During my time working at Leica I was tasked with creating a concept camera UI. The idea was to design a conceptual interface that might generate new ideas and inspire the future UI direction. It was an exciting project to be a part of as it allowed me to have a lot of creative freedom with many design directions to explore.
After a series of interviews, our team consolidated the insights and created three personas to embody the different Leica users. By investigating their needs, motivations and workflow, we were able to understand the problem in a more practical and actionable way.
The entire experience centres around taking photos. As such the viewfinder is the root screen of the experience. In the interview stage, it became apparent that the navigation could work with touch and gestures but it also needed to work with physical controls. In order to achieve this I opted for a swipe-to-navigate system. This means that users that want to use touch could simply swipe to move around the system and users that wanted to use hand controls could use the arrow keys present on every Leica Camera.
