Usability on Facebook: The People Take Charge

By Matt in Information Design, User Science, Design, Commentary, Usability

Something is happening on Facebook, but it’s not the sort of thing you’re going to read about on Techmeme. It has to do with usability; specifically, the readability of a collection of comma-separated interests in a person’s profile. Apparently some people think the lists are too close together, and because Facebook doesn’t allow the sort of customization that MySpace does, the users are bending what they can’t break.

For those unaware, one of the default applications that comes “installed” on all Facebook profiles is the “Information” application, which allows the user to list their points of contact as well as their interests, favorite books, movies, and music, and a few other mundane details. Here’s what mine looks like, for reference.

But recently, on a few of my friends’ profiles, I started to notice something different. Here, a friend has separated her massive list of interests with a single dash.

For some, a single dash isn’t enough:

So: users obviously think their interests are hard to read when smushed so close together, right? Or is it just a trend they’re following?

People gussy up their MySpace profiles for a plethora of reasons, none of which we would assume is very practical. I’m sure they’d do the same on Facebook if profiles there were customizable, but it’s interesting to see that this change is one that has to do with usability. The choice and arrangement of applications on one’s profile are one of the most customizable aspects of Facebook, but also prone to increasingly random placement as their number rises on a given profile page. Unlike the placement of applications, this dashes alteration is deliberate. Or is it? I decided to find out. I asked the two friends behind the profiles above about their choice:

Hi! I’m writing up a post for the Sakuzaku blog about something I noticed on your and a few other Facebook profiles. You separate your interests, music, TV shows, etc. with little dashes, like this: [Here I provided an example.]

I find it really interesting that you and a bunch of other people are doing this, and I wanted to ask whether you began doing it yourself or you noticed it somewhere else first? Do you remember where you first saw it, and when? Why, in your own words, do you separate them that way?

I had my replies in only a few hours. C— wrote:

Hiya! Well, actually, I was editing my profile one day and saw that it was a mite long-winded… I wanted to make it look less cluttered and easier to read. A couple of years ago, I had an even longer list of quotations, because Facebook didn’t have as much of a character limit. So, I used a separator at that point too, but it was a long row of stars (the Shift-8 kind). However, with the new character limits, I couldn’t do that anymore. Plus, the areas besides my quote wall were looking kind of cluttered too. So, the dash just seemed like the best solution. It was the first thing I came up with, after I realized I couldn’t do the stars anymore.

Note that she’d been doing it for years, and only recently switched from a row of asterisks to double-dashes because of a character limit.

Coincidentally, the other friend I asked had stopped “dashing” her profile by the time I got around to asking. K— replied:

I actually began doing that on my own when I saw that it was sort of hard to distinguish between what was in what section without a space in between just because of the amount of text I put in there. It doesn’t keep a space between sections if you press enter a few times, except for between the last section and about me. I’m really organized like that, so it was bothering me. I’m not really sure why I changed it back… I think it’s because I started deleting sections and just putting my music and my about me and then gradually added the others again over a short period of time.

Both mentioned, in their own words, that it was about usability: “I wanted to make it look less cluttered and easier to read.” “I saw that it was sort of hard to distinguish between what was in what section without a space in between just because of the amount of text I put in there.” Regardless of whether their desire to separate things visually is driven by a desire to draw more focused attention to their interests, the fact remains that they believe they’re correcting an error in Facebook’s design judgment. This is bolstered by the particularly interesting claim that they each made the decision independently. In a way, they were designing with their “users” in mind: the people consuming their profiles.

The central argument of the piece I published last year, in response to Clay Shirky’s article on A Brief Message about the iPod and MySpace, was that good design is not necessarily arrogance. But there was something else I hinted at: users care about usability, but don’t realize they do. Most people probably aren’t even familiar with the term on a daily basis, but they could probably give you examples of what it means in an applied sense, at least. Thus the popularity of the “beautiful and useful” iPod — it’s popular because it’s pretty and the easiest-to-use MP3 player on the market. They likely can’t tell you that it’s a masterpiece of usability engineering, but they can tell you that they like how it “just works.” Like the iPod, Facebook is a tool that is both usable and popular: A social network done right.

So what does it all mean? I think there are two important and intriguing things to take away from this.

The first is that once users are committed to something (or even, indeed, forced to use it for lack of alternatives), they will change what they think isn’t perfect, to the best of their ability, to adapt the thing to their own standards of usability. Ergo, iPod cases to prevent scratching, and dashes separating big lists of interests in Facebook. (If they can’t change it enough, of course, they’ll leave, if they can.) Secondly, trends in style (especially in technological contexts) inevitably include elements of usability — however unnoticeable they might be to the people participating in the trends.

Sometimes the most fascinating and telling elements of the user experience are found in the smallest of details. Do you agree? Have you seen anything else like this on the Web?

This Is Important. Do It. Now.

By Matt in User Science, Commentary, Business

We received an email from the Wall Street Journal recently as part of a campaign to encourage their subscribers to complete a survey. Everything is wrong with it, and it’s a great example of how not to solicit feedback from your customers.

See for yourself:

First, there are some obvious but minor offenses: The visual design is terrible. What’s with the bright blue text? And the light blue background on the logo? If you’re going to send HTML email, do it with style. And couldn’t they have merged our name into the form letter? But there are some more fundamental problems here which we’ll address.

Dear Newspaper,

Please pay attention to these rules of user engagement:

Be polite.

It’s a no-brainer, but people respond much better and more often when they’re addressed nicely. Being blunt and businesslike may be an efficient way to do business, but when you’re bargaining for your customers’ valuable time and giving them nothing for it, you should at least butter them up a bit.

Ask or encourage, don’t demand. “We’d appreciate it if…” or “Would you like to help us…” is much better than “Please do this.” Note that the word ‘please’ here doesn’t do anything to make the request polite — it just makes it sound even more superficial and curt, since everything else about the letter screams rudeness.

Write from my point of view.

This letter is all about what the WSJ wants, and it operates under the completely erroneous assumption that what I want corresponds with what the WSJ wants. Ha.

I, quite understandably, want my business to be successful, want to finish this last piece of code, want to respond to these emails, figure out why my USB hub isn’t working, finish writing this blog post, to get to the bank before it closes, and to make a quick dinner. I could care less what the WSJ wants. This letter is like the annoying friend who comes whining to you when they, very reasonably, get fired for being late every day and losing an important file one too many times, but who isn’t there for you when your mother dies. The WSJ is asking me to do them a favor out of the goodness of my heart, but they don’t even bother to acknowledge that there is, without a doubt, a hundred more important things of my own that I could be doing.

How could this be improved? Simple: ‘We understand that you’ve probably got more important things to do, but completing this very short survey can really help us improve our service to you.’

Offer reward.

Why should I spend ten minutes on your survey? What’s in it for me? How about $10 off my next year’s subscription? This rule is the more concrete corollary of the previous one.

If there’s no promise of anything but a “Thank You!” page waiting at the end of your survey, don’t expect heavy participation.

Sometimes, even the illusion of reward is enough — automatic entry in a drawing, for example. People know they probably won’t win your sweepstakes, just as they know the chances of winning big at a slot machine or on a lottery ticket are small, but there’s a chance, and everybody loves chances.

Don’t deadline.

Your users are busy people. Giving them a deadline and expecting them to complete your survey by then is just asking to get ignored. It sounds imperious and as if you don’t care at all about the fact that the recipient probably has many other deadlines that they consider far more important.

Of course, there does have to be a deadline — you need to cut off submissions and aggregate the data eventually. Handle it like this: First, set it more than eight days in the future (much further, in fact). Second, just don’t tell your readers when it is. There’s no need to create a false sense of urgency with brusque statements like “Please complete it by October 22nd.”

Make it quick.

Ten minutes is a long time, and exactly the sort of length that seems too long to bother with. And it’s probably not even accurate. Anything above two or three minutes is actively discouraging participation.

If your survey does take more than a few minutes, though, there’s no reason to lie. Like the deadline, just leave it out your estimated time. Better to risk people leaving in the middle of a survey than not starting it all.

Explain yourself.

Why are you conducting this survey? “To help improve The Wall Street Journal” is too vague. What about your services are you improving? Why should I care? Again, this ties in with writing from the recipient’s point of view and thinking about what’s in it for them. Just referring to your survey as an “important project” doesn’t necessarily make it one to me. You’ve got to convince people what you’re doing is important, and every bit of communication you have with your customers is a valuable opportunity — make the most of it and don’t make them regret they gave you their attention.

If all you’re doing is running an annual survey to ensure the relevancy of your advertising and there’s really nothing interesting or exciting about it, well, there better be some nice prizes.

And besides, everybody loves to talk about advertising — you might be surprised at the responses you get by allowing your users to sound off about it.

Be brief.

You can be friendly, honest, and sufficiently explanatory without being overly verbose. Leaving out details like deadlines and completion times can help. Ask nicely, offer reward, and let people do your survey on their own time, on their own terms.

The rest is results.