Imagine Your Reality

I used to be a technical writer and one of my roles as a tech writer was to look at the design mechanics of a tool or technology and critique it for user-friendliness. What I found was that while technology works great, designers and engineers don’t always think about the component of how people will use it, and consequentially make the tool or technology harder to use than it should be.

Social media sites are no exception to that rule. Some social media sites are not well designed. MySpace, for example, with all of its commercials and the awkwardness of its design has not made it a very user friendly site. Facebook is similarly guilt of bad design. This is evident by the fact that it can take up to five clicks or more to find link to create a Facebook Fan page. This is also evident by the design of their paid for advertising which doesn’t allow you to set a budget limit. For instance if you only want to spend 100 on their advertising, Facebook won’t let you do that. They’ll let you limit the amount you spend per day, but what let you define a budget.

Design flaws like that can make you not want to spend time on social media sites. Good design doesn’t just provide  a pretty design. It presents easy and functional access to whatever you need on the site. You don’t need to click more than twice to get what you need.

Now as social media sites get more complicated it may seem unreasonable to expect good design from them, but if anything that very complexity necessitates good design. The harder it is to use a site, chances are the badder the design is. That won’t necessarily stop people from using the site, but it may eventually cause them to stop using it, especially when its no longer as popular as it was before. Part of popularity, in the end, is ease of design, and knowing when not to change the design.