When Flickr launched their new awesome last May I was far from impressed, indeed I pondered at one point whether Yahoo/Flickr were trolling their members. I wasn’t alone in this sort of view, as the official feedback demonstrated.
After this Flickr made more changes, changed groups, changed the layout of the photostream, changed colours, moved things around and generally seemed to be going out of their way to annoy me with their totally unnecessary bandwidth hogging designs and practices. As someone who is used to the Second Life experience and realises how unnecessary bandwidth hogging textures can undermine the user experience I was somewhat befuddled as to why Flickr were abandoning the thumbnail.
Putting this in Second Life terms, think of the initial rollout of viewer 2 and you may start to understand the horror I experienced. The big difference has been that Linden Lab were far more responsive than Flickr in terms of trying to get back on track.
However a few iterations later and Flickr seem to be showing signs of seeing a limited degree of sense with regards to their new Photo page. The new photo experience, or NPE as it is being dubbed, has been very warmly received. Flickr staff explained some of the thinking behind this latest change :
Because of the feedback from you, we’re moving the photo page in a direction that more closely resembles previous iterations of the product, but with contemporary design and the new framework that delivers photos so much faster than before.
These are the most important issues we have fixed from your feedback:
*Moving too much information to the right rail on the side of the photo.
*The narrow space for comments on photos that have lots of comments makes it hard to scroll and read them.
*The white text on black background makes it hard to read.
Now not everyone will like the changes, just as there were some people who liked the Flickr changes last May … I suspect these people may well be gluttons for punishment or members of the Flickr FIC (Yes it does exist), but some people liked the changes. The new photo page offers a fresher look, has comments below the photo and they are easy to read, the flow of photo, discussion, information all seems to fit together better with this design.
This is all very encouraging but Flickr is still a lot more annoying to use than it was prior to the changes of last May.
The landing page still has the completely unnecessary bandwidth hogging design. There is absolutely no need for this to be the only option in town. If you want to see your own stream in a thumbnail view, you need to click edit, if you want to see someone else’s stream in thumbnail view, you still need to add ?details=1 at the end of the URL, for example, Torley’s stream in thumbnail view :
https://www.flickr.com/photos/torley?details=1
There’s still no thumbnail view for groups unless you’re an admin and that’s a flawed design too. Unnecessary bandwidth hogging design concepts are still too widespread but they do deserve some credit for working on the new photo page and actually listening to feedback.
Companies seem to go through a stage of being stubborn about issues like this, then they suggest people just don’t like change, then they remain stubborn and finally they seem to see a little sense, some are better at this than others. Linden Lab have been quite good, Yahoo/Flickr not so good and also in the not so good camp sit Microsoft whose Office 2013 product remains at the showstopper stage for me over the issue of its lack of colour themes and lack of depth. Yes some people like it, many others feel it burns their eyes but Microsoft have remained in camp stubborn over this issue.
The key to a happier UI and happier user experience is options. Options do require development time, but options really do give more scope for a happier user base. Flickr have taken a first step on the road to redemption, let’s hope more steps follow.