Pixabay UX case study
Scrutinizing viable solutions to solve quandaries within Pixabay’s user experience while navigating through the website interface. The following case study outlines the process, ideation, and suggested design concept.
User experience is ever important right now. In the age of internet, with numerous choices at the tip of your fingertips, you remember only the ones that make you feel something and give you a lasting experience. This user experience is designed and altered according to the needs of the most active group of users that the website attracts. User Experience therefore, often needs meticulous planning in terms of the process, ideation, and suggested design concept. This UX case study outlines the following whilst studying the website Pixabay.
This project is a part of the user experience module, during the third year of design school.
Project Brief
Our brief was to provide Pixabay with recommendations and suggestions on how they could improve the overall UX of their current website and create a positive user journey that aligns not only with their clientele base, but also attracts more users, strengthening their market strategy.
Some of the challenges were:
a. Define missing UX fundamentals
b. Correct existing UX issues
c. Create a scalable system
d. Continue to build out new features
About Pixabay
Pixabay.com is an international, copyleft, and free-to-use website for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, film footage, and music. You do not have to give credits to the original artist. You can use it free of charge for every legal purpose. You do not have to provide backlinks to Pixabay. Pixabay also enables passive income for the authors.
1.One-Stop Website
From Music, footage, graphics to images, pixabay offers an astounding library of premium quality resources to their users.
2. Free for use, for everybody
You can use it free of charge for every legal purpose without giving any credits to the original artist. Large library of free resources for commercial/non-commercial use.
3. Community Driven
Pixabay not only provides free resources, but it also encourages conversations amongst creators and clients in terms of mutual benefits.
Research Synthesis
Stakeholder Analysis & Users groups
“An individual, group, or organization, who may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project. The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. Therefore, you must understand interact and design keeping you primary stakeholders in mind. “
· Creatives — Freelance designers, designers in house, students, sound designers, photographers, videographers, content creators, bloggers.
· Non — creatives — students, working professionals.
· Advertisers — People looking to advertise.
Based on the above categories of stakeholders, we further developed a few user profiles.
One of the examples of a user profile:
Lalitha is a twenty one year old student, studying design. Coming from an urban background, she is well equipped and introduced to technology. Being a student, she is often sometimes in a hurry to finish her assignment before deadlines and does not want to spend a lot of time searching for images. Often many times, she requires stock images for her assignments. Since she’s a student she does not have a constant flow of income and therefore requires free resources and would not prefer paying. Pixabay is a good option for her since these images are copyright free and the quality is uncompromised.
Needs and expectations from the website
· Free quality content
· Diverse content to choose from
· A creative community
· A place to express
· Side money
· Exposure
· Blogs from experts
Brand Story
The tone of the brand would be friendly, approachable, reliable. The brand will also be mature, professional. The brand would be open to all and diverse in terms of various aspects. The brand would also believe in not commercializing. It would however, give the users a chance to pay the content creators. The users can therefore choose to donate.
Cognitive Walkthrough
“The cognitive walkthrough is a usability evaluation method in which one or more evaluators work through a series of tasks and ask a set of questions from the perspective of the user.”
Takeaway from Cognitive Walkthrough
o The user flow of the website was chaotic and the visual hierarchy was not quite as clear.
User Analysis
Also, five volunteers were observed while using the website or navigating around the website to get a better idea of their comfort and experience with the website. These are some of the cognitive behaviours and patterns that were observed:
1. The first instinct of the users is to look for the search bar immediately. They tend to be very specific while navigating around the website and mostly they would shy away from exploring further. This happens for two reasons:
a. People are in a hurry and usually want to download the images and be on their way.
b. The interface is too messy and overwhelming for the user. Leading to confusion and the messy hierarchy, the users might avoid going any further.
2. Users want to know how popular the image is and how people have interacted with the image.
3. Users expressed how important categorization, tags, and curation can be while the image results are displayed.
4. Users want to know how resource A is different than resource B, C, and D. They also tend to check the creator’s profile for similar content in case they need multiple variations.
Heuristic Evaluation
The visual experience is just too much. The visual hierarchy confused us and we safely assumed it may overwhelm other users too. The home page has images since that is the main attraction for the users but these images are not curated and are displayed in a random order.
The current design state can be improved by implementing UX Design strategies that reduce the user’s cognitive load that may lead to an increase in revenue. The navigation flow could be improved for a comfortable experience.
Heuristic Insights
a. Quality is Value
Users visited the website because the content on the website was curated and the quality standards were maintained. This encouraged people to not only come back to the website, but also remember pixabay as a brand.
b. Comparisons and Reassurance
People like to compare between a range of options before deciding upon one. Pixabay offers a huge library and therefore numerous options to choose from. This increases the value provided.
c. Visual Experience
The way the aesthetics of the website are designed makes a huge impact in terms of attracting more and more users. The better designed, the more professional and approachable it looks, it becomes easy for the users to trust the source.
Set backs
· The machine learning is not strong enough to find the right images according to the keywords and tags.
· The photos are not updated on a regular basis.
· Custom images not available the Pixabay open environment has less incentive for photo.
· Owners to submit their work and therefore leads Pixabay to have fewer photos than other websites.
· Increased resolution causes high file size, lower resolution should also be available.
Site Map
Content Strategy
Research identified the importance of copy and content as a key component of a successful site.
The three core categories of online users to consider while designing would be as following:
- Skimmers want to find the information they need and get out as quickly as possible. Skimmers usually are in a hurry and do not stick around for too long, so in our case the home page is the best impression that may convince a skimmer to prod further ahead. This user group is generally what pixabay as a website attracts.
- Swimmers will go a little deeper and browse more of your site. Swimmers are usually people who have a bit of time on their hands and stick around to have a good look at the website, they are also the same group of people who sign up and browse the blog section or the community section. It is great if your website can attract attention this user group.
- Divers want to take it all in and spend time exploring. This user group generally includes the content creators, people who invest in the website, or brand loyal customers.
Delivering to the following user groups; Skimmer (Unconscious/ first time visitor) and Divers (Conscious/ Return user) would enable us to deliver a website that meets a high percentage of Pixabay’s needs.
Competitor Analysis
Unsplash
Unsplash is a website dedicated to sharing stock photography under the Unsplash license. The website claims over 207,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 17 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 2 million photos. Unsplash the interface is quite clean and the navigation is easy to follow. Unsplash is most competing with Pixabay and is getting quite popular in millennials.
Pexels
Pexels is a free stock photo and video website and app that helps designers, bloggers, and everyone who is looking for visuals to find great photos and videos that can be downloaded and used for free. Pexels has a feature section named Challenges wherein different people can participate and win cash prizes. These challenges are sponsored by different advertisers.
3. Freepik
Millions of Free Graphic Resources. Freepik mostly focuses on graphic illustrations and vector-based work. The niche is set and therefore the brand has come to be known for that.
Problem Statement
The former home page struggled with several usability issues
User feedback indicated that people found that the flow was unintuitive. There was also an opportunity to update the page to use the new design patterns and be usable on the website. There was a confusion on the resources offered by the website and the purpose of it.
Wireframe & Prototyping
Information Architecture
We used a user-centric approach to defining and testing the information architecture for the reimagined Pixabay website as we discussed above.
User testing — Conducted five user tests to understand how users interact with the website, identifying potential problems with the current navigation.
Card sort — Informed how we could re-group the current website information architecture and make it more cohesive and was key to forming the new Navigation System
Content audit — A full review of the pixabay website, with a focus on copy under all pages in About Pixabay and the Home page.
Further, we started with drawing on paper rough skeletons of the website. The hierarchy, structure of the webpage, ergonomic visuals were some of the factors that were taken into consideration while doing so. The wire-framing sets a base to work upon and build from. We felt this was one of the most defining factors that influence the way the website turns out to be.
Resolved Design Suggestions
Website Prototype - Micro Interactions
Final Conclusion
Right from hierarchy, to the site map, to designing the final prototype, it was quite insightful and really exciting to work on!
We learnt a lot since it was our first UX project. I must thank my partner Rishabh Gandhi for the work he put alongside me and all of the support from our faculty. Fin.
