New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

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vynsane
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New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by vynsane » Thu May 17, 2012 5:52 pm

Just noticed today, apparently it was an upgrade that happened two days ago - resize your browser window and your pics grow - right there on the display page! It's cool to see them improve the interface using a design philosophy known as 'response' or 'reactive' design - something that you'll probably see a lot more in the near future, as designers embrace the enormous expanse of device/screen sizes out there.
big, BIG, BIGGER photos on the photo page!

Two weeks ago we brought you the new hi-res images in the lightbox and today we’re releasing those amazing hi-res images directly on the main photo page. Hi-res images on the photo page let you share all the detail side by side with the context of your photos. Location, time, camera, title, description, tags and more are all there to tell the full story around your photos.

Image

And it’s not only that you see larger images – we’re releasing this with a new “liquid” layout.

Flickr’s “liquid” design adjusts the photo page and image size based on the size of your browser window. With that your photos will look great on a laptop screen, and look even more stunning on larger screens. With the new design:

The biggest photo size is shown depending on your browser window
There is absolutely no “upscaling”, and we try to avoid downsampling as much as possible.
The title and the sidebar are visible without scrolling on landscape oriented photos. (which are the vast majority of photos on Flickr.)
With the introduction of the new liquid layout, we are also introducing the new photo sizes to our API and in the “All Sizes” menu.

If you are interested how the new photo page magic works behind the scenes, then you can read the blog post on code.flickr.com. As always please let us know in the help forum if you find any bugs or have feedback to share with us.

Photo from Thomas Hawk
That's taken from this Flickr blog post.
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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by vynsane » Mon May 20, 2013 3:44 pm

Flickr has redesigned again! Now you get a terabyte of space, instead of a 200 image limit with a free account, and your photostream page and recent activity page are redesigned with larger versions of the pics. As usual, I like it, most don't. :eh:
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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by Morgan19 » Mon May 20, 2013 5:57 pm

The (as of right now) 38-page list of complaints and my now-cancelled Pro account pretty much sum up my feelings on this version of Flickr.

:sick:

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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by Mantisking » Mon May 20, 2013 7:22 pm

Yeah, this would have gone over better on April 1st.

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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by vynsane » Mon May 20, 2013 7:24 pm

^^ Reading through the first page of comments netted about 90% "I hate it" with no rationale behind that reaction, and 10% this:

Image
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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by dr_spock » Mon May 20, 2013 7:29 pm

People hate change. Flickr could have done a better job at change management. Photobucket gave a few months before everyone had to go over to the new design.

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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by Morgan19 » Tue May 21, 2013 4:08 am

vynsane wrote:^^ Reading through the first page of comments netted about 90% "I hate it" with no rationale behind that reaction, and 10% this:
You've already stated you like it, and that's fine. But those who feel contrary don't need a well-planned thesis laying out the twenty-seven points of why they don't: if a user goes to the site and doesn't like what it's suddenly become, that doesn't make their opinions any less valid. Flickr specifically asked for feedback in that thread, and that's still feedback.

Responsive design doesn't need to equate to bad or user-unfriendly design, and that's exactly what this redesign has become to a whole lot of people. Usability and functionality is way down for the sake of filling up a page with bloated, bulky content.

Out of curiosity, did you read past the first page? There are plenty of great responses from folks dissatisfied with the new layout, with a lot of good, valid criticism spelling out exactly why the new site stinks: incredibly hard to navigate and use, weird zooming/cropping of images, hiding options away, the new site freezes and can easily use up all your system's resources, inability to control your own settings, screwiness with thumbnail previews, and so on... The complaints are hardly just about bigger pictures easily put in a meme.

(86 pages and counting...)

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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by vynsane » Tue May 21, 2013 7:41 am

Yes, I have read a bit past the first page, but honestly I have no time, patience or desire to weed through the slew of useless dreck comments ("Nooooo!!!", "It's terrible!", "Change it back", etc, etc - these are objectively awful comments and don't help in any way) to get to the quality ones. That is Flickr's job.

Some criticisms are quite valid - do I agree with the truncation of comments? No. I see no need for that. Could the 'justified' layout use a bit more whitespace? Yes. Is the black background on all pics necessary? Not really, but the 'View on Black' option was always very popular, so it makes sense to make it the default. Perhaps in the future you will be able to choose an optional complimentary background color.

As for calling this a 'responsive design' - that was the topic name based on the last redesign, and not applicable to this one. I just posted in this topic so as to keep things concise - we didn't need another Flickr discussion topic. This is objectively NOT a responsive design, which, frankly, surprises me. When I resize my browser, the content should reorganize/resize to fit. It does not, resulting in a horizontal scrollbar. This, in my opinion, is inexcusable in an era where sites need to support more screen sizes and orientations than ever before.

Do I think that the site is harder to navigate/use now? No. The navigation seems relatively unchanged to me, mainly just shuffled a bit. The options on photo pages have just been moved, not hidden away. They used to be above the picture to the left, now they're below the picture and to the right. Perhaps I never used some navigation options that everyone else was using that have now vanished or been obscured in some way - can you give me an example?

What weird zooming/cropping issues are you seeing?

What I like about the new redesign is that the pictures are the focal point, as they should be: It's a photo sharing site. I loved when the group pools went to the larger format, and this was a logical evolution of that. I never understood why all the thumbnails were so tiny. I'm sure it was necessary some time ago when everyone was on really slow connections. While I understand that not everyone has blazing fast connections still, and they can and should address the criticisms that the larger pictures make browsing too slow/costly for slower connections or older computers, it's hard to evolve as a site while maintaining backwards compatibility. On the other hand, it took little to no time to load my entire photostream on my phone via the new version of the Android app (which is lightyears better than the previous version).

Part of the problem is also that people are confusing their subjective aesthetic opinions with objective functionality issues, too. I posted the two bugs I found using Chrome on Mac - I can't type the letter 'K' in any comment form and the action buttons below the pic on each photo page (fave, comments, share, large, three dots) only work on my pictures, no one else's for some reason) but it got piled under with all the "I don't like it" comments (in the wrong topic).

At the end of the day, the site is redesigned. Just like Facebook before them, they're not going to roll back the changes based on a slew of knee-jerk "I hate it" reactions (timeline is here to stay, so is the new Flickr), but they may (and should) continue to tweak, improve and evolve based on thoughtful criticism and feedback. The knee-jerk reactions are just making it harder for them to get to the quality responses, which is a shame.
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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by FenrisAkashi » Tue May 21, 2013 11:18 am

To be fair its now quite irritating to link pictures whereas it was easy before.

Major redesigns can and often do hurt page traffic numbers. I used to read Engadget and Digg daily before they made their sites hard to read messes.
Seems no one ever learns, people like the familiar. If you really feel the need to change then you iterate, not reinvent.

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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by vynsane » Tue May 21, 2013 12:56 pm

FenrisAkashi wrote:To be fair its now quite irritating to link pictures whereas it was easy before.
Not sure I catch your meaning of "link pictures" - do you mean the 'share' button? It's become pictographic as opposed to text-based, and has been moved from the top left to the bottom right:
Screen Shot 2013-05-21 at 2.55.20 PM.png
It still holds the exact same functionality.
Major redesigns can and often do hurt page traffic numbers. I used to read Engadget and Digg daily before they made their sites hard to read messes.
I suppose major redesigns can have an impact, though I can't seem to find any articles about the Engadget redesign issues (only articles on Engadget about other site redesigns ;-) ) but I read a bit about the Digg redesign. While the Digg redesign fiasco was blamed on "venture capitalist" meddling, it doesn't seem like anyone is blaming Flickr/Yahoo the same way.

Anyway, out of Flickr's reported 87 million users, it would seem that the detractors are a incredibly vocal minority, as is the case with basically anything on the planet. Negative energy is easier to accrue, apparently. I'm not saying the rest of those 87mil are all completely ecstatic about the redesign, but the vast, vast majority of Flickr users are obviously somewhere in the spectrum of {happy with, okay with, apathetic to, or mildly annoyed by (but not enough to complain about)} the change.
Seems no one ever learns, people like the familiar. If you really feel the need to change then you iterate, not reinvent.
Iteration only gets you so far. Eventually you must evolve by a leap and a bound or get left in the dust. That said, the new homepage and grid-based photostreams are iterations of the grid-based group pools. It just was combined into one large release.
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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by dr_spock » Tue May 21, 2013 1:16 pm

Still trying to get the hang of the new flickr. Is it crashing for anyone else? It seems to crash my iPad safari once a while. It didn't do that with the old version. Oh well, it is adapt or die.

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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by Mantisking » Wed May 22, 2013 3:58 am


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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by Morgan19 » Wed May 22, 2013 5:45 am

Mantisking wrote:While the terabyte of free space is nice I just upgraded to a pro account recently. So that makes that $25 semi-wasted.
If I understand correctly (and if you're interested), I believe they'll refund the balance of your payment in 7-10 days if you cancel Pro. So if you just signed up, I think what that means is that you get most, if not all of, the full amount back.

Also, for those people who've been hearing rumblings about a site called Ipernity (it came up in the feedback thread), the team there has been nice enough (and is smartly capitalizing on the Flickr debacle) to make it easy to transfer your stuff over if you still have Pro account. Here are the instructions, in case anyone's interested:

http://www.ipernity.com/apps/gm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

m19

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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by Mantisking » Wed May 22, 2013 7:53 am

Mantisking wrote:While the terabyte of free space is nice I just upgraded to a pro account recently. So that makes that $25 semi-wasted.
Morgan19 wrote:If I understand correctly (and if you're interested), I believe they'll refund the balance of your payment in 7-10 days if you cancel Pro. So if you just signed up, I think what that means is that you get most, if not all of, the full amount back.
I'm not sure if I'm going to do that. They haven't closed down Pro accounts yet, and there is the opportunity to renew, so I may keep it for the time being.
Morgan19 wrote:Also, for those people who've been hearing rumblings about a site called Ipernity (it came up in the feedback thread), the team there has been nice enough (and is smartly capitalizing on the Flickr debacle) to make it easy to transfer your stuff over if you still have Pro account. Here are the instructions, in case anyone's interested:

http://www.ipernity.com/apps/gm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

m19
I've already opened a new account with them. I've uploaded a few photos but not gone through the transfer process yet.

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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by Mantisking » Fri May 24, 2013 3:53 am


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Re: New 'responsive' page design on Flickr!

Post by skeet318 » Tue May 28, 2013 10:14 am

A month ago, I didn't even know what Flickr was. Finally sold the rock I was under.

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