🚢 Product Update: photo peeking, browsing history, & designing the feed

Our July Week 3 product update that we share internally with the Crew team, keeping them up to date on the product changes to Unsplash over the past week.

Photo peeking & browser history 👀

Or as Annie Spratt so eloquently put it: The Click Big Click Small Thing™.

You can now jump into and out of a photo really easily, going from a small grid view photo to the full screen, full resolution photo. It stores the state properly, so you can use back and forward buttons in the browser and share the links.

Go try it out on the website — it’s a fun way to browse collections and feeds, and a huge improvement over the previous view.

Peeking. We think Tim would be proud.

This goes back to a problem we’ve been wanting to solve for a long time: making it possible to browse the feed, scroll a few pages down, click a link, and then get back to your position in the feed.

It sounds simple, but it’s anything but simple. Most sites, even the big ones like Facebook and Instagram don’t always do it properly.

This was the problem that originally brought us to our overhaul of the frontend to React: we knew that doing this without a framework would be hacky and highly error prone. And we knew that with the core experience of Unsplash being centered around the photo feeds, we had to find a good way to do it.

Huge props to Naoufal Kadhom for getting it out the door quickly and adding that sexy scaling animation 🔥

Feed ⛰

From Kirill Zakharov, who’s been designing the next big changes, among them the feed:

We’ve been thinking a lot about the future of Unsplash and where it should head. The Feed / Homepage is where most of the action happens — and we want to keep it that way. However, we’re experiencing a big disconnect between the “curated” photos and thousands of other photos that are in the “new” feed (that other secret Unsplash feed). This probably sounds confusing just reading about it, right?

The goal of the new direction is to merge the two feeds into a seamless experience — for both casual and power users.

Most power users return to the site and skip right to the `New` section since they want to see all the other photos that have been to the site. Casual users on the other hand are just here to see the very best of Unsplash — most of them aren’t even aware of the New section. At the same time, we’d like them to give them the option to discover beyond the current “10 photos every 10 days” that the site is known for. Solution? Algorithmic unified feed.

Mockup of the starting direction for the feed — notably the changes to the navigation.

Based on certain criteria and metrics, we’ll be studying our users and feed them the best photos. As a power / registered user, you’ll definitely be seeing more. The more active you are, the more photos you’ll see. If you’re here every day refreshing the site, we’ll try to give you what you want — while keeping the quality up. If you visit the site every 10 days, we’ll give you the best of Unsplash and more — with the end goal of making you join the Unsplash family.

If you’re really into it and want to see absolutely every new photo by certain photographers, then you’ll be able to follow them and track their Unsplash activity. I’ll save that for another update.

Other things: Tim started the Unsplash dashboard in Periscope, similar to Crew’s; added total photos count to the stats endpoint.