Human Centered Design & Engineering Blog

Jakob Nielsen photo curtesy www.useit.com

Nielsen recently revealed new research results on the usability of RSS feeds and social networking site. An interesting read; reading anything by Nielsen will keep you up-to-date on the field.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/streams-feeds.html

Streams, Walls, and Feeds: Distributing Content Through Social Networks and RSS

Summary:
Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.

“Mega IA” tackles the problem of distributing your information across multiple outside websites and Internet services. It’s no small challenge: it’s hard enough to architect your own site, but when additional sites offer wider distribution, it introduces another layer of difficulty in ensuring a good user experience.

User Research

To find out how users approach corporate postings on social networks and RSS, we conducted two rounds of research:

• Round 1 was conducted 3 years ago and focused on RSS feeds. We tested a variety of feeds with 4 different RSS readers, using two different methods:
  • Most sessions were conducted as traditional usability studies, often using an eyetracker to give us a detailed view of how people read RSS headings and blurbs.
  • We also ran several field studies, observing users in their work environments. This gave us a more naturalistic view of how people use business-oriented RSS feeds in their daily work.
• Round 2 (the new research) included 4 different social networks — Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn — and ran additional tests of RSS feeds. This round encompassed two studies:
  • Most sessions were conducted as traditional usability studies in which participants used their own RSS readers (primarily Google Reader) for the study’s RSS segment. For both social networks and RSS feeds, we asked users to sign up for messages from a few pre-determined companies and organizations during the 2 weeks prior to their session. We also asked users to sign up for new companies during the test so we could observe their behavior in the moment of “following” somebody new. These lab studies gave us detailed insights into participants’ browsing and reading behaviors while accessing corporate messages.
  • We also conducted diary studies in which users recorded and commented on their experiences with corporate messaging over a 4-week period using their existing social networks and RSS feed readers. This approach let us examine longer-term usage patterns.

Read the whole article.