Flickr the popular photo sharing site owned and developed by Yahoo has taken a bashing recently for its bad user design…..we ask why?
When one of your own designers (Timoni West) publicly tears apart a fundamental design flaw in Flickr as part of the user experience in her own blog, you know that the rot is likely to have set in at the Flickr camp for some time.
So who is the main competitor on the scenes?
The name we keep hearing about is 500px a plucky little upstart that has just found itself with a Series A funding windfall of around $500,000 thanks to its attention to user experience and the various ways it aims to stick to its core ethos of helping photographers reach a wider audience.
How are they going to differentiate from the rest?
Community:
Flickr never really allowed much engagement with its sterile complicated interface.
Dig like buttons:
People love to vote and share its what makes the Internet social.
Ipad and Iphone support:
We all know how good photos look on an Ipad so they have developed a fancy HTML5 and JavaScript based app so you can look and share your photos with friend in style.
Flickr dead?
Well if the essence of Timoni’s post is to be taken in full context, the fact that it was written after a proposed total overhaul of the user experience was pitched a year ago and nothing actioned.
It does look like Flickr could be taking things way too slowly to steer a course of beneficial outcomes for the team and company in the near future, time will obviously tell.
Your voice?
So what do you think of the Flickr issues?
And when you have had chance to evaluate 500px let us know where you think they succeed and perhaps also are currently failing….we love to hear your constructive comments!
Editorial Staff