This project focused on improving the image upload tools of Gallery, a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website.

Along with mentors Katrin Goetzer and Chris Kelly, Jakob Hilden did a comparative analysis and created mockups for a new image upload tool. His work is documented in Gallery’s Wiki. After having finished his own Season of Usability project, Jakob offered to mentor two more design projects related to Gallery at a design course at the University of Michigan, School of Information.

Read on for a full report of Jakob’s activies:

Project background

I was the Season of Usability student for the Gallery project during the summer of 2008. Gallery is an online photo gallery software that everyone can install on their webserver to organize and share their photos. It is a very advanced and complex software that allows you to use it for many different things, but at the same time it is often a little too difficult to do basic things. This is definitely the case with its upload interface(s), so my job over the summer was to improve the interface for people to upload photos to Gallery.

Comparative Analysis

I started out with doing an expert benchmark analysis between Gallery’s photo upload interfaces and those of popular other systems. The interfaces I looked at included Gallery’s web interface, Gallery’s upload applet, Flickr, Facebook, Zenphoto, Picasa Web Albums, and more. On each interface I performed a heuristic usability evaluation using Jakob Nielsen’s famous 10 web usability heuristics. As a result of the analysis I identified what each interface is doing really well and came up with a number of areas where Gallery could be improved. These included: access to the upload functionality, photo selection, dealing with filesize limitations, photo upload process, and metadata creation.

Interface Mockups

Based on the findings from the benchmark analysis I started creating mockups to incorporate most of the improvement ideas into one interface. Some of these improvements include:

1. minimizing distraction by having the upload interface in an overlay lightbox;
2. removing unnecessary explanatory text;
3. guiding the user through the upload process with easy to understand questions;
4. spiting the screen having the main upload interface on the left and additional/advanced options on the right;
5. hiding advanced options on first view.

In addition to the upload interface I also worked on the interface to create/edit photo metadata, since it came out that this is an important part of the upload process. Here it was especially important to focus on the most important metadata fields and integrate an easy option for batch editing of metadata.

The way I went about creating the mockups, was to start with static images and later went on to create simple interactive mockups using special rapid prototyping software.

User Input

All through this process I continuously asked the Gallery community for feedback on the mockups and tried to incorporate it wherever possible. Once I had a simple interactive prototype that I was generally happy with, I did some simple user testing. I basically showed it to people, told them to try uploading pictures, and observed where they clicked and looked. In general I did not encounter any dramatic usability breakdowns and the interface even passed the ultimate test, that my mother seemed to be capable of uploading pictures using this interface ;). I’m planning to do some more formal user testing once the prototype is a little more mature.

Future

During the yearly Gallery developer gathering, which I attended in Amsterdam this summer, the idea came up to dramatically redesign Gallery’s code and interface to make it simpler for users as well as developers to use the software. I’m very exited to be part of the Gallery community through this interesting phase and hope to play a significant role in the redesign process. Overall it is an exceptional experience to be part of the Season of Usability and the Gallery project.

This project was mentored by: