Design

The purpose of ShutterConnect is two-fold:

1. enables users to find and review photographers based on several criteria.
2. allows photographers to create a profile page with their business information, thereby advertising themselves to potential customers.

The website consists of three main pages:

• a homepage, from where users can search for photographers based on criteria such as location, price range or event type. The homepage also allows new users to signup, or log in if they already have accounts.
• a search results page, which displays results of a user's search query.
• a photographer’s profile page, which gives an overview of the photographer’s work. Photographers can also edit their pages.

All the pages have a top horizontal bar that allows redirection back to the homepage.

A detailed discussion of the top bar and the 3 pages follows.

Top Bar

The top bar provides consistency of look and feel across all of ShutterConnect's pages, while also increasing efficiency of navigating back to the homepage. The top bar also allows users to log in or log out in one click.

When designing, we considered using a tab bar with different tasks, such as "find a photographer" and "leave a review". However, we decided to show only the tasks that were applicable to the particular page that a user was viewing. For example, having a "leave a review" tab at the top of the search results page might be confusing to a user. We therefore decided to appeal to the simplicity heuristic.