Dribbble Follow Feature

You know what bums me out? Really good designers that don’t have a big audience. I don’t have a bajillion followers but I was lucky that I was on Dribbble early. It used to be that you rebounded or took part in a playoff and overnight your inbox was filled with a whole treasure trove of emails from new followers and comments.

I think with the sheer number of content on Dribbble now, we’ve gotten into this swipe right mentality where we’re consuming super fast. Likes and followers are now fleeting. You make it to the popular page (neat!) and you maybe get a few new followers out of it. Not that it’s all about followers and likes, but let’s be honest — it’s totally about followers and likes (ewwww — did he just say that?!).

First off, I know that there’s that little hidden tooltip profile thumbnail when you roll over a person’s name by their avatar. But, I’ve been using Dribbble for years and have never once used it to follow someone because it’s really (IMO) not very intuitive _and_ it doesn’t give you a big enough preview of work samples.

The Idea: Make that dialog smarter and more intuitive

1. Smarter
Right now, when you scroll through the popular page and “like” someone’s work. You probably just close out and keep on scrolling. Most of us follow so many people we really don’t even know if we follow that person or not. So, what if Dribbble was smart enough to know when you’re liking someone’s work — who you don’t follow — for the first time. Why not take advantage of that moment to introduce you? Meet that special someone who just made something worthy of your heart.

2. More Intuitive
Right now there’s too much effort into diving deeper into a person’s profile. For one, it’s not near the like button, the close button is closer than the person’s name. I love the Pinterest style modals in our feeds but the last thing I want to do is click a person’s name and lose my context or, even worse, realize I already follow them (the humanity!). So, why not take those existing little “More from…” thumbnails and present them in a way that gives you enough information to determine whether said person is worthy of a follow?

Okay, this was a quick exploration / idea and was more to open up the conversation around improving follow conversions. It’s probably a little too complicated and might suck on mobile. I am sure the folks at @Dribbble have way cooler ideas and way more insight. So, for that, I apologize for the unsolicited complaining. I love Dribbble and probably couldn’t have gone freelance without it.

Oh, and this idea was sparked when I was looking at a popular shot by @DallasBarnes and I used his stuff in this animation. And, really, he has a good following so maybe not the best example but hey — Go follow that guy!