90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Here’s a little walkthrough of the Linked-in user experience:

1. When you register, it encourages you to add weak links to your network.
It does this by trying to get you to add your entire address book to join your network (as shown below). I don’t know about you, but many of the people I have in my address book are “weak links” – people I only sort-of-know.

2. Even if you dont fall for the trap, people you sort-of-know will.
So you end up with a mix of strong links (close friends and colleagues) and weak links (people you have met a couple of times, or have only ever had email contact with).

3. One of your contacts requests an introduction with someone you don’t know, but one of your weak links does.
Linked-in allows your contacts to request “an introduction” with not just people on your network, but people they know. So if you’ve never met Bill Gates, but one of your weak links knows him, another of your contacts could ask you to ask your weak link to introduce them.

4. You are given two options: “forward” or “decline”
This chain of vague association would probably make you feel a little awkward at this point. If you go ahead with it, you’d could find yourself saying “I know you don’t know me that well, but this other person I don’t know that well wants me to introduce you to someone you are linked to”. What if you don’t want to do this? Is there a polite way of getting out of this situation?

Basically linked-in shows you two buttons (as above), which force you to make a choice. The problem is that this is so black and white. You are either actively helping, or you are actively blocking. In a face-to-face conversation, you might change the subject, or be non-committal - “I’ll see what I can do”. The requester might then realise you don’t feel hugely comfortable about it and drop the subject. Also, with voicemail or email, one of your options is inaction. You can postpone indefinitely. Basically, in the “real world”, there are many shades of grey, and both parties have many options to avoid socially awkward interactions.

But in the Linked-in world, their system forces you into a direct confrontation. You can end up saying to yourself “I feel awkward about forwarding, I feel awkward about declining”

5. If you ignore the email, linked-in keeps hassling you
So Linked-in now sends you a reminder email again, and again, and again. How very, very annoying.

Here’s what Linked in should do to sort this mess out:

• Don’t allow people to add their entire Outlook contact list. If they must offer this feature, they should add a step where the user is encouraged to remove the weak links. Weak links dilute your network.
• Allow users to set their chain length. I personally would only want chains of 3 (a friend asks me to introduce them to another friend). Other users might be happy with 4.
• Don’t force direct confrontations: Allow people to gracefully ignore or “sidestep” thorny requests.
• One reminder email is enough. Two is nagging. three is ridiculous.

“Using an “eating your own dog’s food” approach, the UbiComp2007 Challenge is seeking for submissions of how to implement an audience voting system to finally determine the winner of the “Best Presentation Award” [Read more here]

I’ve seen so much Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) research that looks at supporting social interaction at conferences (including my own). Why? Are conferences the best scenario for UbiComp? Well, they do seem like a good scenario. Conferences exhibit lots of interesting issues to do with providing technological support to people who are mobile, in unfamiliar territory, and hoping to learn new stuff and socialize. However, I expect the main reason it was chosen was because it was very practical. “Er, we need a social setting to investigate for our UbiComp conference… Oh I know, why don’t we choose the conference as the setting? - problem solved!”

On the positive side, it will be a great way of getting researchers to get together and genuinely experience each others’ designs, and get that serious level of enthusiasm that you can only get from hands-on activity. However, my main reservation is not the target scenario, but it’s the target user group: designing UbiComp for UbiComp researchers. It seems a bit too in-turned, like a snake eating its own tail. If you design any system for enthusiasts of that system, then you are very likely to end up with a particular, specialist style. For example, if you design a home automation system for home automation enthusiasts you end up with something a normal person would perceive to be weird and crazy.

I’m sure some really interesting stuff will come out of this conference, but I can’t help wondering about the limitations of this method. Maybe it’s OK for a new field. Eric Raymond said in The Cathedral and the Bazaar “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” So maybe it is OK to start off by designing for yourself. The risk is, though, that if you go too far down that road you might suddenly find out that after all that work, you find you’ve made something that nobody else wants to use.

People at the UbiComp conference will be, basically, quite nerdy gadget lovers. Because of their love of the subject matter, they will be probably be willing to forgo a bit of privacy and take on “odd” social behaviors for the purposes of a cool new UbiComp concept. And they are definitely going to go to some effort to use the systems deployed at the conference that might simply get ignored if deployed at a normal conference.

What do you think- should today’s UbiComp research be aimed at satisfying the needs of normal people?