Some time ago, I discovered a photography company with a 25-year track record in the market. Their sales model was unique: they had to sell their product in a matter of seconds with a single sales opportunity.
During the day, photographers captured images of potential customers. At the end of the day, customers had a single opportunity to decide whether to buy or not, at a single point of contact. Their offer was limited to printed photos, with no digital options.
When analyzing their process, I noticed that the retoucher took between 3 and 3.5 minutes to enhance and print each photo. The entire process was manual. Additionally, the business's target audience covered a wide spectrum in terms of technological adoption.
To improve the process, I had to focus on three aspects:
- Automation: The retoucher's work needed to be done automatically.
- User Experience: The process had to be clear and simple for customers.
- Performance: The new process had to be as fast or faster than the current one.
In the solution implementation, I used artificial intelligence to perform the retoucher's work. This accelerated the process and simultaneously ensured quality in each photo. The AI process crops the photos, enhances the quality, and adjusts the saturation and colors.
To ensure simplicity, I developed an application accessible from mobile devices and desktops, using Next.js on the front-end for a smooth user experience and Spring on the backend to manage operations. This distributed architecture allowed me to efficiently handle the load and improve overall performance.
The application reduced the processing time of each photo from 3 minutes to just 30 seconds. Customers can download the photo easily with just one click, making the process as simple as the manual sale.
The result was very satisfactory for the company, and as a bonus, they save money on physical supplies like paper and ink. The application works with free cloud layers, so they don't have to pay anything. Now, I manage an application that serves 250 customers monthly, something I built as a personal challenge to apply what I know to improve a real-life process.
Want to know more? Maybe details like technical aspects, design and development studies for UI/UX, applied architectures, technologies or deployment services, maybe how the distroless images of Next.js and Spring Boot are made? Be free to contact me on linkedin, x, see my Github, or hopefully, we'll meet in some Discord or Twitch community.
These topics are my passion, and I love taking the time to help and collaborate with anyone who has a challenge or question. than will be nice to meet you :).