Flickr’s photostream.

Flickr is a complex and powerful site for sharing images with your friends. For the sake of this review, I’m going to focus on the starting point most users: a person’s “photostream,” which shows their most recent uploads.

Form.

Most of Flickr’s navigation is confined to the top 150 pixels of the page.

White space is used to split the navigation into three areas.

This establishes a hierarchy for users, both architectural (stuff pertaining to my photostream is in the green box) and behavioral (the red box contains drop-down menus that expand when clicked on).

Most of Flickr’s design decisions appear to revolve around showcasing a user’s images as well as possible. The background is white, deliberately neutral for viewing photos. Caption information suffixes each image, with title, longer description, access rights, uploaded date, and a link to comment. Other than that, the pages are kept as clean as possible.

On the “medium-sized” view, 80 pixels of white space separate each image; and the sidebar (colored such a light gray that it requires effort to see on many displays) is kept about 100 pixels to the right of the widest image. This effectively and subtly forces users to focus on the content.

Photo-related navigation (a user’s sets, collections of sets, etc) is, by default, located on the right sidebar of the photostream. (One has the option to turn this off, but few do.)

Function.

When you click on the arrow of a primary navigation tab, it expands as a quasimodal, unintrusive menu. Focusing away from the menu preserves it, and clicking away from the menu contracts it.

The “You” is a link to your photostream and not a trigger to expand the menu. This risks confusing first-time users or causing errors when people click on an unintended target. On the other hand, it looks like a link, and could confuse people who expect the right behavior. Moreover, the target for opening a menu is comparatively tiny – the button itself is 15×15, and the 20×23 area of white space around it clicks to the corresponding link (“You”, etc).

Two links stand somewhat apart in the upper-right corner: “Slideshow” and “Share This”. One links to a separate page, and the other gives a quasimodal popup. Each link is appropriate to what they’re supposed to do, but the behavior is inconsistent. I might move the “Slideshow” link to a different place in the navigation.

Regardless, having “Share This” gets around the problems of access rights. You can share otherwise “private” photos to those not on Flickr, or to folks who you don’t want to show all your friends-only photos. Too few content aggregators focus on the thorny and complex issue of access rights. Many people want to keep their experiences private, or be selective concerning what to display and to whom. The only downside with Flickr is there are only two groups you can set for access: the arbitrary “friends” or “family.”

At a glance, the icon for a set looks very similar to the icon for a collection. People tend to skim pages, and these aren’t visually differentiated enough to work well.

Conclusions.

Flickr is a very well-designed site, tailored and tuned for its content and functions. Copying its features or styling would work atrociously for a site with any other purpose. That Flickr works so well despite that is a testament to its the detail and care. Only minor tweaks are needed to make the site more behaviorally consistent, and the photostream page is a good example of that.

The core feature – uploading images – is simple, but Flickr is an extremely complex site. You can add all manner of metadata to your images, and organize them with tags, sets, and collections. But this complexity gets out of the way of users who simply want to post a camera dump of yesterday’s party, or phone shots of today’s brunch. This caters to all experience levels.