Ookaboo's Design Evolution
Paul Houle
We started Ookaboo because we weren't happy with the state of the art in
free photograph collections. Although we've improved on the accuracy of
image search, so far, we've done a poor job of organizing topics in our
browsing interface. This is a consequence of choices we've made: to
scale our process to 500,000 topics, we made no effort to organize the
topics before inserting them.
We've rolled out the first software upgrade in a series that will
improve navigation in Ookaboo. Initially we're tackling the problem of
topics that are categories, such as "City", "Car", "Person" and
"Animal". An example of a new page can be found here:
http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/topic/12219071/City
Overall, Ookaboo has a network instead of a hierarchical organization --
it's just not useful to organize a collection of very different topics
into a single hierarchy. We've discovered, however,
that about 50% of topics in Ookaboo are part of two large hierarchies:
the hierarchy of geographical subdivisions and the hierarchy of living
things -- we're filling gaps in our knowledge base so that we can build
these hierarchies into our navigation as we improve the relevance of the
network that interconnects everything else.
In prototyping our first category pages, we discovered that our photo
mosaics looked much better against black backgrounds that white. We've
been considering a shift from a white background to black for at least a
year, but the results of prototyping led us to make the jump now.