Flickr blogged a few weeks ago about a major design change to the flickr homepage, and it just launched today.
It has some pretty big interaction design changes - they have now combined all the latest activity, so new comments/favourites/notes/tags on your photo show up in the same area as comments you’ve made on other photos.
Groups have now been given more prominence on the homepage - the latest photos are pulled in, rather than just a notice that there are new messages in your groups.
They’ve also used the same area for recent uploads and recent activity - you toggle between them both. I love this little design feature - if I went for weeks without uploading new photos, I’d get really sick of my “latest” photos being the most prominent part of the homepage on the old design.
My favourite bit is you can now adjust your own activity settings. You can choose which activity you’d like to be notified about (comments, sharing, etc) but you can also mute particular photos. I think this is a brilliant new feature - if I comment on a photo, I can mute it and not receive followup comments. This is going to be really handy, especially for photos like Dan and Cybele’s, where they generally receive about 30 comments on a photo - I’d previously have been alerted to them for weeks if I’d left a comment. That would be weeks of being incredibly jealous of their photography talents - now I can just mute all the followups.
They’ve also really brought out the stats. They only introduced stats about 6-12 months ago but it looks like it’s been so useful to everyone they’ve pulled them into the latest activity page. I actually get a bit sad about my stats - the most popular photos are from such typically boring search terms, people are searching for things like “eurasian girls”, “naked”, etc. My photos are totally innocent but searchers still end up there.
The homepage has changed a little bit since they released the sneak preview so it looks like they’ve really listened and taken feedback on board and made tweaks and changes based on user behaviour.
I admit when I saw the sneak preview my initial reaction was that I hated it and I didn’t want it to change - but I recognised that this was a fear of change rather than the fact that the changes weren’t good. It’s going to take a little bit of getting used to, but I think the changes they’ve made are going to be really positive once we all get used to them.
This post is tagged under: Design, Information Architecture
It reminds me of the facebook homepage design :)