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.
Categories: Social Media, social media behavior
Tags: good design, Social Media, Taylor Ellwood, user interface, virtual divide
Interesting perspective. I get what you are saying about the site being hard for people who are less "techy", but how do you reconcile your opinion with the fact that FB is now the first or 2nd most popular site on the Web (depending on which survey you look at)? It seems to me that if the interface was that bad, they would be losing share instead of gaining it.
First as someone who is fairly tech savvy, I find the site frustrating to use.
As for the reconciliation...that's simple.
Facebook initially started as a website for college students only, but eventually expanded, and did so with early adopters who were young. Ask older people why they get on Facebook and what you here is: "I do it because that's the main way my kids or grandkids (or both) will communicate with me."
Add in the social gaming, which can be fairly addictive and you get a lot of people on there willing to tolerate a bad interface, because it enables them to stay in touch with each other.
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