Respecting your content. At its fullest form.
Respect.
What does it mean to respect users’ content? What does it mean to be the best home for your most important memories — photos of a newborn baby, videos of their first steps, and songs that make them laugh (or cry)? There are various ways to respect users’ content. These include protecting data from data corruption and representing data in the most respectful way possible.
Imagine this. You manage to convince your friends to go out for a nice picnic at the park. Everyone is having a blast, many photos are taken, many videos are recorded. Cheers!
Upon returning home, you plug your camera to a computer, import the photos in your favorite photo app, and you’re presented with this:
People’s faces are cropped. Others are out of frame. You’re pretty certain you’re a much better photographer than that. Those are not your photos, damn it! What is happening?!
These thumbnails are merely proxies for the photos you took. In design lingo, they’re affordances to access photos. In other words, they’re buttons. On the other side, they have a fixed number of photos per row along with a fixed height. You might be thinking: why do they look like checker boards? Answer: because the layout’s easier to engineer. But designers are not here to make engineers’ lives easier, are they?
At Upthere, we hold respect for users’ content as a top value and priority, regardless of difficulty. We take on these challenges to make your life easier. That’s why if you imported those photos in Upthere, you’d be greeted by this instead:
Now, you can finally consume your content at its fullest — as it was meant to be. Literally. No more fragmented images. No more faceless friends. Easily recall those memories without needing to click on every photo to uncover that face or to see that cute cat on the corner. Remember that portrait or landscape photo in its entirety. With a high resolution screen, you don’t need to click on the individual photos anymore to relive each moment. We truly believe that small decisions like these will generate a large impact — because it’s about fully respecting your content and representing your content as you, the user, would expect.
We also try to respect your files as best as we can. For instance, if you added a couple of PDF files along with a couple of songs, most cloud interfaces would show you this:
These files appear identical regardless of the file’s format. There’s hardly any thought put into how the file’s consumed. In Upthere, you’d see this:
The photo is meant to be consumed with your eyes, hence the emphasis on its visual element. If you prefer, you may simply click on the picture to access all the photo’s metadata, including the filename. No data is lost. As with the song — because the file type rarely comes to mind — we shed light on the music artist, album, and track name: the things that are most important to you. Tapping on the song will start playback because this is how you consume music.
The more we think about cloud storage, the more value we place in every single detail adjusted to best honor our users’ content at its fullest form. At Upthere, we pride ourselves in having an interface that focuses on your content and respects your most precious memories.
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Laurent Baumann
Design Lead
