SLR Lounge
SLR Lounge is a free online resource created by photographers for photographers featuring tutorials on Lightroom, Photoshop, wedding photography, lighting and more.
Objective
In redesigning the SLR Lounge website, the main objective was to ensure that users were being served the best, most relevant photography education and news by ways of a seamless site experience. The other goals while designing and executing these website features were to help increase the amount of free account sign ups and the number of paid, Premium subscribers to the site’s streaming platform.
My Role
As SLR Lounge’s graphic designer, marketing associate, UI/UX designer, and project manager, I was responsible for assessing the goals set forth by the company partners and tasked in analyzing our user data to come up with elegant design solutions that provided not only great user experience but also keeping in line with marketing initiatives . I was in constant collaboration with our partners and organized the web team’s design sprints in such a way to ensure the most pertinent and effective website features were developed, tested, and deployed in a timely manner.
Features Designed
Logged Out Homepage
To begin fulfilling our company goals of increased free and paid accounts, we traded our original homepage, a simple newsfeed of the latest photography news, for a summary page describing what SLR Lounge is and what the site can do for the buddying photographer. We asserted one main CTA for all guests to “Join for Free” as a way to entice users into signing-up and accessing all the perks of a free account. The layout of the page is also designed to reflect a photographer’s journey to becoming a trained professional. By following the paths drawn on the page, a photographer can expect to “Learn, Practice, and Succeed" with the site being their guide.
Logged In Homepage
Once a user has logged in to the site, the following logged in page serves as a hub for users to interact with all the sections of the site. Users are able to jump right back into their most recently watched Premium tutorials, submit and participate in a Critique discussions, judge Awards submissions, be inspired by fellow featured community members, and check in on the latest photography news - all without reloading the page.
Store Page & Check Out
The Store page design was integral in efficiently presenting the available products for purchase and displaying the latest sales to pursue an increase in product purchases. The design included customizable banners at the top of the Store so that sale announcements can be changed at a moments notice and links to products are among the page’s main CTAs.
Individual Product Pages
Each of these product pages are designed to give a comprehensive overview of each course, providing the product trailer along with sample imagery of what one can learn through out the course, the full Table of Contents, and Reviews from purchasers. I also designed the page to show a purchase option for “$0 with Premium Membership” to potentially sway a user who was looking to buy a particular workshop to instead, subscribe to our Premium Membership, driving more paid user accounts and pushing us towards meeting our goals.
Check Out Process
The checkout process allows users to checkout as either a guest or a logged-in SLR Lounge member. I incorporated a progress wheel into the design of this page to help users visualize the steps left for them to navigate in order to complete their purchase.
As a way to push for additional sales, I also added a “Recommended Products” section at the bottom of the page to entice users to purchase another course that is closely related to the course(s) they are currently looking to purchase.
Purchase Confirmation
At the completion of their purchase, the confirmation page was designed to provide all purchase details in a digital and print version. I specifically sought to include a print version of the user’s purchase receipt as a way to help cater to working photographers that need physical copies of their receipts to write off their educational expenses.
The confirmation page also includes easy access to the user’s product download and streaming links to watch their latest purchase on the site’s streaming platform.
Workshop Page
The SLR Lounge Workshop page houses the library of Premium tutorials for paying subscribers. After signing-up as a Premium member, users are taken to a onboarding page that provides them clear instructions on how to access their free Premium resources, what courses are recommended for them to begin their photography journey, and direct links to connect them with the Premium community via a private Facebook Page.
Premium Workshop Onboarding Page
Workshop Library
Once users begin streaming their tutorials, they can resume wherever they left off and track their learning progress with the Workshop page’s educational Dashboard. Premium members are also able to see how much of each course have they completed via the course thumbnails’ progress bar and stats.
Awards Page
The Awards platform was created with the purpose of providing a space in which the curators at SLR Lounge could grant distinctive, reputable awards to honor excellence, creativity, and audacity in photography. The system draws on a formula for judging with the goal of removing all pretense and bias from the awards selection process by having the site’s users weigh in and score which photos should be recognized by leaders in the photography community.
Awards Scoring Lightbox
Click through the gallery to see the how the final scores are presented.
Awards Scoring Interaction on the Logged In Hub
The same interaction design applied here is also built into the larger Awards Scoring Lightbox as well as on Critique photos (see below in the next section).
Critique Page
The SLR Lounge Critique platform was revamped to support more tools to encourage more constructive critiques between photographers. Critiques could be add directly onto the image to provide pin-point suggestions to specific portions of a photo that might be lost in translation when simply trying to describe things in a general comment.
SLR Lounge Critique Page + Scoring
The full page mock below shows an updated iteration of the Critique page that includes the scoring component seen in the Awards section of the site. With the inclusion of this feature, engaging with critique photos is made even simpler for users as they can give feed back on a photo by scoring the criteria accordingly and letting the photographer know where their photo is lacking or doing well in with a quantitative number.
Magazine
The original Magazine and Article pages were redesigned to better display not only the imagery associated with each writeup but to also promote ways to drive affiliate and product revenue. I incorporated direct affiliate links into the pages as well as created dedicated spaces for SLR Lounge Featured Tutorials and free tutorials that have a CTA for users to join our Premium membership. This update also introduced a new video component to the Magazine so that videos highlighted in a certain article can be set as the thumbnail and watched directly from the Magazine.
Article Page
Profiles
The following design is a comp of the SLR Lounge user profiles at a later stage of development that includes the site’s tentative plans on incorporating their education into photography skill certifications and having each user’s completed profile as a part of a larger wedding photography directory.
The main objective for this profile is to advertise a photographer’s abilities so that they maybe hired by other photographers to work with, primarily on weddings from this initial concept. In this design, I looked to provide spaces for users to showcase how qualified they are to shoot high-end jobs. This page was designed to aptly display a user’s completion of SLR Lounge’s certified photography courses, their endorsements from other photographers, their industry awards, and their overall body of work.
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