Ink Interview: George Oates

Daily Ink

Stored in: Interviews

Posted On: October 02 2006

By: Bryan Partington

Photo © fraying

George Oates is flickr's fabulous UI designer, responsible for many of the tweaktastic improvements in the less-than-recent GAMMA update.

She just got back from Amsterdam, and I'm a bit jealous. Specifically, I'm jealous of her opportunity to first get lost, then find her way again in that beautiful city.

I had the good fortune of meeting George at a flickr meetup in San Francisco last year. Her personality is a delightful mixture of plain-spoken ebullience and friendly cursing. This drives a calculated, un-pretentious approach to design - making her the perfect person to build the interface to flickr's frothy social pressure cooker.

George graciously took time out of her überbusy schedule to answer some questions for this installment of Ink Interviews. Behold below, where she sits down to discuss the importance of getting lost, flickr's historical implications and the power of a little pink 'r'.

Flickr was super hard to search before Gamma. Now we have the immense searchy brain of Yahoo! behind the site, and things are much better :)

The navigation was a dog's breakfast, and people had a really hard time getting comfortable in the space. This isn't perfect yet, perhaps it never will be.

The Organizr was a bit mis-aligned too - the workspace was teeny and searching your photos sucked.

Flickr had been around for a while, and the time had come to consolidate it. Developing sites nimbly in small teams is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you get to do whatever feels right whenever it feels good, but on the other, the organic nature of the system you produce is, well, organic... so, perhaps lacks a little structure.

To me, Gamma meant a great opportunity to consolidate on the strength of Flickr that had emerged from a couple of years' use. That meant a consolidation of what the place means, and particularly how you might move around in it if you've just arrived. (I think once you "get it", then everything's OK, and you'll *probably* stay.)

For a few reasons... It's paramount that the photos are the main focus of the site - always has been. Keeping the layout plain, simple and somewhat predictable lends itself to ensuring the eye is on the content itself, not its container.

I think the fact that the design is consistent across also creates a sense of equality, perhaps lowering the barriers to participation by presenting all members in the same way. It also makes people's photos easier to absorb as you jump around, because you don't have to interpret anything (layout, colour, text) as you come to a new member page.

There is a lot to take in, but once you've taken a bite, I think the complexity becomes part of the fun and a reason to stick around. The trick is having people take that first nibble.

People remark to me fairly often that one of the things that helped them take that first bite was the copy around the site. From Day 1, I tried to inject a friendly human voice into it, particularly if things go wrong. "Oh! You forgot your password? Don't worry - it happens to the best of us" sort of thing.

In the Gamma redesign, I made an attempt to normalise the overall navigation of the site. On one hand, I wanted the navigation itself to give some indication of the "structure" of the place (you, contacts, groups, the universe), and at the same time, reorganise which bits went where.

I still wanted to retain that idea that you can get "lost" though. It's a very important part of the site to click around photos and people and photos and more photos until you end up looking at something you'd never expected.

If you think of Flickr as a smörgåsbord, just remember the best bits are never at the beginning - you have to explore a bit for the seafood ;)

Umm... we don't have metrics for that. Pink does rock though, and works particularly well as a highlight on a mainly grayscale palette. I guess if you measure success by imitation, we're about sixteen percent flattered about now.

Many, many things... but if I have to focus...

I love the fact that it nearly escapes itself. A system can only have so much control. The fact that the API is public also means that there's a perfect storm of external development going on that we have little control over.

I love that it's possible to sense the evolution of a person's "lifecycle" as a member on Flickr. What's that point where you dip your toe in? What is it that makes you want to show your work? When do you decide to get a new camera?

The bigger Flickr gets, the more I'm seeing it as a huge historical corpus of our lives. Particularly interesting to me is the visible history of the mundane on a massive scale - dude on couch with mates, bee up close, the back fence, my new pants, etc. I think the thing I like most is that I can see so much of the world: both from an individual's perspective and through the lovely, incidental collections that "just happen" through things like tags and time. In a way that just wasn't possible before.

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