flickr gamma

Flickr have just released their ‘gamma’ update to the traditional beta site. This seems to be mostly a UI revamp – moving stuff around and adding in dropdown active menus to everything in sight. To be honest my instantaneous response was dislike – but then I’ve been a hardcore flickr user for a while now and had fallen in love with it’s clean, simple behaviors and visibility of functionality. Everything was just right.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown/list of gripes (because I can’t see much positive at the mo):

• The new interface feels more cluttered to me, even though they’ve tried to hide everything under dropdown menus. Everywhere.
• There are now dropdown menus for all the main section heads. Ick. What a predicable ‘solution’ to a problem that wasn’t even there. Can I hear you say ‘committee’? The problem with dropdown menus is that you have to know where something is before you look for it. Or go off searching to find it. Do I click on the click ‘You’ or hover to get a menu? too much choice! Observe Amazon – they use very few (1?) dropdown menus, everything you want to do is there and obvious.
• The nice light highlighting they had before seems to have been replaced by something more solid, clunky and heavier. This seems to distract from the photos whereas before they were the central focus (as they should be).
• Your home photo page has changed from a one column display of photos to two columns. This creates relationships that were not there before between random pairings of photos rather than the simple flow. Do I scan down then across, or across down back and so on.

In summary I’m not convinced this is a step forward. What was a beautifully clear and simple design now seems harder to use and more obstructive to the core goal of sharing amazing photos. Fingers crossed the ‘epsilon’ release is better and I can go back to being in love with flickr again…