Roles: Project Manager, User Researcher, UX Designer

Status: Complete

Objective: The goal of our 5-person design team was to help Creative Commons with one main problem: Make Creative Commons search more friendly for first-time users who are confused about different licenses and encourage them to attribute, while also maintaining ease of use for power users.

Deliverables:

• Design brief
• Comparative review of other search engines
• Report with user research findings from testing low-fidelity mockups
• High-fidelity mockups of a redesigned Creative Commons search process in a web browsing format

My role: I set the strategy and timeline for the team, conducted and synthesized user interviews, and created low-fi and high-fi wireframes, including the second image below (showing attribution information for a single result)

We decided to create a mini-quiz in plain language to help first-time users better understand different licenses. The main design challenge here was making the feature visible and understandable without having it so prominent on the page that it would disturb power users who didn’t need it.

Originally, we thought users might want a flow that was similar to Google Images (where if you click into a single image, the image gets larger but you can still see other image results). However, through user testing, we found out that people actually didn’t like that flow – they preferred this pop-out image result where they could see all of the relevant information (licenses, attribution information, image size, etc).

One issue Creative Commons was facing was that despite their mission statement, users still didn’t know that they were required to attribute images. Our solution to this issue was to add a little bit of friction to the download process – when users click “Continue to Download,” a reminder to attribute pops up before they are able to actually download the image.