ZURB Helps Photobucket Make a Good Thing Even Better

There's no doubt that people need a free place to store their images online—which means that image repository Photobucket had a good thing going. But they knew things could be even better. There were still people who were starting, then abandoning the sign-up process.

Their seach mechanism would be radically improved if only they had a bit more meta data for each image. And users were clamoring for increased functionality, including the ability to build albums with collections of Photobucket images. Photobucket turned to ZURB for some advice on interaction design.

Quick Iterations Get Improvements to Customers, Stat

ZURB worked directly with Alex (Welch) and Peter (Pham), Photobucket's founders, to quickly run through iterations of improvements to the sign-up and metadata collection processes. We also quickly tried out several different ways that Photobucket users could build albums. With Alex and Peter's timely feedback, we were able to toss out bad ideas and expand on the good ones 'til we were certain we were moving in the right direction.

Messing with a Process that Signs Up 60K People a Day? Yep.

More than 60,000 (yes that's 60 thousand) people a day were joining Photobucket—so one of the first things we did was to overhaul the sign-up process. Why fix a good thing? Because we identified how a good thing could be an even better thing (and knew that we could get even more people signing up) by radically simplifying the sign up process—and after our tweaks, the number of people abandoning the sign up process dropped significantly.

Additionally, ZURB modified the site's thumbnails to increase the amount of meta data Photobucket was collecting (and then allowing to be searched on) by five times.

Alex and Peter, Meet Tom.

While it may have seemed risky to mess with a website and application that was already enjoying loads of traffic and success, Photobucket's educated decision to work with ZURB paid off...and then some.

In 2007, Alex and Peter decided to sell Photobucket. They sold the company to a little outfit called MySpace, who paid $250 million for the Photobucket website and application, including ZURB's UI improvements.