UX case study developed by me

Problem : Facebook status update is confusing , as user can update status in various way including photo video, How to simplify the interaction?

Research on Facebook Power users to identify the audience and their core behaviour towards the site

Purpose: To conduct a research through the various online research channels.
Objective: To identify the behaviour pattern.
Agenda: Identifying audience through a demographic and physiographic research.
Deliverable: report

Facebook is the second most popular site in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. This site's audience tends to be users who browse from school and home they are also disproportionately women under the age of 45 who have postgraduate educations.

Here I have listed few statistical charts audited by Alexa websites. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com#

Audience Demographics for Facebook.com

Now if we can closely monitor the statistics produced be the Alexa website we can conclude the power user of face book comes from the School, following by the graduate schools, which mostly fall under 25-34 years of age group, people browsing from the school is over represented in facebook and interesting fact is among this group female audience are significantly large.

Audience breakdown by income, ethnicity, age, education, gender, children and browsing location and their browsing pattern

From the above screen it is observed that the power user of facebook is keener on the community and to show off the personality.

If I may quote John Gray the famous relationship expert from the USA from his book “Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus”, ‘Men Go to Their Caves and Women Talk’ we can surely differentiate women are more expressive than the men who just want to talk even if there is nothing to talk about. Women want to share their problems with their dear ones and seek their support and help. They often talk to the communities relating to their thoughts, ideas simply they love share, express and to show off. They long for appreciation, respect, love and care. So from the above audience demographic report we may choose to conduct interviews with the women from the different categories, and we may have one School Girl, College girl, housewife under 34 years and a working woman (who doesn’t have much time to socialize). We will also have a male graduate student and a passed out intern who can also add certain value to throw some light into it.

Survey 

Purpose: The survey asked participants to complete the questionnaire regarding their Facebook sage.
Objective: It will help us to identify the behaviour, interaction and mental models of a participant toward the status update feature.
Agenda: Identifying interaction nature of an user
Deliverable: Survey report

Participant: - 1

Q1. On average, how long do you spend on Face book per week?
ANS.

	1 - (just under) 2 hours
	1 - (just under) 2 hours
	2 - (just under) 3 hours
	3 - (just under) 4 hours
	4 hours or more

Q2. How important do you feel the ‘facebook Status Update Feature’
ANS.

	Not Important
	Important
	Very Important

Q3. How important do you feel the ‘facebook Status Update Feature’
ANS.

	Not Important
	Important
	Very Important

Rationale: If I am on the top of a hill and watching sunrise at ‘Kanchenjunga Mountain’, I will defiantly look forward to take a snap of it and update through a mobile device.

If I am socializing with a celebrity in a party I would be upload a video with it.

Q4. Do you feel uploading photos and videos with the Status updating causes confusion?
ANS.

	Yes
	No
	Not sure but I would like to state what I feel

Rationale: I would be happy if I can see a write up stating ‘attach video with the message’ or add a photo , may be iconic representation of video and photo would be good for me.

I would also recommend if a help balloon can be produced instead of a write up, so that people can avoid reading and comprehend through the visual representation.

Conclusion Many popular social networking services, such as Facebook and Twitter, enable users to write a brief status message, which is then visible to their connections on the network. For example, Facebook‟s status message can be up to 423 characters long; the prompt “What‟s on your mind?” encourages the user to fill in the status box. I have conducted a survey to explore the ways in which people use status messages to ask questions of their social networks. The findings should be interpreted in light of possible biases introduced by the demographic of the survey population.

Persona

User: Anatara the Student, Govt. College of Art, Applied Art

Background: Antara is an art student specializing in applied art. She uses a computer, but she's an artist by trade and not so computer-savvy. A computer is just another tool for getting her artefact tasks done.

Key goals: Being a designer it is extremely important for her to build a network of her own with the people from different country, different perspective. Every time she wants to update with a post, she feels she should add a thumbnail of her work associating with the text, or to upload a video of her workshop days. But she wants the people to understand the essence of her update without any confusion.

A usage scenario: At the start of everyday she would update her status with an illustration sharing with her friends, networks through the face book status update, and then she would go to the college and meet other friend. There will be interesting campus work which she sometime records through her mobile phone. That’s one of her favourite things because she felt every work has its own distinction from the process perspective and if that can be shared and further developed. On a good day she tried to upload the video she recorded through the face book. First she updates the text then added the video. Surprisingly her friends could not relate the message with video and got confused.

She realizes the pitfall immediately and wished if there is something which makes the system simplified to a further.

About the persona: The persona describes the user's goals and some of the interaction. It's not too specific in describing the actual UI because that will be created later. The goal is to understand important tasks in the UI and the user's motivations. The intention here is to understand what a specific, representative, user wants to do and what doing the task would be like.

The Design

(A note on psychological manifestations and the psychology behind Facebook and its use. 

Through a psychographic study it is observed greater use of Facebook was associated with feeling closer to and more satisfied with friends . Shy students are heavier users of Facebook reported the same levels of loneliness as their shy peers who didn't use the service so much. So adding mood may help them to manifest something which they might struggle with purely face-to-face relationships. They think that if their data had been collected over time, it would likely have shown that greater Facebook use led to reduced loneliness. Mental and emotional issues associated to and resulting from user habits they are The Curiosity Factor/ The Boredom Variable/ The Ache to Belong/ The Loneliness Phenomenon. Therefore adding mood to the status update in my design has arrived.)