BEING POPULAR DOESN’T MEAN BEING NORMAL

BE DIFFERENT – Image by UrbanoJ

500px’s new interface comes with a new color scheme of white and blue. These two colors are the safe and most chosen in the app market. With this move, the company shows a clear goal of getting more normal users than just photography lovers. However, the light palette actually does not fit well with a professional photography app. While light color is friendlier and more suitable to a wider market, it is annoying for viewing image. The eyes have to spend more time and effort to focus on the picture for the lack of contrast. 500px design team built the app from the ground up without the cornerstone: the app’s character. The new version stands friendly among its competitors and looks just like the bunch of them as a very regular app. The black sheep, in the fear of being known less, decided to dye white to get more attention. Oh! How irony it is! 2. SIMPLICITY IS NOT A CLEARANCE

LOST – Image by Jon Bowen

Lost (connection) is the first thing come to mind of old users. The old navigation is reduced dramatically to a few abstract icons without any text to guide users. Instead of the user-centered approach, 500px re-invents the wheel in its latest design: camera-centered approach. The camera button takes the biggest and weirdest space in the navigation bar, promises a future in which Instagram-alike photos flood 500px. 500px must have predicted smartphone cameras would surpass professional ones soon with this revolutionary transform. The view mode is rearranged as well. 500px replaces the compact category list with a new list. Each category now is separated by generous white space and represented with a big thumbnail. Thank to that, users finally can understand what kind of pictures a category, such as ‘people’ or ‘nature’, can hold. More work and brain power needed to invest in when choosing a category may be the only downside of this new view. Information which was very constructive and helpful for users to learn from each other is also chopped down cruelly to uselessness. 500px cuts off most metadata (information about the camera settings when taking a photo) to encourage its users to look at the photo and make the best guess they can about these settings. 3. NO PLACE TO HIDE

NOTHING PRIVATE – Image by mark notari