Flickr iPhone 3.0

I love photography and was thrilled to join the Flickr team to shape the future of digital photography. Flickr started over 10 years ago as the first major online community to store, organize, tag and share digital photos. In 2014, I had the privilege to work at Flickr as an Experience Designer and redesign their iPhone app.

The Redesign

The first version of the Flickr app was built a few years prior to this. It worked great but the design started to grow outdated. The redesign was a chance to stay relevant in the marketplace, refresh the product, grow the user base and compete with other social photo platforms.

Part of my challenge was to keep most of the core functionality so as to not disrupt our existing Flickr community of passionate people. I designed the new photo feed, photo information screen, profile, and new video recording feature.

UX Challenges —

With this redesign we wanted to keep existing features + functions and improve the experience around usability and easy access to whatever task user wants to do. How might we structure and organize the app to best enable people to find the stuff they need? This was how I framed the problem so that my goal and strategy become very clear: give users the best way to access relevant information at the right time.

The Process

I started with sketches of different flows for different features to flesh out ideas and interactions before jumping in to wireframes and high fidelity user interface and visual designs.

Photo Info

Here's a small design detail after user taps the Edit button, the pencil icon is animated in as the screen transitions in place.

Thoughtful motion and animation can help give contexts and guide users to help them achieve their goals. The small details can improve the overall experience and really make the product shines.

Explore Flickr

This prototype shows an interaction where a Search bar appears when user swipes up from the Feed screen. Once user taps it, the Search screen will show the default trending photos. I took this approach in simplifying the UI — adding the feature in without crowding the main bottom nav. This strategy worked really well since Trending photos added value to both the businesses and users.

The Results

The app redesign received positive reactions both internally and externally.
App store ratings showed improvement from 3.0 to 4.5.
Increase daily users, photo uploads and app downloads.