Improving the User Experience of a Photo-Sharing Social Media Platform: A User Research Study of an Online Community

Abstract

YouPic.com is a photo-sharing social media platform and an online community for photographers. To keep users coming back to the platform, and to stand out from other similar photo-sharing websites, the company wanted to evaluate the user experience of their site to see what improvements could be made. The aim of this thesis is to identify any problems with the user experience of the platform, and find ideas for solutions to these problems. This was done by evaluating the usability through a heuristic evaluation, and conducting user research through a focus group, questionnaire, and looking at support errands. The final result consisted not only of a list of four named and described problem areas, but also a list of ideas for how these problems can be solved, as well as three identified strengths with the platform, and four identified areas of the user experience which could need further investigation.