Social Network Sites (SNSs) likes Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and TikTok gain popularity in the last decade and become part of our daily lives for most of the people. SNSs is not just only use to connect with family members and friends and build the social network virtually, it also provides business an alternative way to get in touch with their business partners and consumers. There are multiple social interaction ways in SNSs: instant message, post and share multimedia contents, blog and etc. The reply mechanism embedded in the social interaction plays an important role in the success of the SNSs.
Tsai, Wu and Hung (Tsai, Wu, & Hung, 2013) conducted usability evaluation on the reply mechanism of 3 SNSs, which is Facebook, YouTube and Reddit; they suggested a new mechanism to improve the UX interface after that. In the usability evaluation, 35 participants filled in a questionnaire and it offered a 5-points Likert scale for the participants to choose on. System Usability Scale (SUS) (Jordan, Thomas, McClelland, Weerdmeester, 1996) was then used as the usability measurement of the reply mechanism. An interview to find out the good and downside of the reply mechanism also organized after the questionnaire and they recorded the comments and gathered the data in the interview session. The analysis result found Facebook has the highest SUS score and proposed a new interface of the reply mechanism to reduce the users’ confusion and solve the over- complicate reply mechanism problem in SNSs.
I find the article is particular useful to anyone who is interested in usability design as there are 2 methods used in the usability evaluation: questionnaire and interview. The questionnaire is relatively great as there are simple yet comprised both positive and negative questions (see Figure 1), which can help in requirement gathering to propose a new interface. Although the interview questions not revealed in the article, the interview result (see Figure 2) shows that they collect the useful data to design a good user interface. I would recommend you have a read on the article to begin your own journey of usability evaluation.
References
Tsai, T.-h., Wu, F.-g., & Hung, Y.-H. (2013). The Survey of Usability Evaluation in Social Network Sites’ Reply Mechanism. Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. User and Context Diversity. doi:10.1007/978–3–642–39191–0_77
Jordan, P. W., Thomas, B., McClelland, I., & Weerdmeester, B. (1996). Usability Evaluation In Industry. London: Taylor & Francis.
