Activity Feed

01

Context

Flickr was a photo and video hosting service and an online community for photographers. The Activity Feed was the landing page after login or registration on Flickr. It was one of the most viewed pages on the site and a top-rated feature in our satisfaction surveys. We wanted to redesign this page to surface more community-driven content in the product to help active users connect with each other.

02

Goals

  • Increase engagement actions on the feed posts (faves, comments, group invites)
  • Increase time spent on feed
  • Increase views on community content
  • Improve ad performance via new sidebar placement

03

Discovery

To get started, we ran user testing sessions on the current feed to determine pain points and opportunities.

We also began a conversation with our Alpha Group, an enthusiastic audience of early-access users, about how they used the feed, problems they encountered, and what improvements they’d like to see.

We brainstormed with internal team members on various improvements we could do as part of a redesign.

View the original feed design

04

Findings

The Good

  • Single photo card style/layout with action buttons outside the image
  • Hover-to-play videos
  • Chronological posts & infinite scroll

The Not-So-Good

  • Too much empty space
  • Engagement actions (comment, fave, add to group) are hidden on batch cards
  • Batch cards are too big and scroll offscreen
  • No recommendations for people or groups to follow
  • Does not update real-time

05

Ideation

With the discovery findings in mind, the next step was to wireframe a few concepts.

The wireframes were used to field a “hot spot” survey with current users. Users could highlight areas on the wireframes they liked, disliked, or found confusing.

The cumulative, detailed feedback from 185 users gave us a vivid picture of which concepts could work.

06

Designs

The next step was to distill the feedback into detailed, responsive wireframes and visual design.

There was a long tail of edge cases to design due to the complexity of the product and feed content.

Engineering now had a clear idea of what we needed to build and began working on the technical approach for making a modern, real-time photo feed a reality.


A selection of wireframe work (Desktop)
A selection of visual design work (Desktop)

07

Launch

A high-fidelity prototype was created and sent to the Alpha Group for feedback and discussion.

Prototype feedback was integrated into the first build, which was enabled for the Alpha Group and Flickr staff to test and catch early bugs and usability issues.

After some fixes and a few weeks in limited release, we launched the feature to everyone.

For the first time in years, Flickr received a significant positive user response to a major feature release!

Read the new feature announcement blog post
The new activity feed page (Pro version, Desktop)

Love it. Fantastic work!

Love the way that most recent group discussions are featured now. This is a great way to build more community in groups on Flickr.

THOMAS H., FLICKR PRO + MEMBER SINCE 2004

I love the upgrades. You have given us some control. Thank you very much!!!! I love the changes. Being able to choose which groups show up is very helpful.

Jim P., Flickr Pro + MEMBER SINCE 2006

First, designing a good website/app is hard so I can empathize with your effort here. There have been many great improvements to the UI. However, I don’t find the sidebar useful at all. Did you do user research?*

Shawna P., Flickr Pro + MEMBER SINCE 2006

*It’s tough to please everyone, and that’s okay!

08

Results

  • Engagement actions on the feed posts measurably increased.
  • The time spent on the page actually went down, since users were finding interesting content to view. Feed page views per session, however, significantly increased.
  • Community content views measurably increased, especially group discussions. We also saw increases in new discussions created and average replies per discussion.
  • The new sidebar ad placement became our best performing ad.