Is it? Really? Personally I’m doubtful, but that’s the conclusion of our recent social network usability poll in which half of the respondents felt that Facebook was the easiest to use social network. We asked people ‘which social networking site do you think is the easiest to use?’ The full results were:
- Myspace – 4%
- Facebook – 50%
- Twitter – 19%
- Bebo – 1%
- Friends Reunited – 1%
- LinkedIn – 5%
- Other – 7%
- None of them are easy to use – 12%
Looking at those results, there’s clearly a correlation between the voting and the popularity of the social networks in question - no surprise really because the more you use a website the easier you will find it to use.
The difference between social networks and other websites is that the sites themselves are a pass-time, so users can (and are often happy to) learn how to use them properly. On other sites they usually wouldn’t be prepared to take the time.
I think the results might be very different if you were to have a sample of people that had never used any of these sites before, and you carried out usability testing on all the sites. Given the simplicity of Twitter’s proposition, I would expect that it’s the easiest to use for a beginner as there’s far less to learn compared to say Facebook or any other social network.
I’d be interested to hear what you make of these results…
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Darragh commented on 12 March 2010 at 11:11 am
Maybe there was some confusion between useful and ease of use.
e.g. “I just haven’t gotten my head around Twitter. And when I do it just looks for business and marketing-focused. It’s boring…”
Twitter has very limited usefulness beyond its core IM paradigm.
Kelly Moller commented on 15 March 2010 at 11:12 am
I like the research figures - especially as I prefer Linked in! Not in the majority!?
Best regards
Kelly
Ben commented on 2 April 2010 at 3:09 am
In that case, you should have been more specific, or less pedantic about the results.
“Which social networking site do you think is the easiest to use?”
For what purpose!? Twitter is rather difficult to use for private event management, and similarly rather awkward for finding photos of old girlfriends, yet for informing friends of my opinions of a local geek conference very useful.
You lumped together a variety of tools and tried to force people to compare them. Either you overestimate the relevance of your poll-taking audience, or you suck at writing polls. A shame, because usually (with a pince of salt), the articles here are very good.
This feels like it should be an apology: “sorry our last poll sucked so bad, here’s a better one”.
John commented on 4 April 2010 at 10:11 am
Find Twitter a total waste of time and agree, it’s sooo boring! Use it only for SEO purposes because I have to. How it has reached the popularity is beyond me.
Facebook is by far more interesting, you can actually have some dialogue on important issues, initiate debate and get to know people via the interaction it facilitates.
…and find it so much easier to use than Twitter, which I more often give up & pull out.
As for LinkedIn, I have given it up for now until they fix the problems.
Michelle Carvill commented on 5 April 2010 at 9:42 am
I’m a big Twitter advocate - but as Darragh mentions above - I use it for business and marketing. I think it’s moved beyond a ‘personal, social’ platform. Facebook - I find very frustrating. I’m certainly not a fan of the personal element of it - and to collaborate with relevant colleagues and groups I’ve been using http://www.bizzbug.com for about 2 years now. And comparatively in my opinion it’s marvelous - easy to use, useful and purposeful.
Recently, as part of our marketing services - we’ve been managing social media elements for clients - setting up Facebook business pages - and I have to say, Facebook is a nightmare from a usability perspective - very restraining.
LinkedIn I like - and again, get the connectivity from a business perspective. Again, wouldn’t use this for social - however, has been useful for reconnecting with business school colleagues. Setting up business pages for clients in LinkedIn though isn’t as simple as it could be. In fact most platforms out there at the moment seem to struggle between the personal and business cross over.
Karri Flatla commented on 5 April 2010 at 5:42 pm
I agree with your interpretation. Facebook is a usability nightmare! But human beings are very visual by nature and Facebook is the ultimate playground for voyeurs looking to see what their peeps are up to.
I use Twitter more often (and I suspect this is why it appears to be more populated by biz / marketing folks) because everyone is forced be succinct and it’s easier to filter out the wee bit of clutter that does exist there (Mafia wars anyone?).
Cheers,
Karri
Zandra commented on 15 June 2010 at 7:50 pm
I find this study interesting for a number of reasons. Usability in terms of social media will likely vary depending on what the user’s goal is when using that media.
In terms of just being able to navigate it and utilize built in features, I’m surprised to see that Facebook has been ranked so high. Facebook’s page features are actually incredibly difficult to use! Creating tabs on a facebook page is not intuitive at all, and frequently the available applications just don’t work. As far as user interface web design goes, only about half of facebook’s features and functionality are accessible to the average user without additional research and effort.