Photomashing
When I first pitched photomash they either loved it or it was met with a “huh, you do what?.” Photomash lets an iOS or Android user take a photo and erase parts of the photo. After erasing a part of the photo you can see through the hole revealing what the camera sees. At that point you line up your shot again mashing the two photos together. You can keep erasing and mashing. It’s extremely simple yet a bit confusing to explain.
The birth of the challenge system
After getting the app prototyped it became obvious to me that some users needed some creative help to understand what was possible with Photomash. The idea of a tutorial seems kind of annoying. So, I had the idea of showcasing all the stupid and wacky things my colleagues and I came up with while testing the app. We built a system that solved two problems, making it social and teaching users how to use the app in creative ways.
The challenges ranges from simple things like replacing someone’s face with someone else’s, then sharing it. Others get crazier like creating a “Frankensteined” version of someone. Overall the challenges needed to be simple tasks that only took a minute or two.
Many of the challenges like teabaggin came from playful explorations. I stumble upon the teabaggin challenge while testing. I happened to take a picture looking down at my nethers while I was sitting. I erased a bit then pointed my phone at a developer and started to laugh uncontrollably. Slowly while testing challenges began to show themselves organically.
One night me and my fiancé were taking turns playing around with ideas. She ingenuously came up with my favorite, the lollipop head. Take a picture of someone, then erase a huge area where their head was and move closer to take a shot. The results are hilarious and super simple.
Another one of my favorites was inspired by people defacing signs and billboards. The sign anagram challenge introduces people to the idea of taking a picture of a word and erasing letters to make a new word.
“ Bubny loves fairies,
my daughter
and him have that
in common ”
- RJay
Icons
The icons for the challenges were inspired by xbox achivement icons. Conveying the challenge in the icon was pretty funny in a few instances like man baby and teabaggin. The icons also servers a purpose of letting users know which challenge they are on while taking photos.
