Wemark Product Update — March 2019
Since launching our marketplace in late January, we’ve been making daily updates and improvements. Here’s a quick recap.
We’ve worked long hours building the marketplace and its infrastructure, releasing several versions before launching it earlier this year. Since then, we’ve received tons of valuable feedback and suggestions from customers and photographers, much of which we’ve incorporated into our latest update.
Now, when the product is live, instead of deploying one massive overhaul, our updates happen in small, daily increments. Other than many bug fixes, improvements to the general stability, and security upgrades, the recent updates include new features, improved UX, and further development of our back-office for content review and administration.
Here’s a summary of some of the updates to the product since our launch — a glimpse into the work behind the Wemark platform.
Search experience
99% of the customer experience is finding the right image. A powerful search engine is key to help customers browse through relevant and high-quality images and find the image they need as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Search UX
Since customers generally browse through hundreds or thousands of images before finding the image they want, the search results’ UX becomes vital to finding what they need. To improve it, we significantly decreased the loading time of search results, making it one of the fastest the industry offers today. The improvement in performance did not degrade the thumbnails quality, which is constantly optimized and is now far better compared to earlier this year.
We’ve also changed the search results’ layout to show more images in each row. This resulted in smaller images in the gallery, enabling us to remove the watermark from the thumbnails, while still preventing most uses of the images without licensing them and getting access to the full-resolution files. Also, the order of which images are displayed at search was modified to diverse the search results instead of showing too many similar images next to each other.
This improved the experience majorly, and we received some incredible feedback from customers about this change.
Keywords’ Relevancy
Like other stock content platforms, we use keywords to match relevant images for every search.
Since launch, we’ve made significant upgrades to handle more types of phrases and allow users to find relevant images, even if they’re looking for something very specific.
For example, in our initial version, a search for “music festival” would retrieve images that were relevant either to Music, or Festival. This resulted with images that are relevant for some part of the user’s phrase, but irrelevant for what the user was looking for.
With the recent updates, only images that are relevant for both Music and Festival will be shown, and a higher priority is given to images with the exact keyword (“music festival”).
Automatic Keywording
The keywords for each image are generated in two ways. First, photographers in the experienced track include keywords in their images’ metadata, which is then extracted and assigned to their images. Additionally, we use AI and computer vision algorithms to automatically generate keywords for each image in the marketplace.
Thanks to integrating new services and modules, we’ve been able to significantly improve our automatic keywording capabilities, removing many irrelevant keywords and adding new types of keywords, like concepts, feelings, themes, etc.
Sticky Header in Search Results
It’s common for users to try more than one keyword before choosing an image. Instead of requiring you to scroll up all the way back to change the search term, we’ve added a sticky header that allows you to start a new search instantly, at any moment.
Keyword Suggestions
When searching for images in a specific collection (Wemark Go or Wemark Impress), our auto-complete suggestions for images will now be based on images of the relevant collection, instead of all the images on the marketplace.
Creators’ experience and content review
Moderation Emails
As our content review system became much faster and streamlined, we needed to create better ways for creators to stay informed on their images review status. We’ve added a bunch of automatic emails to help creators navigate the process and get feedback on their submissions in real-time.
Automated Onboarding to Wemark’s Experienced Track and Impress Collection
Some pieces of the onboarding process for photographers to the experienced track or the Impress collection were done manually or semi-manually. It helped us personally help the first photographers until their accounts are set up with their entire portfolios. Since we started scaling this and adding new photographers constantly, we saved crucial time and resources by automating big parts of this process. This also helped us shorten the waiting times of photographers before their account is set up or upgraded.
Content Review System Upgrades
A big part of our product development isn’t visible to customers. We’re working around the clock to improve our content review management platform (backoffice), allowing us to review more images in less time. This includes several options for bulk image review (accept or reject a group of images instead of a single image at a time), tools to streamline the priority for reviewing the right images, faster ways to validate photographers’ ID, and much more.
This offers a better experience for both creators and customers — helping creators get faster feedback on their submissions while keep adding more and more images for customers to choose from.
Upcoming updates and product roadmap
While our search experience became significantly better over the last few months, we still have plenty of ways to improve it even further. One of the important features we’re currently working to build is advanced filters that will help customers refine the search results according to their needs. For example — this will allow customers to filter images with a specific orientation (vertical, square, panoramic, etc), color types, and more.
The next major milestone will be supporting credit cards payments. This will help to enable the platform to more customers, even if they have no experience with cryptocurrencies. With all the other work on the platform, the launch of credit cards payments will happen later than we originally planned, and is expected to take place during Q2 of 2019.
Lastly, we’d like to thank you — our incredible, generous community — for your continued feedback and suggestions since we launched the marketplace. It’s helped us get more focused and work on the right things, making the product better every day.
