We Heart It 6.0.0

There’s no shortage of social mediums with a focus on photography. Just look at Instagram, 500px, Deviantart, and many others. For people who like to express themselves through imagery, there’s also We Heart It, a network that lets you “heart” photos and share them as albums with the rest of the world.

UI flows in all directions, and it's hard to understand

For all the simplicity in its design, We Heart It is difficult to understand when you first use it. The setup process appears intuitive on the surface, but once you log on you’re presented with a GUI that doesn’t tell you anything. It’s just a tile of images with a row of tabs at the bottom that you have to tap through to see what they do. There’s almost no guide, and half of the setup process happens as you work your way through posting.

Despite featuring the proper design direction for iOS customers, the interface is not designed with the user’s workflow in mind. The setup process is confusing and fragmented, and, as a beginner, half of the time you don’t even know where you are in its UI. Also worth noting is that We Heart It introduces some unfamiliar icons that users need to commit to memory in order to remember what each button does and how it will affect the user’s timeline.

The pictures displayed in the app are big and crisp, just as the videos and GIFs, making the experience that much nicer. You can put together customizable canvases that enable you to put together collections of favorite pictures on certain topics, for instance.

Design is clean and modern and the browser is quick to load, allowing you to save, upload and post new images from the web. The fact that the search history persists from one session to another is particularly useful.

A positive community

Being clueless when you hop onto a new social network is not unheard of, but in this day and age, these companies go to great lengths to attract the user and get him / her acquainted with the service. Not We Heart It.

You’re left with no idea as you make your first post and you realize that the photo you just shared has become your background profile image for some reason. Your first post is likely without a face, as setting an avatar is not a requirement. You don’t know what the canvas is or how it appears to others. You also have collections, which is confusing.

But after toying with it for a while you start to see the value in it. It’s really just a service that lets you upload images with high hopes to inspire others and maybe even receive a little feedback. As its developers brag, We Heart It is indeed a positive community that lets people express themselves through imagery. Nothing more, nothing less. For such a simple mission, it’s really a shame that they didn’t make the mobile app more straightforward.

Portable version:

• We Heart It for Android