The importance of good design in social media
I was teaching a class on social media last night and one of the frustrations that both my students and I expressed was the clunkiness of the interface that’s designed for Facebook. I’ve never really liked Facebook’s user interface or design, because they make it needlessly harder than it should be to find a lot of features or do certain activities.
As I watch different sites such as Facebook and Linkedin go through user interface facelifts, what I find myself wondering is how much the different sites try to think of good design protocol. To give Linkedin credit, it’s much easier to navigate than Facebook, and they’ve taken the best parts of Facebook and incorporated that into their design. But it seems to me that often what is missing is consideration of the people who have very little experience with technology.
When I hear that someone has spent a few months on Facebook and felt frustrated by the interface and as a consequence ends up spending less time on the site, and then hear other people express similar sentiments, it tells me that the design aesthetic is focused less on making the interface accessible and organic, and more on treating the interface as stereotypical technology, which is to say technology that is hard to learn and figure out.
These kind of issues may seem to be silly, but are they really? I’ve argued before that first and foremost social media is social and to me this doesn’t just describe the interactions that happen on a social media site, but also the medium which enables such interactions to occur. Is social media designed to be accessible by everyone or only by the people who “get” the technology? Seems to me that some technological literacy is required, but how much does that ultimately become a way to separate the people who “get” technology from the people who don’t, and what happens to the people on the wrong side of the virtual divide? As social media becomes more integrated into life, it can leave some people out of the loop in a variety of ways from professional to personal. We aren’t there yet, but we will be eventually, and it would be good to consider how design can be made friendlier to people who may not “get” technology, but nonetheless find a need for it.
When social media customer service sucks
Carri Bugbee pointed me to this article about the suckiness of Facebook customer service, when she noted on her twitter stream recently that they had yet again complicated the User Interface (UI) by requiring users to add a plug-in in order to upload pictures. My guess in regards to the plug-in is they want to get more data, but needlessly complicating the UI in the mix just seems to create more problems and potentially gets people to leave Facebook. So why doesn’t Facebook care about what its users have to say?
My guess is they’ve gotten too big and like many other big companies they don’t think what the user has to say actually matters. It seems rather odd that its a social media company that thinks this way, if only because social media has proven that if enough customers speak out, the company will feel the pain and pressure. Than again, for that to occur, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s important to get enough people with substantial social influence to speak out, so that their followers accordingly bring the pressure to bear on the company.
At some point, the continued changes that Facebook makes to the user interface, which are done in a manner that inconveniences the user, will catch up to Facebook and more people will leave then join. It might be useful for Facebook to remember that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, and to also remember that good customer service engenders the loyalty and trust that keeps people using the site.
Realistically, customer service can’t solve or satisfy every customer, but ideally the majority of people should come away feeling that the problem was addressed in a manner that showed them the company cared. When companies don’t handle customer service responsibly, it may for the moment cause the customer to leave frustrated, but in the age of social media, it can bring the torches and pitchforks to the gates, while causing current customers to start questioning whether they will really be taken care of.
Hopefully Facebook will appreciate that and improve their customer service, especially as there business is based on the very medium that so many people are starting to use to get their voices heard by big companies who’d rather ignore them.
