GoPro's app as a remote control

The app enables users to control and preview their GoPro’s shot in real time, even when it’s mounted somewhere unreachable. I led design on a team that addressed everything from supporting new GoPro camera features in the app, pairing a GoPro for the first time, and addressing connectivity issues.

Technical challenges

GoPro’s app supports just about every camera they’ve ever made (over 25 GoPros!). Combine that with the range of mobile devices and operating systems (iPhone 8, 12Pro, Samsung, Google Pixel, etc.), and the mechanics of connectivity between the GoPro and the app become complex to manage very quickly.

Research

Users were unhappy with the number of errors they encountered when trying to connect their GoPros to the app. It was the number one reason for poor app reviews, and the biggest source of calls to customer service, which was a huge drain on those resources.

Approach

I created a technical flow with the help of engineers to understand just how many things could go wrong when connecting (so many things!). My approach was to educate users through onboarding when they first connected their GoPro, standardize the error messaging, and empower users to understand how to fix the situation themselves.

Outcome

With a new educational onboarding flow and more specific error messaging with suggested actions, user sentiment improved, and customer service calls were reduced 50%.

Impact

• Fewer connectivity errors
• 50% reduction in customer service calls
• Improved app store rating

Live stream from your GoPro

Instead of capturing footage and posting it after the activity, GoPro wanted to build functionality that enabled users to live stream straight from their GoPro, using their app/phone as a hotspot to transmit the footage. Imagine seeing someone’s GoPro-quality mountain biking footage as their riding!

Challenges

The main challenges to solve were around how to educate users about the pros and cons of higher quality settings (it could use up all of your data plan quickly!), surfacing the quality of the stream (spotty cell service?), and notifying users if the stream had ended because of a bad connection. Nothing would be worse than ending your hour-long bike ride, only to realize the stream disconnected two minutes in.

Outcome

Our team launched a great first version of live streaming in the app. It was important to let people use it and see what was working and how we could make the experience even better during the second phase.

Learnings

One particular point that came up was that users couldn’t see their own live stream and verify everything was all good. If you’re streaming from your GoPro camera to Youtube through the GoPro app, we can’t show your YouTube stream in the GoPro app.

To address this, we added a button to “View your stream” that would open the YouTube (or Facebook, Twitch, etc.) app to help the user verify their stream was successful. It would be interesting to explore improving this further in the future.

Other Projects

• Overhauled and evolved the design system + component library
• Media backup + transfer manager between GoPro, app, and cloud
• Introducing albums to the media library, including shared albums
• Onboarding in the app (first time use)
• Media info: creating more meaning from meta-data