Back in the 1850’s, if you wanted to upload an image from your computer to a website, you would have to click on 5 different buttons, 3 of which were redundant.
Uploading an image was an entire user journey and might have looked like this …: click on the “Choose File” button, which opened some kind of “file picker” … then you would click on the image you wanted so that the filename would populate in the file picker … then you would click on “Open” to actually select that image file … and then you would have to click on another button called “Upload” to upload the image.
If you were really unlucky (or if you’re using the unusable so-called “software development project management” tool currently owned by IBM whose name I have successfully removed from my working memory after a year of wasting my time trying to help a company who asked for my help but didn’t want to do any of the important things that I suggested — a tool which costs more than Jira bion), the uploaded image would not automatically preserve its own aspect ratio, and you would have to manually resize the aspect ratio of each image that you uploaded. Was it 2025 or was it the 1850s? You tell me.
Today, if a user is uploading an image to a website/application/app (server), then it goes without saying that the selected image should automatically be uploaded if it has been selected. No extra clicks please.
Expected Behavior
So, as soon as the user selects the image (which itself may require 2 clicks or taps), the image should automatically be uploaded to the application. Basic premise: As a user performing a single, straightforward, repeated task such as uploading a file from my device or computer, I do not want to do extra unnecessary steps.
User Story
As a user uploading an image, I would like to select the image by clicking (or dragging & dropping) and confirming my selection, which will trigger the image to automatically be sent to the server, without requiring another confirmation click from me.
The same applies to multi-image select (where multiple images are selected): after I select the images and confirm my selection, those images should automatically be uploaded to the server, without requiring any additional confirmation from me.
User Flow Considerations
User needs a way to cancel or change their mind after the image has been uploaded.
May Be Related To
This may be related to Upload of Video (should link to a separate card for that, but can’t do that properly with this WordPress portfolio site … but can do that easily and intuitively in Jira).
Notes (Not Important)
One consideration for the supporters of the many-step approach is “what if the user selected the wrong image and changes their mind and wants to select another image for uploading?”.
The answer to that is: It doesn’t matter — just let them re-upload the correct the correct image if they got it wrong.
Also, most of the old tech that wants you to multi-click doesn’t even actually display the selected image anyway — it just shows a text string for the filepath — making it less likely that the user would suddenly think “oh I selected the wrong image, let me change that before I make the server do the extra work of doing an extra upload”.