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Digital expertise, AI, and cloud native led to success in the shortest time possible
Towards an excellent app with a strategic partner
Photo books are a wonderful way to collect, preserve, and share memories. But working with a photo book designer requires patience and time.
The development of a design program
Our client HappyFoto asked us to develop a solution that supports their customers in creating photo books, calendars, and photo collages. With the help of AI, cloud native, and digital expertise, we developed the smart moments app.
This has been met with remarkable success. At the end of 2020, smart moments was voted the most innovative app of the year by the Apps Magazine of CDA Verlag. Additionally, in 2024 “HappyFoto smart moments” was awarded with the Confare Livin IT-Trophy, proving again the long-lasting value of this project.
The challenge
Simply tell a story
After a market analysis, we set ourselves the task of supporting the customer in the best feasible way to tell their story without having to worry too much on design and layout.
Using AI, the app was to suggest a group of photos that are related in location and time. The best photos were to be automatically selected and distributed to chapters. This selection would then only have to be confirmed or corrected by the user. This would eliminate the most time-consuming part of the work and users would need only to add book titles and, optionally, chapter headings.
Marlene Hackl
CEO, HappyFoto
The solution
Artificial intelligence takes over most of the work
In the development process, we leveraged our design/build/operate cycle and integrated our core technological skills of Cloud Native and AI. We developed clients on five platforms and a highly scalable server landscape on a hybrid cloud. These are partly operated and maintained in our own data centre.
For the installed clients, we wanted to use relatively little platform-specific code. After extensive research and several prototypes, we decided on a technology stack that can be used on all clients.
On the software side, we used open source solutions in the Java environment. At peak times, more than 200 pods run in parallel to render incoming customer orders into printable formats.
But we are far from finished: The app is continually being developed and expanded. Thanks to an infrastructure that is 100% designed for zero-downtime deployment, we can import new software at any time without affecting ongoing operations.
User Experience
During the design and development phases, we strongly focused on the most important part of the project – the people who use smart moments.
First, we gained a lot of insights by working in close collaboration with HappyFoto as they are in contact with their customers day by day. Learning more about the issues customers are encountering and seeing why a print product is being returned was highly valuable for further steps. We realized quickly that printing photo products is not an easy business.
At the beginning of our product development process, we created Proto Personas together with the client, based on research and learnings. The diversity of our research methods helped us to define priorities, brainstorm innovative ideas and focus on features that are likely important to our target audience.
We regularly conducted usability tests to evaluate our concepts. We gathered feedback on the usability, the interaction flows, and the overall user experience and challenged our prototypes to work on the right features. We were also curious to know more about what makes people passionate about photo products – and what they need to achieve even better and faster results.
In addition to the diversity of methods in UX research and design, great teamwork is essential to build useful and meaningful products! At Cloudflight, not only do UX designers strive for good UX, but the whole software development team focuses on user-centric thinking, by giving input, sharing ideas, and keeping a critical eye on the product.
Our partner
HappyFoto has been one of our customers since 2018. A building block of the success of this project was the form of cooperation and a high level of mutual trust. Throughout the project, HappyFoto was an integral part of the team.
HappyFoto was founded in Upper Austria in 1978. The market leader for personalized photo products by mail in Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia is also active on the German market.
