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.
Pagination is required to make this work, some simple design principles and most of all, choices for users. I really don’t want large photos in my face on the landing page, I may like them sometimes when I’m browsing, but by default I’d like my landing page to be informative, not in my face, it’s my landing page after all, which should be designed to allow me to navigate.
I can’t see any options to reduce the size of the pictures in my stream, they may be there somewhere. I initially had trouble finding the options to embed my own photos because instead of a simple share link, they’ve changed it to an icon, one without a tool tip too.
I can’t see any options to limit the amount of images per page, it just scrolls on and on.
I could go on and on with design flaws, but it’s just an all round frustrating experience, heaven only knows how people who use Flickr a lot and have really busy streams are coping.
The only new feature I like is the way my groups and the explore categories appear on the right of the screen, that’s nice, indeed I’d be happy if my friends photos appeared where the explore window is and were about that size. There may be other new features I’d like, but to be honest, I’m not exploring too much because, of the usability issues I’m experiencing.
I’m not sure who at Flickr thought this makeover was a great idea, there are of course people who will love it, but there are also plenty of people who will hate it, this is why they should have introduced this as a choice, they could even have made it the default choice, but allow people to go back to the quiet life of the old view instead of forcing this upon them, it is generating a lot of ill feeling. The customer friendly thing to have done, would have been to roll it back and then introduce the changes gradually, of course managers believe it’s a sign of weakness to never admit they are wrong, this is a silly attitude and there’s nothing wrong with admitting, you’ve got it wrong. Flickr shouldn’t be afraid of rolling back, they can bring this new Flickr all back when it’s ready for prime time and by prime time, I mean with sensible usability options.