Virtual Photo Booth
A web app for virtual wedding guests to take photo booth pictures that can be downloaded for printing and are sent to the bride & groom. Images are automatically stored in the cloud for printing and sending to guests as a thank-you gift for attending.
Challenge
The biggest challenges were not having any prior experience writing scripts to capture and transfer images on the web and a very short timeframe (under 3 months in between work, wedding prep and pandemic life). Smaller challenges included designing an interface that paired with the wedding aesthetic and finding an image storage option that had a REST API and would accept POST requests.
Solution
Research
I dug through open source projects, documentation and forums to try and see what had already been built in this space before - hoping to find some inspiration and guidance into this unfamiliar territory but aside from learning a lot about photo booths and messing around with a few helpful projects - I did not find as much as I had hoped.
User Flow
Armed with more photo booth knowledge than I ever expected to have, I mapped out a user flow in Figma, translating the typical steps users would take to operate physical photo booths into web app interactions.
Wireframe Sketches
With the user flow locked down, I loosely sketched out the form (UI) of the interface to match its function (UX) in a notebook.
Prototype
I then hopped straight into Glitch to build the web app. Since I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted the interfaces too look like and because I hadn't worked with the image capture/transfer scripts before, I decided to ensure the functionality was in place to then iterate on the design details.
Develop/Test
Working with images was difficult beyond anything I had imagined but I was able to pull together a working demo and sent it out across the country for friends to test. A few iterations took place during this phase until a shippable product emerged.
Result
The photo booth was a huge success despite being a big challenge for me. Guests from across the U.S. and Europe posed for photos during the event and were later printed and mailed out with thank-yous for attending.
