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Ready for Redesign

The redesign also focused on improving the site's interaction with the user. Designed quickly under deadline pressure, Wishnie says, version 1.0 of the design didn't have a thorough strategy for how users would interact with the site. It was a series of static screens, he adds. The engineers were left to decide "what page comes after what page, and what happens when you hit this button," Wishnie says. "A lot of the issues with the initial release were that the interaction simply hadn't been designed, and we had to get it out."

In March 2001, Snapfish hired Mike Monteiro as its first creative director to lead the redesign. Monteiro, who has since left Snapfish to form Mule Design, says his goals for the redesign were to make a more pleasant user experience, increase online sharing and customer acquisition, and increase sales of multiple prints.

Monteiro says the need for a redesign so soon after the site had launched didn't surprise him. Snapfish, like many sites, had grown and added features, but no one had overseen the visual design or thought much about user interaction. The original site had a three-tabbed structure that unnecessarily separated viewing images from buying prints, Monteiro says. And new features and functions had been added in a way that wasn't cohesive, he says.

"You find out things a couple of months into a site's life that you need to adjust for," Monteiro says. "The biggest thing that we knew we had to do was make it a seamless experience."

Monteiro says he also tried to help his design team work more closely with Snapfish engineers and developers. I wanted to "get the design team to think of themselves more as problem solvers than as task finishers," he says.

In much the same way that page refreshing is disabled in some areas on the site, Monteiro says the redesign team looked for ways to hold down the load on the site and give users better interaction feedback by applying front end coding changes. For example, when an image is placed in the user's shopping cart, a yellow, dog-eared icon appears over the image to indicate the change in status. The code is simple DHTML, which toggles the visibility of the icon's layer on and off. Cart status in the screen's upper right corner also changes dynamically using JavaScript, and engineers devised a way to preload the next image in a user's album to speed viewing, all in an effort to minimize page refreshes.

"A lot of what we did was to let you know what was going on without cluttering up," Monteiro says. "The whole site needs to feel very simple and easy to use."

The Next Catch

One issue left unresolved in the redesign, Monteiro says, was how the interface might handle the management of other media types as Snapfish's typical user becomes more comfortable with video and audio. But that's not how users see the site now, Monteiro decided, so addressing it in the interface didn't serve a purpose.

Kapoor agrees that Snapfish will evolve to fit the needs of users who want to store and revisit memories in whatever form they take. "Today, it's photos, but ten years from now it'll be multimedia—however consumers are recording their memories, and telling stories about their personal lives is where we want to be involved," he says. "But we're not there yet in the market, so we don't have to worry about it."

Doug is a freelance journalist and Web producer in Austin, Texas. You can contact him at webpro@daddison.com.

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