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The page isn’t just outdated, it’s actively hurting Flickr, as members’ social graphs on the site become increasingly out of sync with real life.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

Daniel Bogan’s interviewing the Flickr staff with the same questions he uses for The Setup. You can read my entire response here, but my favorite question is “What would be your dream setup?”. Here’s what I said:

We’re at a really fascinating point in hardware development right now, which makes it difficult to answer this question. My knee-jerk answer is that I want the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer combined with an iPad combined with the Cintiq combined with, you know, a Cray supercomputer or something else equally powerful.

The problem is, really, handwriting recognition; if you’ve ever tried to use the iPad with an external keyboard, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Switching from typing to writing or drawing and back is a fucking pain. Regular notebooks allow you to draw and write without changing your hand position, which doesn’t seem like a luxury until you try actually working on a tablet and then find you need to input text.

SJ may think that styli are inelegant, but the fact is, using a pen to write or draw on paper is both comfortable and easy; it’s just not as fast as typing. Most people are content with inputting data via a keyboard, and this makes sense for a lot of jobs: marketing, business development, finance, and programming, for example. But for the designers, there’s a big gap between starting the creative process and executing the product design *because* it’s much easier to sketch out your ideas on paper, with a pen, than a computer.

And this is unfortunate; in the future, we should have computers that allow us to keep contexts for different stages of product development. The iPad and ThinkPads are steps in the right direction, but they’re still awfully clumsy, which is why, in part, people criticize the iPad as a product for mere consumption.

I want a Moleskine that is a blindingly superfast computer. That’s my dream setup.

—Timoni

read write where

Yesterday ReadWriteWeb’s post on Facebook Connect was, for a while, a top google hit for “facebook login” and as a result of this—combined with RWW’s Facebook Connect button—the site got a lot of negative comments* from confused Facebook users who thought they were looking at the new Facebook redesign.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the whys and whats and wherewithals, and ReadWriteWeb wrote a summary of things they had taken away from the experience. It’s unfortunately easy to extrapolate beyond what actually happened (“Users don’t read your copy or look at your branding”, for example), but we can take away some really fascinating truths from this debacle**:

1. Facebook did a great job annoucing their redesign. Almost every confused commenter knew that Facebook was redesigning and had clearly been expecting it.
2. These users don’t trust Facebook to maintain any UI consistency. This is the part that I find truly mind-boggling: aside from ignoring the ReadWriteWeb logo in the corner, aside from commenting on how much they didn’t like the red, most confused commenters genuinely thought that the changes they saw were the result of the redesign. Their expectations for brand consistency were so low that they didn’t realize they were on a completely different site even though quite a few of them had clearly clicked around in a fruitless attempt to ‘log in’.
3. Perhaps less surprising to those who have come across this user mistake before: URLs mean nothing to certain types of users—specifically, any user that mistakenly commented on ReadWriteWeb today. It’s impossible to tell how they all came to RWW, but Google seems to be the most common path—which means they didn’t use desktop shortcuts, browser bookmarks, or address bar autocompletes.
   One of my coworkers anecdotally mentioned that his mother had accidentally removed the address bar from Safari, and had been happily (and obliviously) using the search box for everything for the better part of a year. This is not entirely surprising, since address bars and search box often look alike and can be used exactly the same way in a lot of browsers.

Beyond that, there’s not a lot of points we can glean that aren’t speculative or specious. Here’s an excellent point from filthylightthief:

Even at work, around people who use computers every day for their jobs, get beyond the basic functions and it’s a foreign language. Follow the steps you normally take, and you’ll get to the end. The path doesn’t matter. But I think the same can be said about anything that is sufficiently complex: if you can make it work for your normal tasks, most people will be content with getting from A to B, even if it takes you past Q and Z. Computers just have a lot more options for detours.

*Example: “Can we log into face book? This is crazy I want to get all my info off and be done with this. I recently moved from MN to SC Myrtle Beach and facebook was a great way to keep in touch with family and friends but this is getting to be to difficult.”
**This hilarious, hilarious debacle.

—Timoni