NokiaBetaLabs

What people say about Nokia Image Exchange

Written by Elina Vartiainen, Nokia Image Exchange team

In January, we invited Nokia Image Exchange users to participate in a survey* to gather insight and feedback about how the service is used and collect new ideas. We got a lot of good input and are now happy to share the results with you.

Who responded?

In total, 983 people (46 female, 937 male) answered at least some of the questions. Out of those that responded, 75% were 18-35 years old. The respondents came from 88 different countries, and the biggest user groups were from India, Brazil, and China.
 
Thanks again to those that responded!

Serving practical needs
 
These respondents used Image Exchange mostly for practical needs. The automatic photo back-up seemed to be the most important feature but the mobile application is also used as an offline gallery. A popular way to back-up photos was to connect with the mobile application to the service only when needed. Most respondents had a flat-free data subscription and many used WiFi due to cost but also speed. More than a half of the respondents used Nokia Image Exchange at least a few times a week.

Sharing is also important to our users and many respondents were already excited about viewing photos from different parts of the world and considered sharing as one of the best aspects of Image Exchange. In addition to this, the respondents requested even more ways to share photos in Image Exchange including Internet services like Flickr and Twitter, and mobile email. Half of all respondents had already shared images via e-mail, and Bluetooth and Facebook have also been popular.

Many respondents valued their desktop computer as an important factor in the photo back-up process. Almost half of the respondents had downloaded photos to their PC and one third had uploaded photos from their PC. The mobile application was used as a back-up tool and photo browser on the go, while the Web site was used when a computer was available, for example, at home or office. The Web site also offered a bigger screen for checking the photos and easily sharing them.

Overall, our respondents appreciated Nokia Image Exchange. Especially, the look and feel attracted as well as the ease of use and, especially, the mobile application including its animations and effects. Unfortunately, our respondents had suffered from the server downtimes and its beta status. Also, some of our users have been upset about offensive content in the service posted by other users.

Ideas for future development

We got a lot of ideas for the future development. Obviously, offline use of the mobile application could be supported more as the application seems to be a favorite gallery application to many respondents. Also, a support for mobile email was clearly something that many of our users are missing. Sharing to Facebook was a great step start to start sharing to other Internet services but there are many other services that our respondents like to use and would like to access them also via Nokia Image Exchange.

As next steps, we aim to solve the problems that were currently bothering our respondents: the inapproriate content in the service and stability issues. We hope this will improve Nokia Image Exchange and its user experience. We have also a lot of ideas for new features that we hope to implement in the future. So stay tuned for an even better Nokia Image Exchange!
 
- Elina   

* The data was gathered via two surveys: a Web survey, which was a longer survey with open questions and service user experience evaluation; and a mobile survey, which was a subset of the Web survey. Invitations to the Web survey were sent to users that have given their email address in the Nokia Image Exchange Web site, while invitations to the mobile survey were sent via the Nokia Image Exchange mobile application and users received the invitation when they connected to the service. The Web survey respondents represented the whole scale of users (from non-active to active) while mobile users were active users. The survey revealed that the respondents of the Web survey had mostly found Nokia Image Exchange via Beta Labs, while the mobile respondents via Ovi Store.