01

Context

Flickr was a photo and video hosting service and an online community for photographers. Members of Flickr could organize photos into various specialized curations: albums, galleries, and groups. We streamlined how curation worked across the product to encourage engagement and creativity within the community.

02

Goals

03

Discovery

We knew from previous research that many Flickr users would search for photos taken by other members and save them to their favorites list or invite them to a group.

The product supported an outdated curation feature called galleries. Galleries gave users tools to curate and showcase sets of photos taken by others. This feature had been long neglected and was not well integrated into the main product. We learned from our surveys that awareness of the feature was low, though our site data told us that users who created galleries were very engaged.

We invited gallery creators to join the Alpha Group, an enthusiastic audience of early-access users, to share their experience with the feature and run usability tests.

04

Findings

We found deep usability issues, not just with galleries, but with curation on the product as a whole.

We discovered that users found curation to be laborious and involved many interactions for a user to achieve their goal. Users did not care to create a gallery or add a photo to a group when they could simply fave an image immediately and move on. This resulted in unwieldy and unusable Faves collections for many users.

In addition to improvements to the curation process, Alpha Group members also gave us insight on what specific changes we could make to galleries as part of the redesign:

05

Ideation

We put together a series of wireframes and prototypes for Alpha Group testing and feedback.

Each round of feedback helped us refine our approach and make progress towards our goal of easy curation.

06

Designs

Curation improvements:

Galleries improvements:

07

Results