I’m at home this weekend. As much as I love it I don’t always enjoy these visits. They are stressful and always leave me with a feeling that it wasn’t enough. I didn’t have enough time for everyone. It’s related to my frequency of visits and has parallels with social media.
During the last year I haven’t been home often enough to be able to properly catch up with people individually. As a result there are too many people I want to see in too little time and if I don’t see them it means another few months until next time. So I try to see as many people as I can. I want to. I really miss them.
The solution to the problem is to go home more often and have less long spells between visits. It worked so much better when work used to take me to my home town on a regular basis and that is what I need to get back to. However, it’s had me thinking that the same problem is inherent in a lot of social networks and services.
Infrequent visits means missing out
Social media and newsfeeds have a problem. If you don’t keep checking them you miss out. The more things you follow, or the more friends you have, the more they rely on frequent visits. Or you will miss out. The services that are out there aren’t yet fully geared for this or for infrequent visit. The result being that you don’t necessarily know what you’ve missed. Just that you have missed out. And therein lies the problem. It’s not creating a positive experience for the user. The user has been asked to be kept up to date, but instead the services are “punishing” users with a “I’m not telling. You weren’t here. It’s too late” kind of attitude.
I am of course making this a bit more dramatic than the reality. However, there is more we as designers can do to reward all users. Frequent visitors or not.
What we’re working on
Something we’re working on at byflock is designing experiences that provide an element of delight and that help you cut through the noise online in order to get to the bits that are important to you. It’s about removing frustrations from the user and empowering them rather than give them a feeling that they and how they use a service is not enough. Contrary to the physical world and my trips to Sweden, how we design social services can help the user get a positive and stress free experience despite infrequent visits and that’s what we should strive for. As for my Sweden trips they will become more frequent and there are things we can do to ensure we design for positive experience, both online and in the physical world. But that’s for another time.
Tomorrow – Day 127 | Week 18 summary
Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/herrkronen/5295692837
