Category: Usability and HCI

What I’d love to see from Flickr

A few comments from my good friends John Lamb1 and Kurt Werstein had me thinking about what I like about Flickr and why I keep using it when so many people have moved to Facebook, Google+, Zenfolio, 500px2 and the like.

I’ve been an enthusiast photographer for a while. According to Aperture I have taken over 26,000 photos in the past 7 years. I’ve recently started investing more time (and by association, money) into my hobby of photography with a recent camera purchase.
I’ve shared over 3,000 of my photos on Flickr. I love it and have consistently used Flickr since 2005. Recently it’s been chided as having missed the boat on things like social and mobile, but for reliably sharing images and finding other photographers (and their photos) it’s the best solution I’ve found yet.
I’m also an Aperture person, so I love the integration between the two. It makes my workflow more efficient and less frustrating than alternatives. In the past I would load the images into a folder, sort by hand to find those worth editing/sharing, load into Photoshop, edit and then export. Then, finally, upload to Flickr.
Aperture handles that all for me, even keeping the EXIF data intact including titles for my pics. Best part is that it can auto-create sets and import keywords to tags to boot!
While I’m a Flickr fan, I do admit that there are a few things that Flickr could improve in their offerings to avid and professional photographers alike. I’ve been jotting notes down for a few weeks now as I’ve thought about my relationship with Flickr. I have a few idea that I think are worth sharing.
I’ll update this article as I think of new things and hopefully as Flickr adds these features over time I’ll get to mark a few out. If you have a suggestion or an idea, please leave a comment.

Professional Views

Lightbox view on Flickr is great, but one click and you’re back to the normal Flickr. Give photographers the option to set themes for sets or collections. Great for pointing clients to review a set of photos.

Password protected sets or collections

Speaking of photographers sharing specifically with clients, let photographers share their stuff in a controlled way via passwords without requiring guests to have a Yahoo! account. Great for sharing proofs (or final edits) to a select group or individual client. I could see this being very popular for photographers shooting corporate events, weddings, birth announcements, etc. See Vimeo’s handling of password protected videos as an example.

Better monetization options

Give photographers a cut of print sales, more third-party companies to print to and allow photographers to create a ‘store front’ for select photos. Like the professional views idea above, let photographers edit a few areas to make things look professional.

Individual licensing

This is related and a fairly recent trend. Cut out the middlemen (Getty, Shutterstock, etc.) and let people (professional, semi-pro and casual) market directly to other individuals looking for photography.

Less page refreshes, more visible metadata

 

 

I’d love quicker access to common metadata – having to click and wait for a second page load sucks. I love looking at a photo at a large size and seeing what other people are doing with the same gear – or with gear I’m interested in. I love photos where I go, “Huh, how did they do that?”
Make this a modal AJAX element of the information. When I click the + next to the ‘Taken with a xx’ have some of the high level EXIF data present such as lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO and time of day.

 

 

Update: It’s not perfect (I think it should be higher on the page) but Camera Settings (EXIF) is now on the photo page!

Better mobile apps

The current Flickr mobile site and iOS app are rather lackluster. Let people upload from their smart phone to the site without the app. (iOS 6 FTW!) Allow group participation on Flickr to be as easy as Facebook or Twitter for mobile interfaces. Let me comment and share to groups with ease. I want to see notifications when people comment on a photos, add as a favorite, or reply to a comment.

Better Groups

Groups are great nodes in the big web of photographers on Flickr. They’re focus points of attention across a sea of individual photos. Give Flickr groups a shot in the arm with a more modern interface. Threaded comments, voting and collapsible navigation. Let me see past comment history from folks. Allow folks to upload more than 6 photos at a time and give me Facebook-like notifications when activity has occurred in a group. Let people like a photo directly from every embed – like you can in justified view. Use the tags, titles and set/collection names to suggest related groups that I might be interested in. Do I tag a lot of photos in Seattle? Invite me to Seattle-related groups. Are most of my photos taken at night? How about some night photography groups?

Better Stats

I’m spoiled by Google Analytics, WordPress.com and Facebook metrics. Flickr gives you some basic stats, but I’d love to see timeline views for individual photos over a range greater than the past 30 days. Let me see how different ways of publicizing my photos impacts its views over time.
Give photographers better stats on where people are coming from. A lot of my referrals are internal to Flickr. Tell me where on the site are they coming from. Are most of my views from random keyword searches, groups I participate in, people who are contacts, etc?

Find people

Help me find people with similar tags, group membership, geographic location of photos (and profile). One of the great things about Instagram is the ability to quickly find existing friends from Facebook and Twitter. (Yes, I’m aware that the Twitter contact function was removed in a recent update.) Figure out a way to plug me in to as many folks as possible. Make recommendations intelligent and unobtrusive.
This is really just a list of desired features and not a deeply substantial or cohesive strategy for moving Flickr forward. I do enough of that in my day job!
I hope these ideas give a hint of a bigger picture and some suggestions to move things forward. I know there are smart, passionate and creative people working on Flickr – people who are far more intelligent than I in figuring out what Flickr needs.
I have high hopes for those folks. There’s plenty of positive movement with Yahoo’s new CEO, the great team that continues to support Flickr and the recent news about the SVP over Flickr having a past as a National Geographic wildlife photographer. I don’t think Flickr is dying, but I do think it needs a good shot in the arm.

Semantic MediaWiki Templates and #arraymaps are Awesome

Templates are awesome.

As I’ve written about before, we use Semantic MediaWiki extensively at work. One way we use it is to handle research requests for or Solution Architecture team. We have a customer-facing form3 for all requests and the resulting page is accessible for anyone across the organization – sharing our findings beyond the original requester.

For any requests submitted, the form creates a new wiki article as a sub page of “Research”. This is done by adding an attribute of “query string=super_page=Research” to the form.

It helps us to keep things organized by denoting which pages are specific to research vs. general wiki pages.

The problem is how semantic queries display pages that have a ‘super page’ prefix. By default the query results will show the super page as part of the formatting.

Demo of a default query with no template

 

See the “Research/” prefix on every item? That’s rather redundant (and ugly), so I sought out a way to remove the ‘Research/’ prefix when displaying the results, but still provide the correct link to the sub page.

The magic is two-part. First, you need to make sure your #ask query has the attribute of “link” set to none (link=none) and “format” set to template (format=template)4. This strips out any default formatting of the results. Here’s the #ask query we’re using. Note you’ll obviously want to change the variables to fit your properties.

{{#ask: [[Category:Research]]
|?Research_Level_Requested
|?Research_Submitted_Date
|limit=15
|link=none
|format=template
|template=Research Results Template
|order=DESC
|default=No related research found. Submit a [[Research]] request?
|searchlabel=”’15 Most Recent Research Requests Loaded. View all Research?”’
}}

Then, for your template you’ll use the #arraymap function to format the output.

{{#arraymap:{{{1}}}|Research/|noSuperName|[[Research/noSuperName|noSuperName]]}} – {{{2}}} – {{{3}}}

What this does is for each result it removes the “super-page” prefix (in this case Research/) from the first property returned – the page name.

{{#arraymap:{{{1}}}|Research/|

It then replaces it with the variable noSuperName. 

|Research/|noSuperName|

Finally we actually construct a normal internal wiki hyperlink by adding “Research/” and the variable together in the proper syntax.

[[Research/NoSuperName|NoSuperName]]

The remaining variables {{{2}}} and {{{3}}} are called as normal and a break tag is added to keep each query result on its own line.

The result is something like the following screenshot.

Custom template sans-super page prefix

You will then have nicely formatted results that are easier to digest.

I hope this helps those looking to extend the semantic queries and produce clean, repeatable results. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or ideas of your own.

A Networked Mine is a Terrible Thing to Waste

I throughly enjoyed this video from Manuel Lima, senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing, (via RSA) on how a networked view of the world is better suited to explain the complex relationships between things than the past “tree” view.

I feel a little vindicated as a person who is not very “T” shaped in the sense of skills or specialty. I’m much more of a polymath – knowing a little bit about many areas of knowledge – and perhaps that’s an asset, not what I’ve worried about being a negative thing.

Must-have WordPress Plugins

Recently I was asked to consult with someone developing a website for their small business. We discussed their goals, developed requirements and at the end settled on WordPress for the content management system. As the individual was developing the site they became familiar with the feature of plugins and asked what would be some essential ones to include in their site. I sat down and put this list together and I’d like to share it with you.

In no particular order, my favorite and most useful WordPress plugins.

Advanced Blogroll – For links to other sites or other online presence (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) you create links in what’s called a blogroll (The name is a holdover from the early days of WordPress.) The default WordPress configuration displays them in alphabetical order. This plugin allows you to arrange them as you see fit. You can see how “Latest” comes before “Elsewhere” on the navigation to the right. ->

WordPress Database Backup – Lets me sleep at night. Since WordPress stores all of your pages and post content in a database, keeping a backup is a smart idea. I have this setup to email me once a week with a zip file of my database. It’s a small little email and I have Gmail set to filter it out of my inbox automatically.

Jetpack – What once was a gathering of separate plugins is now a super kung-fu collection of some great features. Two of my favorite features are the WordPress Stats and After the Deadline. The stats gives you near real-time feedback on traffic to and from your site. Popular pages, keywords and links displayed automatically in your dashboard. After the Deadline is a super grammar, style and spell checker that uses artificial intelligence to make you sound more-than artificially intelligent. That’s just two of the many features of Jetpack.

Update: I can’t recommend Jetpack highly enough. It’s continued to become the most awesome plugin for WordPress that I’ve ever used. The just recently added a CSS editor that lets you customize your site design without modifying your theme, new comment capabilities (including login using Twitter or Facebook) and Retina support for images!

Akismet – Comment spam blocking magic. Spammers target popular content management systems like WordPress in an attempt to trick site owners into allowing spammy comments. Akismet sits in the background and filters these fake comments without any interaction. According to my stats it’s blocked over 17,000 spam comments with a 99.87% accuracy over 6 years. Not too bad.

Google Analytics – Google Analytics is the most powerful web tracking tool out there. Coupled with WordPress and a good email campaign tool (like MailChimp) you can track your readership with great detail. I could spend hours just going over how useful good web metrics are!

WP Super Cache – This is just incase you suddenly get hit with a million visitors. Normally, WordPress dynamically generates each page and post, which causes a lot of requests for information in the database and all the pictures and styles in  your theme. This plugin uses a complex set of rules to create a static version of your page, making the load on the server much less. There by allowing for many more visitors at the same time.

One last recommendation is not a WordPress plugin but a web service called if this then that. ifttt allows me to glue things I do online together. For example, when I post a photo to Instagram ifttt automatically creates a new post on my site and posts the picture. It can greatly help in automating posting to a lot of other web services, which allows you to spend more time writing content and growing your business than messing with tech stuff.

I hope this helps you firm up your WordPress site and please leave a comment if you have a suggestion of your own.

Update: Two other great plugins I’ve come across since writing this list:

Admin Quick Jump – From the horse’s mouth, “Admin Quick Jump is a very simple plugin that adds a drop down list to the admin edit-post area.” Very handy for moving between posts while editing. Here’s a little screenshot showing how simple it is.

Advanced Custom Fields – This one is definitely more on the geeky side of things (if that could be possible given the topic we’re discussing) but it’s pretty amazing. This plugin allows you to create super extensible custom fields that can contain any number of things. I friend of mine showed me how he’s using it for a site with staff profiles. Each element in the profile (position, title, and other bio information) can easily be edited in a custom field and populated into a formatted template. Easy for users to manage.

Siri, With Headphones On

Today I learned that when using Siri with headphones on5 she will read back any text or email messages before they are sent.

From Apple,

“When you use earphones or a headset, Siri reads back text messages and email messages that you’ve dictated before you send them, and it reads back the subjects of reminders before you create them. This is especially helpful when you’re driving and can’t see the iPhone 4S screen.”

I wish this option was the default behavior. There have been numerous times when I’m walking between buildings or to the car and want to send a note without looking at the screen and I’m not wearing headphones.