“User Experience (UX)” is the modern, designer way of saying, “the way a person feels about using a product, system or service”. I just thought that i’d share with you just one example of the things we worry about when presenting the whole Open Plaques service.
To begin with we displayed a single photo on the plaque page. This positively discouraged anyone who wasn’t the first person to take a photo, so we now display multiple photos per plaque.
The question then came up as to whether we should only include close-ups. The answer was gleaned from the mass of photos on Flickr – people take a mixture of “establishing shots” and “close-ups” – so we take this as natural behaviour and do the same.
When displaying a (75px by 75px) thumbnail image representing a plaque it is best to use a close-up so that you can actually see something.
rather than 
But, what about the plaque page itself? Which image has priority? There are two main alternatives:
Close-up as the main image…
Establishing shot as the main image…
So, how will we choose? At the moment, there is no mechanism to rotate the images, so to aid understanding we display the close-up first. However, if there was an easy way to rotate images then I like the idea of setting the scene with an establishing shot and then being able to drill in to see the details.
The views are very different, but it is not clear which is ‘right’. This is one that we might need to test with real users, or even try A-B testing by showing some users one view and the rest another then watching their behaviour. But what would this mythical indicative behaviour be?
Anyway, I hope that this discussion and rhetorical questions shows the efforts we go to to try to get it right.
What swings it in favour of the close-up being first – for me – is the mobile experience.
I was in Spitalfields on Friday evening and as we turned into Hanbury Street I noticed a plaque out of the corner of my eye. I said to my friend I wanted to check if we had it on Open Plaques, so we both halted and I quickly looked it up on my phone. I found something under a search of the name ‘Bud Flanagan’ but even then I had to zoom quite a bit into the photo displayed here to double-check it was in fact the same plaque, and this is a relatively close-up photograph compared to the ‘establishing shot’ examples you’ve cited.
http://openplaques.org/plaques/65
Once I’d confirmed this, we moved swiftly on to the curry house
It would have been an inconvenience to click through more pages. Granted people aren’t always in a hurry, but optimizing for mobile user experience and the limited real estate of the smartphone screen is helpful for those on the go.
People browsing at home or in less constrained circumstances can take advantage of the supplementary contextual shots and dig deeper into our data and Flickr links, but with one seventh of our website usage coming from mobile devices (in the last 3 months), and that trend being on an upward slope in the longer term, the case for the close-up being the main picture feels quite compelling.
That’s a really good point. Google Analytics says that 15% of our visits are from mobile devices.
I suspect the answer depends partly upon whether you see the plaques as commemorating buildings (the big London scheme is run by English Heritage – they’re mainly about preserving the built environment), or commemorating people/events at particular geolocations – in which case the building is less significant than the map and the plaque itself.
Personally, I think I generally find the plaque more interesting than the building…
Go with the close up of the plaque, not the building it is on.
How do you switch them around, because at the moment, if you click on the photo, it goes to the Flickr page.
I’d rather see the plaque image first on these ones, than the building
http://openplaques.org/plaques/1399 http://openplaques.org/plaques/1560