Flickr

Today I'm looking at Flickr - the photo sharing community (http://www.flickr.com)

Flickr has a very simple design that reminds me of Delicious and its GUI is easy to use and quite responsive. On the homepage, Flickr displays large links for registration to make it easier for new users to join, and presents a large search bar for people just to search for images.

Navigation links are tab and drop-down based and relatively easy to use and links highlight in characteristic boxes which gives users ample feedback.

In terms of educating users to use their site, Flickr presents a unique highlighted step approach. This can be seen in Flickr's upload tool where there are multiple steps starting from Step 1 and each step is highlighted and further described when the user gets to one.

I don't have any particular qualms about Flickr's GUI though I do believe it lacks a certain contrast in some areas with lighter text (being that Flickr's background is eggshell white).


My educational software (Introductory Astronomy - might change the name) is coming along reasonably, I'm actually looking into ways of making the content and sidebars dynamically align to areas of the screen so people can have a maximised browser window and not have the content stretch too much. This can be done with Actionscript 3 and I've got an example of it here (try changing the size of the browser window):

http://www.taraxanoid.com/flash/test.swf