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Say Cheese

Snapfish keeps customers smiling with quick access to hi-res snapshots

By Doug Addison

New Architect
December 2002

Entering the mail-order photo business with an online version of a decades-old process might draw skepticism from even the most optimistic venture capitalist. Snapfish started out with a raft of technical challenges at a time when venture capital was scarce.

The team needed to manage data storage; fine-tune bandwidth and protocols to handle high-capacity, cross-country data transfer; and design a solid user interface that could manipulate several terabytes of digital images without intimidating technically inexperienced users. The site and its functionality have required continual refinements to support the three-million- plus registered customers. Since the site launched in 2000, its back end systems have grown about sevenfold.

Point-and-Shoot Moms

With competing sites such as Shutterfly and Ofoto focused on high-end digital users, Snapfish set its sights on the more substantial film-to-online market, says Jeff Wishnie, a former director of product development for Snapfish who now consults on product definition and user interface issues for the company.

"There were two ways to play the market," Wishnie says. "One was to ride the wave of people moving to digital cameras and the other was to tap into the photography market as a whole, which is still significantly larger—even with the growth of digital—and try to push that wave."

Snapfish, Wishnie says, wanted to turn "every mom with a disposable camera or a point-and-shoot into a digital consumer."

In everything from its branding and the site's look and feel to the functional requirements of the 1.0 version of the site, Snapfish tried to stay true to its target customer: the "Internet-enabled Mom or iMom," as company cofounder and president Raj Kapoor calls them. The Snapfish name conveys ease of use, he added, without limiting the company to photos, while the fish logo (which goes by the name Snappy) and the bubbles motif add character. "People love the bubbles," Wishnie says.

Figure 1 Click for larger image The first version of the Snapfish site was rushed to launch, necessitating a redesign (above) with a greater emphasis on usability and task completion.

Friendly Functionality

Beneath the friendly exterior lies a complex Web service whose back end systems have grown substantially since the site launched in June 2000, while cutting the time of mail-order photo processing in half, Kapoor says.

"In traditional mail order, the consumer must wait for the film to travel to the processor, then the prints must travel back before they see photos," Kapoor says. "With our system, once we process the film, the consumer receives an email with a link to all the photos. They don't need to wait."

Registered users have two ways to get their images into the Snapfish system. Customers who want to submit film receive a welcome package with barcode stickers and vinyl preprinted mailers for marking and sending in rolls. Registered Snapfish users also can upload images from digital cameras via a browser-based form or a faster, drag-and-drop ActiveX interface. All images— film and digital—are available online for sharing and ordering reprints.

The most important goal for the 1.0 launch was integrating with processing labs, which meant forgoing many of the digital tools one might expect from an online photo service, such as eliminating red-eye, cropping images, and creating custom albums. (Snapfish worked with several labs until October 2001, when it was acquired by its main processing lab, Maryland-based District Photo.) Many additional functions have been added in subsequent releases, but the first feature set was basic, Wishnie says. The initial launch was defined by two guidelines: to provide a valuable service to film camera users and to offer a way to share and order prints.

"We knew we couldn't launch the service if we couldn't get the pictures into the system," Wishnie says. "And there was very little point in launching the service if we couldn't earn any revenue off it. So everything else in that first launch was gravy."

When version 1.0 launched, Wishnie says, "the whole operations side worked very well. That's where the effort had gone. Our customers' experience includes a big offline component, so it had to be smooth, speedy, comfortable, and reliable. The bulk of the work in 1.0 was not anything the user would see."

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