[msbarnett]

So I've spent like ten minutes clicking around the OpenPhoto site, and it seems to me that they somehow forgot to mention what it is that OpenPhoto actually does.

Like, I don't need special software to store photos on S3. I don't need special software to hand links to files on S3 out to others, or display the files on my own site in galleries I build myself.

Presumably, then OpenPhoto lets me collect said photos into galleries and hosts the gallery bits? If so, why doesn't the word gallery appear anywhere on their site? Why isn't there any way to explore the galleries that they are hosting right now? Do I have to create an account to even see them? Would people I want to share with need to? Why aren't there some screenshots of what these galleries look like? Does the absence of all of this information mean that it doesn't actually handle the gallery bits? If that's the case, what does it do?

Their website is like a case-study in what not to do. It looks great, but at no point does it clearly communicate to me what it is their product does.

[joebadmo]

I pretty much agree with you that their landing page is a bit of a mess.

Though, I probably should have given this link instead: http://openphoto.me/

My understanding is that the OpenPhoto Project is the open source project, and that site is aimed at developers. OpenPhoto.me is at least partly aimed at users. It explains it a little better.

I will also take this opportunity to plug a piece I wrote for the Atlantic tech blog that explains a bit more about OpenPhoto: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-st...

[msbarnett]

Oh that makes a lot more sense. I assumed that the original link was the user site, and wondered why there was so little content aimed at explaining the end-user experience, interesting as the dev details were.

Thanks!

[jmathai]

It's actually our second attempt at making it easy to understand WTH we're building. I guess we need to take it back to the drawing board. Out of curiosity, did you ever (even think to) click on the "Get Started" links? Our goal was that end users would click that and then click the giant red button we put on that page. Not sure it's working though :).

Basically, imagine if you could use something as awesome as Flickr but have the photos stored in your personal Dropbox account or S3 bucket.

[msbarnett]

> Basically, imagine if you could use something as awesome as Flickr but have the photos stored in your personal Dropbox account or S3 bucket.

Intellectually I had a fairly good idea that that was what was on offer, from reading through the high-level info and the REST API, but there's really nothing that spells that out in a concrete way for non-developer end-users. It's great that I can host photos on my own storage and that the code is on github and that the API is well-documented and hey it got started on Kickstarter!

But where's the beef? What do I get in a tangible way for signing up? Which leads us into...

> Out of curiosity, did you ever (even think to) click on the "Get Started" links? Our goal was that end users would click that and then click the giant red button we put on that page. Not sure it's working though :).

Yeah, I got there pretty quickly, but I didn't want to sign up until I knew what I was signing up for in a concrete sense. Freedom, Peace-of-Mind if OpenPhoto goes away, etc, are all good and noble things, but I don't want to create an account until I can see tangibles: what do the galleries look like, and how do they feel to browse around in? What kinds of customizations are available? That's the sort of information I'd expect to find in your Overview page[1], but there's almost nothing concrete to be found there. http://openphoto.me/ [2] is slightly better, once I was pointed to it, but only insofar as there are two tiny thumbnails which appear to show something of the user experience.

Flickr and 500px have sold me over the years because I could hit 'Explore' or 'Popular Photos' straight from their landing page and experience exactly what signing up would get me in terms of what the site feels like to use, what the community is like and how it functions, etc. One of my big concerns as a user of one of these sites boils down to: if I take photos of someone, and use this site to display the photos, and send links to that person, what will that person's experience be, and is that an experience I want to associate myself with?

Neither http://theopenphotoproject.org/ nor http://openphoto.me/ offer me a way to really answer that question for myself, so neither site makes me want to sign up, however nice hosting on my own back-end might sound.

[1] Incidentally, "3) RELAX, ORGANIZE AND SHARE YOUR PHOTOS (REQUIRED)" comes off to me as a lot more ominous than its probably intended. It sounds like it requires me to share all of my photos with the internet, privacy be damned. Maybe needs a rethink of the verbiage?

[2] The combo sign-up/request an invite form seems pretty confusing. After finally deciding from squinting at the thumbnails that I might want to at least click around inside, I started to fill it out before realizing I didn't have an invite, apparently required, and abandoned any thought of going further out of discouragement. Just my opinion, but I'd probably just have a request-an-invite form, and send invitees to a different private link via email. Realizing something is closed to me 3/4ths of the way through a form can be off-putting.

All suggestions in this post come from an engineer, not a UX expert. YMMV. Check local listings for details. You have been warned.

[jmathai]

Wow, thanks for the detailed response. All extremely good points.

You're not the first person to say it needs screenshots of the product you're signing up for.

I actually agree on all points, but I'm also an engineer so I'll pass it by someone else :).

Thanks again.

[jmathai]

Yay! http://theopenphotoproject.org/screenshots