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Authors: Haining ZhuAffiliations: Penn State UniversityMy Role: Project leadYear: 2017
Scenarios
Scenarios
As a student, I often get facebook notifications in the middle of the class. I want to get in touch with my friends, but often times I just get notified by other people I don’t really know, people who just happen to be on my facebook friend list and very enthusiastic about sharing everything. I know I can unfollow them, but that’s an extra step, so I am wondering is there an easier way?
The real question behind this scenario is: do I really want to see what’s going on in this person’s life, if not, then whose post was I expecting to see? Is there anybody that has the same problem as me? Is this research question even worth investigating?
Method
Method
I used qualitative research methods to uncover the current user experience, and provide insight for improvement in this study. To understand if this case is generalizable, and what other users are experiencing. I mined the readily available app reviews on google play from 10/23/2017 to 10/29/2017. After drop reviews only contain 1 or 2 words, it result in 4448 valid reviews.
I chose the app reviews because they’re free and convenient to retrieve. It can act as our first resource in gaining insight and collecting self-reported data from users about their thoughts, attitudes, problems, and understanding the trend of the problem. And many of the reviews are quite useful for software improvements.
To maximize my efficiency, I created an excel sheet to find some of the most frequently appearing words, and picked those that I was interested in and which might lead to a better product. From there I have developed my semi-structured questions for the participatory design and the interview.
User experience is dynamic, context-dependent, and subjective, and it is something individual rather than social which emerges from interacting with a product, system, service or an object. Therefore, my inclusion criteria is that participants need to be an active Facebook user. I recruited 5 participants (1 undergraduate and 4 graduate students) by using convenience sampling.
The limitations include: small sample set, sampling bias towards active users, and participants with higher education levels. Thus this study is not generalizable.
Findings
Findings
1. It’s IMPORTANT to notify me when it’s about “ME”
Although all participants mentioned that the most important function Facebook has is the ability to keep in touch with other users, such as sharing what they are doing now, and keeping them updated of what their friends are up to.
The fact is that when it comes to “keeping them updated,” they are only interested in the posts or comments that are directly liked/replied to their own comments. And they do not care about other weaker links among their friends, such as who also liked it.
Users are constantly being notified by apps. To reduce overfeeding user information, I want to understand who users care about, and whose life do user want to know about?
"In general, I have family I don’t talk to, they are not important to me at all. They are living in Pennsylvania, and we haven’t talk in 12 years. But my dad is important to me, not all my family are the same." -- P2
“I hated when Facebook notifies you that someone commented or liked something that you commented or liked. But I want to know someone commented a photo that I was tagged in.” -- P1
2. Relationship Hierarchy
Currently, Facebook categorizes relationships as "friend circle" (left), but this is inefficient, because users have families or friends they don’t talk to. So if we provide a news feed based on this generic categorization, we will easily overwhelm users.
Therefore, the importance of users’ posts depends upon the relationship, rather than which category they fall in. So I drew this relationship hierarchy (right) to indicate what users do want to see in their news feed based on relationships.
Relationships come from all parts of life (family, work, school, trip, etc), and relationships can fluctuate. For users, individuals on the top 2 layers (right) are important, and our participants expressed high interest in seeing their posts. However, only some users on the 3rd layer are important, depending on whether our participants wanted to improve their current relationships with these individuals.
“For my close friends, it’s not the content, it’s them. I just want to know what’s happening in their life. Even it’s something boring, it’s good to know. But other cases, for example, New York Times, if I come across something good, I will look at it or liked it whatever.” --P3
Future opportunity: We could to further examine the following questions: Could Facebook facilitate interpersonal relationship changes, or can I improve my real world relationship with a person by using Facebook? It's interesting to understand if it’s easier for individuals on layer 2 to move to layer 1, or layer 3 to layer 2, and what role Facebook can play in this dynamic transition.
3. Flexible and Customizable Design
It's not new that users want to have some semblance of autonomy and control over information. Simple customizable and flexible design could allow stronger self-control over information, and reduce the complexity of the current app design. It is consistent from both App reviews and findings of participatory design.
Shown on image 1, 2, 3, participants expressed wishes to have some freedom to change the tabs, and on image 3, 4, 5, they would like to have a better way of organizing people into different categories. To summarize all users input, we have made a mock-up together, and I illustrated those suggested changes on the right side.
End Notes
End Notes
This is a small but fun project I did in Nov. 2017, a few interesting research directions probably worthy of further examination emerged after this fun project, especially in the context of networking to organize social capital among independent groups to create tangible social change. I do not know if Facebook is already aware of my findings, or if they started through those long ago. But I am really glad that I did this exploratory study, I learned and thought a lot about this area of research.
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