Flickr

Native Flickr app sets a benchmark for beautiful design on Windows Phone 7 smartphone and tablet devices.

The world’s leading image hosting site puts Fjord in the picture

With over 5 billion images, Flickr can comfortably describe itself as ‘almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.’

So when they needed to expand their service to provide apps for Microsoft’s new phone and tablet OS, Fjord stepped up to the job of delivering service design and interaction design to establish Flickr on the Windows Phone 7 OS.

This meant we needed to supply innovation for an existing well-established high quality product, yet take into account the particular interface requirements of an entirely new smartphone platform. And if that wasn’t enough, we were also engineering the service for use on larger screen, touch-based tablet formats at the same time.

Smooth and slick interface plus seamless integration

Fjord designed an entirely new way to browse and explore photos for the Windows Phone 7 platform, on both smartphones and tablets.

Our concept work led into a final product that allows users to browse Flickr photos in stunning high resolution display, browse through photostreams, sets and more with rich touch navigation controls, share photos, upload images on the go, and to seamlessly transition from a Windows Phone 7 smartphone to a tablet and back again. Users can smoothly sync their accounts from the Windows Phone 7 to the tablet and back again.

We also storyboarded a promo video shown at CES, the world’s largest consumer technology trade fair, at which Microsoft and Flickr demoed the new app.

Collaborating for a brand new platform

The Fjord New York team was highly dedicated and stimulated throughout the ten weeks, generating new product ideas and designs to fit the platforms while working with an engaged set of clients and development partners. And the timeline was extremely tight – with the result that our team needed to complete the project within a compressed ten-week period.

Yet we were delighted to deliver a level of functionality and interface beauty for the Windows Phone 7 OS that thrilled clients and the industry alike – with journalists describing the app as ‘massively slick’.

“Fjord was the ideal partner for Flickr on this daunting project. The team worked tirelessly with us, in a highly accelerated timeframe no less, to develop a revolutionary concept for Flickr on a new mobile platform that was both intuitive and gorgeous. Most importantly, Fjord truly understood the core of what makes the Flickr experience unique, and delivered a final design that we’re proud to introduce to our users.”