So whilst I was away, Flickr got a makeover and it’s not one that has made the site more attractive for me, indeed it’s so bad that I’ve had to bookmark another Flickr page to avoid the horrendous experience of the default Flickr landing page. I’m not the only one unhappy about this. Originally there was an official feedback thread, however this got abusive and too busy for the Flickr staff to keep up with, so they opened a second feedback thread, which isn’t quite as abusive but there’s a running theme that plenty of users don’t like the new Flickr.
I know I know, people don’t like change blah blah blah. We’ve seen it with Second Life when the client has drastically changed, but Linden Lab should actually be commended for some of the changes they’ve introduced after user feedback and with third party clients around, there’s plenty of choice in the design stakes for Second Life users. Flickr could learn a thing or two from Linden Lab about user interface changes, so too could Microsoft because I recently tried Office 2013 and that was bland, boring and painful on the eye, to such an extent that my boss agreed with me that we’d never get away with rolling that out to our users and avoid them forming a line at the helpdesk armed with torches and pitchforks. I’m also not the only one who finds Office 2013 painful either, an example of one of many technet threads on the issues can be seen here.
Microsoft have however announced that some old features, such as a start button, will be returning to Windows 8, so maybe there’s hope they will get around to dealing with Office 2013. However what of Flickr? Well there’s some bad news for a start, staff have said: “To put an end to speculation, and to hopefully give some people closure, the old site is not coming back.” Booooo! Well I don’t want the old site back permanently, some people like the new site, I want the choice of the old site view back, which really shouldn’t be that difficult.
There is so much wrong with the new site, but here’s one aspect of it, the help forum where the threads asking for feedback can be found via a link at the bottom of pages. Good luck getting there from the main landing page if you have a busy feed because the photos keep loading as you scroll down, users of Twitter or the Second Life My Second Life feed will be familiar with how this work, but on Twitter and My Second Life, the links to other pages about the company are positioned so you can, you know, actually click on them. The links are there on Flickr, they just vanish when you scroll down because more pictures start loading.