My Experience with Fotolia
Let me just get it out there, I use stock photography. There, I said it. I realize there is a lot of negative thoughts amongst designers about stock photography, but you know what, there is a place for it. I don’t love working with them and it really is a painful process when you have to search for a picture that hasn’t been used on every other site, but there are times when you have to use them. I work with a lot of small start up businesses and I do what I can to help them look good but their budgets never allow for custom photography. So, we go off to the stock sites.
For the longest time I’ve defaulted with iStockPhoto, probably because I purchase credits that I never use up so I always go back so I don’t loose them but a couple of months ago I was approached by Fotolia, another stock site, and they gave me free access to some photos if I would try them out and let them know about my experience, so I agreed.
Just to tell a little about about Fotolia. They have been around since 2005 and so far, there are 12,278,167 images, vectors and HD videos available. One thing that I thought was interesting but I didn’t get to use was their Plug-In that instantly adds photos, videos and illustrations to PowerPoint or Word documents. I don’t want to be a sales person for them so if you want more information, head over to Wikipedia.
What I did want to share was my overall impressions with the site as far as usability. Since I am a interactive/UX designer I thought I would pay close attention to the ease of use and if it was easy to figure out for the first time user.
As far as ease of use, I was a little disappointed. There were actually a lot of steps, that weren’t obvious, to get my photo downloaded. To start off you could search for your photos and select with types you were looking for, pretty simple. You would get a list of search results back which you could scroll over to see an enlarged version of it, nothing new. You then had the option of putting the photo in a lightbox or adding it to your cart. This is where it got confusing and hard to use. If you wanted to purchase one image you would click on the image to view it. Here you could select the resolution size that you wanted. Once you select that it takes you directly to the shopping cart with your size still selected. Then you need to select a checkbox agreeing to the conditions and selecting continue. This normally wouldn’t be an issue but there is not a natural flow to what you need to do. Everything on the screen looks the same so you have to take a minute to look around and figure out what to do next. Then, assuming you have enough credits to purchase your selection, you are taken to a screen where you now have to download the photo. This screen also has the same problem that I mentioned before, you don’t know what to do. There are a couple of different links you can use to start the download but it isn’t obvious. Once you see the download links, you click it, and you finally have your image.
My overall thought, a little too difficult to use for a first-time user or even someone like me that occasionally comes to the site. I think the idea is right but the execution of it is long and hard to figure out especially if you only want to download only one image, which is usually my case. There are too many steps to get your photo and the “next” steps are hard to find. The selection was good and I could find some good shots that fit my needs, but the user experience was poor.
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