Research

04 Brick and Mortar Observation

Goals

Our goals for conducting a brick and mortar observation was to understand how people engaged in reflecting on past experiences.

Results

We conducted observations with three people, watching look through scrapbooks, albums, and/or digital albums. From this we found similarities and differences between physical albums and digital albums.

Similarities

Both physical albums and digital albums:

1. Create a sense of pride in the effort to document and collect.
2. Are structured chronologically by experience
3. Are filtered
4. Engender emotions of nostalgia
5. Create a sense of permanence

Differences

Several important differences between physical albums and digital albums came up as well.

Albums are seen as:

1. slower to view
2. less detailed since it requires more effort
3. more invested in due to the effort
4. more private
5. for self
6. from many sources (collect images from many people)

Online albums are seen as:

1. faster to view
2. more detailed since can tag, title, annotate
3. less invested in since takes less effort
4. more shared since it is easy to share
5. for others
6. from a single source (i.e., only my pictures)

Main Take-Away

Since people viewed online albums as less personal and less valuable, we wanted to create a website that would increase the value of the online repository by making it more personally attached.