Social Networks User Experience Issues - Day 0, Hand Holding & Mimicing

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Gerrit Visser on SmartMob talks about Robert Scobles keynote presentation at The NextWeb Conference where he talked about the user experience of social networks: Here is one user experience issue, friends divide and there is more on Robert Scobles blog:

“But when ICQ was launched, the experiences of people started to diverge. ICQ users with a hundred friends had a different experience than those with only two. With the new web, version 2.0, this diversion becomes more significant. Scoble proved this by showing versions of Google Reader, Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed and Upcoming, one version with only one friend and the other one with Scoble’s famous collection of friends. 1000+ on Google Reader, 500 people on Upcoming, 3000 Powncers and over 17,000 Twitter contacts. So we got to witness two extremes here, one with no activity and the other version that was flooded by updates. Those are totally different user experiences, the consequence is the friend divide.

This same problem was experienced by me when I was working on a social network platform few years back.

Day 0 (W.r.t Users)

On the day 0 of the registration what should be the user experience like?. The recommendation engine can of course recommend certain people & features, but what if user chose to skip those. If the user provided some information at the time of registration it becomes easier for the SNS provider to recommend people, content or the features. But most of the times, users do not provide any information besides the user name and email ID and it would be a disaster if the SNS provider makes all the information mandatory for the registration.

Exposing random people, content and features doesn’t help. The success of the most successful SNSs can simply be attributed to ‘Invite Friends’ module.

On a detailed profile, the known people based on profile information such as home town, work city, interests, etc all form the discovery connectors and some times they are more important than the discovery itself.

Hand-Holding

In India, where more and more people are logging on to the Internet everyday, for the first time in life they will be straight away exposed to the Social Network. I am sure more than half of the SNS population in India doesn’t know what SNS means - they know it as Orkut and Facebook that’s it. For such users, launching yet another SNS with upload photos, upload videos, find friends doesn’t mean anything. You need to properly hand hold your users, what is the next step, what you can do here and why you should do it over here. I think LinkedIn does it best in terms of hand-holding the user. I also liked MySpace Tom who was my first friend there. It can be really scary if you don’t have any friends on Social Networks or places like Twitter, it feels like a terrified kid trying to cross the bussiest highway on the planet

Mimic / Imitation Effect

On any Social Networks, users copy each other and that’s how they influence each other and do some activity more compared to other activities available on the site. Users may not understand the real use of that activity initially but discover cool tools and features through this mimicing. For example, on Orkut they scrap or write testomonials on Facebook they poke each other, write on walls or send each other applications and widgets. But if there are no such tools or the unique twist on that social network, people tend to wander and get lost. It is very important for a newbie to know what others are doing or what’s popular on the system, jump into it and discover people or content through it.

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