Usabilitygene Blog

I just had a horrible user experience on Facebook today.  I found out that something I looked at, “Sexy People at Walmart” posted to all my friends that I watched it.  What?!?  I do not want everything I do on Facebook posted.  This is just embarrassing.

Then when I tried to remove it, I could not find it on my timeline at first.  After going through several pages looking for it,  I finally found it.  It did not look anything like my post to my friends wall.  Sorry…I wish I took a picture of the difference.  I was so focused on finding a way to remove it that when I got the chance, I did….quickly.  

This seems to be the direction Facebook is going with Timeline and the Live Stream.  This will ultimately be the usual death of Facebook.  There is no privacy on Facebook anymore.  Anything you do is now defaulted to broadcast to everyone.  Then if you try to change this setting, it is “complicated” and more trouble than it is worth.

When this frustration becomes stronger than the enjoyment, people will stop engaging.  People will become just listeners, rather than contributors.  But contributors are the foundation of Social Media. Hurting this, will ultimately destroy Facebook.  However….. Facebook most likely will be oblivious this change.  Why?  Because they will probably only be focused on subscribers like Google+. 

From a usability perspective that is based on use. I define a “ufactor” as the reasons on why one would choose to use an app. Life can always be better understood of observing use. Here is a rundown of what I believe is the usefulness of each app:

• Twitter: To share current content.
• Facebook: To connect by small talk from friends to acquaintances.
• Linkedin: To create a business links between people you know and met.
• WordPress: To create content.
• Youtube: The quickest way to learn or find out how to do anything.
• Pinterest: to share content like Facebook without having to friend someone.
• Google+: To share content and communicate to only a “Circle” of people.
• Delicious: to organize and tag bookmarks you find on the web.
• Wikipedia: Your modern day encyclopedia at any moment.
• Google search: the “did you mean” king. If you do not know how to spell something, Google it.
• Craigslist: You newspaper classified listing.

Ok. I don’t believe I am alone. I found several usability issues that made Google+ confusing. After hours of searching and testing I believe I finally found the answers I needed. The problem here is that no “near follower” is going to use Google+ until these things are made clearer:

• What happens on the backend of a Circle communication? It is easy to create a circle, but what do other see when I add them?

Google did a good job of communicating the frontend of Google+ by helping everyone understand Circles. However, they are doing a horrible job communicating on the other end get when they are added to a Circle. Do they get a message by email? Text? What happens if they do not use Google+? I had to call-up a friend, “with the old social technology called a phone,” and went through the motions with her to understand what other see. Then these 3 concepts understanding came to me:

Circles are only for you to disseminate content. You control how much content hit your stream by adjusting your volume of each circle like this:

What the other person gets is information added to there stream. As you know, when you post something to a circle, it will only showup in the stream of those people that is within your circle. When you add a person to a circle, they have no idea what the name of the circle is. They could have just been added to a circle called “Crazy People” for all they know. All they will see is that a post has been made on their main stream. If the person you added to the circle does not have a Google+ account, they will be sent an email instead of it being posted to there Google+ account stream.

• Spark missing? Replaced with search….ok. How do you share a circle?

Yes. Google Sparks are gone. Google did it again. They are good at explaining something new, but horrible on explaining things that has been removed or changed. Sparks seems to be replaced with a search saving feature when you do a Google+ search. When you use the search box on the top of the page, you can choose to save it. This causes the search term to show-up in the same area where sparks were located. This transition to this method was horrible. You can STILL find many instructions online about using Sparks. I had to go through several comments to find out what happened to them. If you know where the Official notice was for this please add a comment of it’s location.

• Sharing a circle? I could?

One thing what I thought Sparks help with was to publicly to share Circle. If I wanted a Circle to know they are part of a group, I would create a Spark. Nope. This too has changed. You now share a Circle. I found this video to show how it is done here:

This is poor usability on how features are added and changed. It causes the “near followers” to die off, and the rest that world to hesitate to follow because of the confusion. People do want to use Google+. It is a great idea. Nevertheless, trust is being damaged by the confusion of changes. I shouldn’t have to dig around to find out this information. It is a step that people won’t tolerate with a Freemium app. This stuff only makes things unusable and frustrates the user at the most critical engagement time of an app. Well, I hope my research will reduce your frustration as it has for me.