MY ROLE
UX & Design Direction | UX Research Direction | Storyboards | Information Architecture

THE CHALLENGE
More than 90% of Getty Images visitors were non-buyers. The challenge was to create an experience that engaged those visitors and expanded the brand from buyers to consumers.

THE VISION
To inspire consumers to enjoy and share their passions by being the go-to source for the hottest, freshest and most visually exciting content in the world.

Getty Images was largely a B2B site optimized for buyers of stock imagery. However, less than 10% of visitors had ever purchased a license. The data told us that these visits were looking at sports and entertainment content, and about a third of this traffic was on a mobile device and about 60% found us in search engines.

Our goal was to create a proof of concept that demonstrated our assumptions and did foster a high-level of user interest beyond e-commerce. We began with gathering existing insights from data analytics to customer feedback and putting together a task force team responsible for moving the initiative forward; we conducted user surveys and created core user personas and core behaviors as a guide for developing a user-centered development plan.

User Profiles

BROWSE |     COLLECT |     SHARE

We interviewed 17 participants (6 male, 11 female) about their social media habits and their consumption of celebrity content. Interviews lasted an hour and were semi-structured so that each participant received the same questions in the same order but the interviewer used follow-up questions to clarify participant responses. We also created a consumer panel with 1503 potential participants.

Wireframes

Because more than two thirds of the traffic for non-buyers was on mobile devices, we started with the wireframes for small screens. The emphasis was creating intuitive interactions that responded to the core behaviors: easy to browse, easy to publish, easy to share. The wireframes allowed us to rapidly be able to start testing with a group of users before we did embark on visual designs.

After testing the concept of having two tabs, one for non buyers and one for buyers, with ten participants of each group, about 50% were confused about the artificial difference between the “Buy” and the “Explore” tabs. The Buy and Explore concept didn’t align with B2B users’ mental models of or their process on our site. They would use Explore to find images and then have to find those images again on the ‘Buy’ tab. They expected the Buy page to contain images that would require them to pay, beyond their current commitment and saw the Buy tab as a place to sign up for an account, not for customers who already have accounts.

Visual Design

Based on the results of the user testing, the team began working on the visual renderings with a few core principles in mind:

• It’s faster to consume content than to click. Encourage browsing. Create entry points.

• Leverage standards. Don’t reinvent patterns unless it’s necessary. E.g.: New article functionality.

• Think responsive. 78% of our visitors have screens greater than 1366 x 768.

• Ensure continuity. Users start on their desktop and move to their phone back and forth.

Our 90 day goals:

• Asset Detail Template launch across categories

• Begin testing and learning topic automation

• Carousels to showcase more content based on filtering

• Support downstream monetization

• Align to the brand (visually moving, depth and breadth)

• Provide a way for customers to purchase

Monitoring The Results & Planing for New Features

Traffic and social following consistently grew year over year. We continued to do user testing and surveys, as well as incremental improvements and A/B testing.