial working assumptions and
ground them in the real world activities of
photographers rather than solely in personal
experience, anecdotal evidence, and opinions.
Second, it became clear that photographers were
patching together a series of applications to accomplish
their goals. This not only slowed down the work itself,
costing the professional photographer both time and
money, it also represented an interruption to the
creative flow of photographers by drawing attention
away from the image and onto the management of
tools. A complete workflow solution would enable
greater efficiency, and if designed well, a more
consistent creative environment.
Third, while Photoshop was the dominant application
used by photographers when performing image editing
tasks, the actual time spent and number of features
used in this application was quite varied. For
photographers who simply needed quick access to
Photoshop’s correction and adjustment tools, launching
a large application for a few features felt especially
painful and slow. For photographers who needed access
to Photoshop’s wide-ranging and deep image editing
capabilities, the application represented a powerful,
essential and irreplaceable tool. This finding provided
the team with early guidance on the types of image
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editing capabilities Shadowland should provide and
those it should offer through tight integration with
Photoshop.
Defining the Task Based Environment
Once the need and opportunity for a complete workflow
solution had been established, the Shadowland team
began defining the requirements for the task based
environment or modules that would make up the
application. Hamburg and Herasimchuk had taken an
earlier pass at coming up with key areas of functionality
and specifying the types of tasks these areas would
support. Nevertheless, the team wanted to make
certain these initial assumptions were on track.
Everyone agreed the ability to provide photographers
with the right kind of support at the relevant times in
their workflows would be crucial to keeping the
application streamlined and intuitive. But not everyone
agreed on how the task based environments should be
defined.
What was needed was an approach that could provide
insight into how photographers conceptualized and
organized their own workflows and tasks. While the
workflow research had shown patterns in the overall
sequence and clustering of tasks, it had not been
primarily designed to understand these task groupings
from the conceptual standpoint of the photographers
themselves. To achieve this goal, I decided to craft a
qualitative card sort exercise that would provide the
team with important information about how and why
photographers tacitly sorted, grouped and labeled their
tasks and how and why they mapped specific features
and functionalities to these task groupings.
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Again, relying on the invaluable expertise and help of
the Photoshop alpha testers, I set up nine studio visits
with photographers in San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Santa Fe and Chicago. The photographers represented
a wide range of work, including fine art, commercial,
product, stock, advertising, catalog, portrait, and event
photography. In some cases, the photographer’s digital
assistant(s) also participated (see figure 2). All of these
visits took place in July and August of 2003.
figure 2. A photographer and his digital assistants
participating in the card sort exercise.
In preparation for the card sort exercises, I enlisted the
help of other members of the Shadowland team. By this
time, Troy Gaul had joined the team as the Engineering
Lead. Together, the team brainstormed and generated
a list of 97 photography tasks and a list of 79 features
and functionalities that would be used in the exercise.
In addition to leveraging the expertise of the team and
actively engaging them in the research process, these
brainstorm sessions provided a space in which team
members revealed interesting and informative
assumptions about why a task or feature should or
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should not be included on the list. The discussions and
debates that took place in these sessions increased and
deepened my awareness of the team’s current thinking
and prompted me to pursue specific questions during
the card sort exercise that I might otherwise have
ignored.
figure 3. A visual poster provided the team with an accessible
format in which to show the relationships among several layers
of information – the major task and feature groupings, core vs.
common tasks and features, global tasks and features, and the
native categories of photographers.
The card sort exercise consisted of two main parts.
During the first half of the exercise, each photographer
sifted through a stack of cards with tasks printed on
them, discarded any cards that did not apply to them
and created new cards of relevant tasks that were not
represented. They then grouped and arranged tasks in
a way that represented their workflow, replicating cards
whenever necessary. Once the photographer felt
satisfied with the way the task cards were grouped and
arranged, they were asked to demonstrate if and how
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any of the groupings could be further combined or
decomposed. This enabled me to explore the extent to
which the boundaries of these groups were flexible.
Finally, the photographer created their own names for
each of the task groups.
During the second half of the exercise, photographers
moved to the stack of features and functionalities. They
sifted through these, discarded any cards that did not
apply to their work, and created new cards of relevant
features not represented in the original stack. They
then mapped the remaining feature cards to the task
groupings, again replicating cards whenever necessary.
Throughout both halves of the exercise, photographers
were continually asked questions to understand the
‘whys’ behind their emerging task and feature maps.
Two striking outcomes of the card sort exercise were
the ease with which photographers discarded many of
the tasks and features and the level of consensus
around which tasks and features were essential to their
workflows. One of the biggest challenges facing the
team was determining where to draw the line in terms
of what Shadowland should support and the features
and functionalities it should include. If photographers
themselves could not agree on what was essential, it
would be difficult if not impossible for the team to keep
the application streamlined and the feature set highly
relevant and discoverable. All nine photographers who
participated in the study agreed that 34 of the 97 tasks
and 26 of the 79 features they were presented with
were essential to their workflows.
While this provided important guidance on what the
core of the application should be, there was still the
question of whether or not a task based environment
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and modular architecture made sense. Although the
number of initial task groupings definitely varied across
photographers, the pattern by which photographers’
subsequently combined or decomposed these groupings
and the overall sequence of these groupings was highly
consistent. The feature mapping also revealed strong
patterns, but this result was perhaps even more
interesting from a qualitative standpoint. Hesitation
from photographers over where to place certain
features or a combination of features was a clear
invitation to ask questions and probe about the source
their uncertainty. This qualitative data was invaluable
for thinking through new ways of presenting and
conceptualizing features.
A visual poster format was used to illustrate and
summarize how tasks and features were grouped and
mapped to one another (see figure 3). Within each
grouping, core tasks and features were presented at
the top level, with common tasks and features below.
Core status indicated all nine photographers performed
the task or selected the feature in the context of the
specific grouping. Common status indicated at least five
photographers performed the task or selected the
feature in the context of the specific grouping. Tasks
and features that appeared in more than one grouping
were highlighted to indicate their potentially global
status.
Concluding Thoughts
Early research strategies pursued during the concept
and definition phases of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
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are best understood and appreciated by placing these
strategies within a broader context. Some of the
contextual factors highlighted in this paper include the
stage of Lightroom’s development, the evolving
assumptions of the Lightroom team, product positioning
issues, time and resource constraints, and stakeholder
engagement. Hopefully, these details will provide
others with the opportunity to think critically about how
their own decisions might have dovetailed or departed
from my own, given a similar context.
Context inevitably plays a significant role in the kinds of
questions we ask as researchers, the specific methods
we choose to use, and the manner in which we engage
our teams and broader organizations in the overall
research process. While expertise in research methods
is an important and required skill for all researchers,
the ability to create research strategies appropriate for
the context at hand is an equally important if not
sometimes overlooked aspect of our profession.
Acknowledgements
Congratulations to the Lightroom development team for
a successful public beta launch. Special thanks and
appreciation go to Andrei Herasimchuk, Mark Hamburg
and Sheryl Ehrlich for their enthusiastic advocacy and
support of early stage research.
Citations
[1] Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/
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