Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

The most important page on Flickr

Is this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/friends/

(I am a designer at Flickr. This post is largely taken from a proposed redesign I sent out last year.)

Virtually every time someone asks if I’ve seen a new photo on Flickr, I first cringe a bit, then reluctantly say no—it’s always no, because the page dedicated to showing new photos on Flickr, Contacts > Uploads, makes it impossible to easily browse those new photos.

There are a lot of problems with this page. For brevity’s sake, I’ll mention the big ones.

• Users have to rely on memory to figure out where the most recent batch of new photos end, and old photos begin.
• There’s no way to see all, and only all, recent uploads from a member.
• There’s no way to see all of the recent uploads from all of your contacts.
• The Friends & Family filter is basically hidden, which means it’s also basically useless.
• There’s no way to change the thumbnail size.
• Users have to go to a member’s photostream if they want to be sure they’ve seen all recent photos.

And remember, these are just the biggest problems. The page fails on a fundamental level—it’s supposed to be where you find out what’s happened on Flickr while you were away. The current design, unfortunately, encourages random clicking, not informed exploration.

The page isn’t just outdated, it’s actively hurting Flickr, as members’ social graphs on the site become increasingly out of sync with real life. Old users forget to visit the site, new sign ups are never roped in, and Flickr, who increased member sign-ups substantially in 2010, will forego months of solid work when new members don’t come back.

The ideal redesign would, at a minimum:

• Add context: for example, a summary at the top mentions roughly how many photos have been uploaded since one’s last visit.
• Include new sort options, including:
  • uploads by day
  • recent uploads by contact
  • recent interesting photos from one’s contacts, and so on.
• Include options to view photos at various sizes, small to large.
• Include infinite scrolling, keyboard shortcuts, and/or toggles to allow seamless navigation.

For the TL;DRers, every suggested improvement supports these two goals: clear context, and easy navigation. Users want to know what* they’re looking at, and then easily go wherever they want to go next.*

Flickr can have a serious competitive advantage if they make photo uploads easy to see and navigate: everybody likes photos, and likes seeing themselves in photos, and it’s even nicer to see photos all arranged on a page without visual cruft like status interruptions and article links. It’s also crucial to have different ways of viewing the photos: chronological is important, but so are groupings by date and contact type.

In other words, Flickr still has the ability to kick ass in this arena. They just have to build it.

*By which I mean what, who, where, when, and who else, usually in that order.
*Usually scrolling down to look at more photos, to be honest.

—Timoni