Corbis Images: News, Sports & Entertainment Integration
News Sports & Entertainment (NSE) were an integral part of Corbis’ offering but were often overlooked in favor of competitors. At the same time, the company wanted to posture as not only image providers but also storytellers. In an effort to improve awareness of the product as well as support our new direction I was asked to design an experience to encourage exploration.
When a customer searched a term that appeared in our NSE offering the new NSE panel would appear at the top of search. It included our most recent related stories to the term searched. As shown towards the bottom of the screenshot, any images from search results included in a NSE story set would appear with a newspaper icon.
On hover of the image a modal would appear with additional images. Clicking anywhere on the modal would take the user to the story.
Images that appeared in NSE story sets would display images from the story at the bottom of their modal. If the user clicked on the image they would taken to the standard product detail page. If the user clicked on any of the story set images or the link they would be taken to the story set.
If the user did not want to continue having the NSE panel displayed they could choose to minimize it. Looking back, this was a rather clunky solution and the user would have been much better served by allowing them to remove it altogether.
Selecting ‘See all’ from the story panel would take the user to this page, displaying exclusively story sets. Default sort for the page was newest to oldest to provide the breaking stories first.
The individual page included a brief write-up of the story, images and related stories. NSE images came in as close to real time as possible so they were subject to much less scrutiny than our other collections. To provide a better experience I suggested providing the “Editor’s Picks” at the top, utilizing a minimal curation process that already existed internally.
Additional Thoughts
In the end, the project was stripped down to minimal functionality. The panel was removed (for the best, I think) and the story sets were moved to appear in search results. The story sets page was canned altogether and the individual story set page was pared down quite a bit functionally. We did see some improvement to NSE traffic but not as much as was hoped. It was a good learning experience in that it provided my first opportunity to present a project to our executives.