11 ms·

What happened to Flickr? Marissa Mayer. She counted user experience as one of her core skills. She revamped Flickr's user experience. When she was done the site

What happened to Flickr? Marissa Mayer. She counted user experience as one of her core skills. She revamped Flickr's user experience. When she was done the site was unusable. I think she realized it, because along with releasing the new UX she compensated for its suckiness by upping free storage to 1TB. A couple of takeaways: (1) A lot of people who think they are good at UX, aren't. (2) When people in power make mistakes they rarely admit it or undoes their "improvements".

ComputerGuru 5y ago
The same thing that happened to JC Penney (Ron Johnson). Buying a big name that was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time with the right idea for the right company doesn't mean you magically get their success.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  JC Penney was on its way out, or at least in terminal decline. It did not matter who took the helm, the change to online shopping meant there was going to be consolidation as demand for in person shopping went down. Even Macys is struggling, and now they have a part of the store that sells basically non returnable junk, like a dollar store. There is typically only room for 1 or 2 retail businesses now per market segment (how much customers are willing/able to spend).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hakfoo 5y ago
    Macy's seemed to slide significantly downmarket over the last few decades. I feel like, growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a place where they weren't, it was seen as an upper-tier product, a notch below Neiman-Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue, but decidedly fancier than Penney's or Sears. Then they either went acquisition-mad, or started rebranding other stores they owned (not sure which) because a local chain became Macy's, and it never lived up to that hype. Now they're doing their own take on Kohl's Kash, which just screams "premium retail experience."
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      All a reflection of widening income/wealth gaps (but also technology consolidating many businesses). Macys used to have a purpose for middle class, but as fortunes have diverged, we are left with Nordstroms serving the 80th to 95th percentile, and then Macys and the rest fighting to retain market share of the bottom 4 quintiles that have been losing purchasing power.
    - amyjess 5y ago
      Probably an acquisition. In 2005, Macy's bought May Department Stores, which owned a large number of regional department stores. May liked letting each chain have their own identity, but Macy's just wanted everything in their business to bear the Macy's name, so after the May acquisition closed storied brands such as Marshall Field's, Foley's, and Robinsons-May disappeared off the face of the Earth.
forgotpwd16 5y ago
What's the problem with UX now compared to before?
- wott 5y ago
  It used to be well organised grid-ordered thumbnails (regularly displayed even when from different aspect ratios) on a white background that made picture stand out, with titles and descriptions as first citizens. Ipernity (http://www.ipernity.com/explore/whatshot http://www.ipernity.com/explore/whatshot) kept more or less that appearance, if you want to see). Then in 2012 or 2013, they 'modernised' it into the current one: glued pictures with almost no separation and 100% screen occupation making an irregular patchwork; no title/description if you don't hover, I guess to accommodate a growing number of people who dumped their memory card without captioning their photos, and often without sorting them.
  - jcrawfordor 5y ago
    I think this gets at an insightful issue - In Flickr's heyday, much of its userbase was professional, aspiring, and amateur photographers who were effectively power users. They viewed Flickr as something like an extension of Lightroom, so they used it for storage but also curated their public profile, lists, etc in a sort of proto-Instagram way. When Flickr repositioned post Yahoo acquisition, it felt like it was aiming for more of a Google Photos-type use-case that was very passive and "it just works", which felt very different from how it had been popular before. I think history bears out that this was a poor decision, we don't really have major players now that glue those styles of usage together like Flickr did. I think it just required a higher level of effort in both the software and the users, and once Flickr pushed away the audience that enjoyed that level of effort to try to acquire a more set-and-forget audience it lost the first and failed to appeal much to the second. I think the old core Flickr userbase often went to 500px, which I don't like as much but is closer to Flickr in the good old days.
    - forgotpwd16 5y ago
      >500px, which I don't like as much but is closer to Flickr in the good old days Hmm... Checking the 500px's homepage and profiles it has the 'modernised' points that wott mentions.
ksec 5y ago
I often think Marissa Mayer would have been great as COO. Not so much as a CEO or Product Designer. I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google. In some sense it wasn't just Marissa, it was also the board's fault.
- objektif 5y ago
  It is always the boards fault.
- geodel 5y ago
  > I often think Marissa Mayer would have been great as COO. Really? What was her operational expertise?
  - ksec 5y ago
    Sorry I wasn't clear. COO not in terms of traditional Operation and company structure. But in terms of startup /company hierarchy, as the 2nd person in charge like Tim Cook in Apple and Sheryl Sandberg in Facebook. To Quote Sheryl >“He basically explained nicely that my job was to do the things that Mark (Zuckerberg) did not want to focus on as much,” Sandberg said of the 2007 meeting that lasted several hours with the chief operating officer of Apple Inc. “That was his job with Steve (Jobs). And he explained that the job would change over time and I should be prepared for that.” Marissa shares many similar traits as Tim Cook. Although she seems to be extremely ambitious which might limit the number of CEO she is willing to serve.
- glenstein 5y ago
  >I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google. This is exactly right, and it perfectly highlights the dilemma of Yahoo that made it an unwinnable battle. "Being a media company" would have been a real answer, and a real decision that gave Yahoo a spirit and a direction, and it would have been a declaration that is really true to the soul of Yahoo. However, a media company is just a bad thing to be, and competing with Google was a losing battle. Probably one of the biggest pieces of revisionist history out there today is that the decline of Yahoo was due to personal mismanagement from Marissa Mayer, when the reality was that Yahoo was in decline and her project was to reverse an existing decline, which was an impossible task. Once that reality is acknowledged, debate will ensue that tries to split the difference about how much is column a, how much is column b, but its beside the point when you step back and realize that Yahoo had fundamental challenges that transcended the tenure of any particular CEO. I've said it before, but I think that if there were any masterstroke Yahoo could have made to revitalize the company, to accomplish what Google could not, Yahoo really could have successfully launched a social network to compete with Facebook. People had been loyal to Yahoo for decades, plus it had some superstar properties like Tumblr, Flickr and Delicious, along with what might be termed its "legacy" properties like Groups, Answers and their massive email userbase. By contrast Google didn't have anything that behaved like a true organic, living and breathing social network when it launched Plus (well, with the exception of Reader). The puzzle pieces were there.
amelius 5y ago
(3) people love to generalize ;)
dahart 5y ago
I think Flickr just never figured out what it was for. I got whiplash from their spastic business decisions. At first it was unlimited storage, and then it became paid storage. It was good for a while and I paid, and then they released the 1TB plan which made my pro plan pointless (and IIRC they promised it’d stay that way forever), so I cancelled the pro plan, and then the next year they reneged and decided to limit the number of photos and started deleting things. Back and forth and back and forth. The end result is I couldn’t rely on Flickr to keep my pictures or even tell me whether I should pay or not, and if so what for. The other major issue IMO was back when Flickr suddenly decided that “Flickr is for photos” and started actively blacklisting all artwork from search, with no clear definition of the lines between all the massive gray areas this idea opens up, like manually modified photos, digitally modified photos, photos of art, and pure art. I was using Flickr for both pure photos, and mixed photo-art, and pure art. Having a bunch of my images pulled down with very poor justification was pretty demotivating. I don’t think UI/UX is in the top 3 reasons why I stopped actively using Flickr.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ComputerGuru 5y ago

The same thing that happened to JC Penney (Ron Johnson). Buying a big name that was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time with the right idea for the right company doesn't mean you magically get their success.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
JC Penney was on its way out, or at least in terminal decline. It did not matter who took the helm, the change to online shopping meant there was going to be consolidation as demand for in person shopping went down. Even Macys is struggling, and now they have a part of the store that sells basically non returnable junk, like a dollar store. There is typically only room for 1 or 2 retail businesses now per market segment (how much customers are willing/able to spend).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hakfoo 5y ago
  Macy's seemed to slide significantly downmarket over the last few decades. I feel like, growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a place where they weren't, it was seen as an upper-tier product, a notch below Neiman-Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue, but decidedly fancier than Penney's or Sears. Then they either went acquisition-mad, or started rebranding other stores they owned (not sure which) because a local chain became Macy's, and it never lived up to that hype. Now they're doing their own take on Kohl's Kash, which just screams "premium retail experience."
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    All a reflection of widening income/wealth gaps (but also technology consolidating many businesses). Macys used to have a purpose for middle class, but as fortunes have diverged, we are left with Nordstroms serving the 80th to 95th percentile, and then Macys and the rest fighting to retain market share of the bottom 4 quintiles that have been losing purchasing power.
  - amyjess 5y ago
    Probably an acquisition. In 2005, Macy's bought May Department Stores, which owned a large number of regional department stores. May liked letting each chain have their own identity, but Macy's just wanted everything in their business to bear the Macy's name, so after the May acquisition closed storied brands such as Marshall Field's, Foley's, and Robinsons-May disappeared off the face of the Earth.

forgotpwd16 5y ago

What's the problem with UX now compared to before?

wott 5y ago
It used to be well organised grid-ordered thumbnails (regularly displayed even when from different aspect ratios) on a white background that made picture stand out, with titles and descriptions as first citizens. Ipernity (http://www.ipernity.com/explore/whatshot http://www.ipernity.com/explore/whatshot) kept more or less that appearance, if you want to see). Then in 2012 or 2013, they 'modernised' it into the current one: glued pictures with almost no separation and 100% screen occupation making an irregular patchwork; no title/description if you don't hover, I guess to accommodate a growing number of people who dumped their memory card without captioning their photos, and often without sorting them.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  I think this gets at an insightful issue - In Flickr's heyday, much of its userbase was professional, aspiring, and amateur photographers who were effectively power users. They viewed Flickr as something like an extension of Lightroom, so they used it for storage but also curated their public profile, lists, etc in a sort of proto-Instagram way. When Flickr repositioned post Yahoo acquisition, it felt like it was aiming for more of a Google Photos-type use-case that was very passive and "it just works", which felt very different from how it had been popular before. I think history bears out that this was a poor decision, we don't really have major players now that glue those styles of usage together like Flickr did. I think it just required a higher level of effort in both the software and the users, and once Flickr pushed away the audience that enjoyed that level of effort to try to acquire a more set-and-forget audience it lost the first and failed to appeal much to the second. I think the old core Flickr userbase often went to 500px, which I don't like as much but is closer to Flickr in the good old days.
  - forgotpwd16 5y ago
    >500px, which I don't like as much but is closer to Flickr in the good old days Hmm... Checking the 500px's homepage and profiles it has the 'modernised' points that wott mentions.

ksec 5y ago

I often think Marissa Mayer would have been great as COO. Not so much as a CEO or Product Designer. I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google. In some sense it wasn't just Marissa, it was also the board's fault.

objektif 5y ago
It is always the boards fault.
geodel 5y ago
> I often think Marissa Mayer would have been great as COO. Really? What was her operational expertise?
- ksec 5y ago
  Sorry I wasn't clear. COO not in terms of traditional Operation and company structure. But in terms of startup /company hierarchy, as the 2nd person in charge like Tim Cook in Apple and Sheryl Sandberg in Facebook. To Quote Sheryl >“He basically explained nicely that my job was to do the things that Mark (Zuckerberg) did not want to focus on as much,” Sandberg said of the 2007 meeting that lasted several hours with the chief operating officer of Apple Inc. “That was his job with Steve (Jobs). And he explained that the job would change over time and I should be prepared for that.” Marissa shares many similar traits as Tim Cook. Although she seems to be extremely ambitious which might limit the number of CEO she is willing to serve.
glenstein 5y ago
>I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google. This is exactly right, and it perfectly highlights the dilemma of Yahoo that made it an unwinnable battle. "Being a media company" would have been a real answer, and a real decision that gave Yahoo a spirit and a direction, and it would have been a declaration that is really true to the soul of Yahoo. However, a media company is just a bad thing to be, and competing with Google was a losing battle. Probably one of the biggest pieces of revisionist history out there today is that the decline of Yahoo was due to personal mismanagement from Marissa Mayer, when the reality was that Yahoo was in decline and her project was to reverse an existing decline, which was an impossible task. Once that reality is acknowledged, debate will ensue that tries to split the difference about how much is column a, how much is column b, but its beside the point when you step back and realize that Yahoo had fundamental challenges that transcended the tenure of any particular CEO. I've said it before, but I think that if there were any masterstroke Yahoo could have made to revitalize the company, to accomplish what Google could not, Yahoo really could have successfully launched a social network to compete with Facebook. People had been loyal to Yahoo for decades, plus it had some superstar properties like Tumblr, Flickr and Delicious, along with what might be termed its "legacy" properties like Groups, Answers and their massive email userbase. By contrast Google didn't have anything that behaved like a true organic, living and breathing social network when it launched Plus (well, with the exception of Reader). The puzzle pieces were there.

amelius 5y ago

(3) people love to generalize ;)

dahart 5y ago

I think Flickr just never figured out what it was for. I got whiplash from their spastic business decisions. At first it was unlimited storage, and then it became paid storage. It was good for a while and I paid, and then they released the 1TB plan which made my pro plan pointless (and IIRC they promised it’d stay that way forever), so I cancelled the pro plan, and then the next year they reneged and decided to limit the number of photos and started deleting things. Back and forth and back and forth. The end result is I couldn’t rely on Flickr to keep my pictures or even tell me whether I should pay or not, and if so what for. The other major issue IMO was back when Flickr suddenly decided that “Flickr is for photos” and started actively blacklisting all artwork from search, with no clear definition of the lines between all the massive gray areas this idea opens up, like manually modified photos, digitally modified photos, photos of art, and pure art. I was using Flickr for both pure photos, and mixed photo-art, and pure art. Having a bunch of my images pulled down with very poor justification was pretty demotivating. I don’t think UI/UX is in the top 3 reasons why I stopped actively using Flickr.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]