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I must say up front that I don’t want to make a judgement on the new facebook homepage layout. I could, but I won’t. What is infinitely more interesting to me is everyone else’s opinion (hopefully that makes me a better usability designer!).

It is fascinating to me that there is such an uproar over the new facebook design. Some of the comments I hear–”it’s too cluttered”, “it’s to confusing”, “there is too much going on”–to be honest, are complaints I have always had.

Even more confusing, are comments such as: “I can’t see what people are doing any more”, “I don’t know anyone’s status updates unless I look at their pages”. It took me a long time to understand these last set of comments and I believe that it is people that have bookmarked their profile page as their homepage and are only seeing their own posts and not their friends.

So what does all this mean? Will facebook fail? Should/could this have been avoided?

I personally see a natural evolution in a widely used Web site that is responding to pressure from competition (e.g. Twitter). I don’t think this will be the downfall of facebook. But I do think this could have been avoided. How? Better promotion of the changes, a longer transition cycle, an initial opt-in period where they could have solicited feedback.

The key take-away is that they can listen to their community, even if it is a small minority of whom are complaining, and see if they can either meet them part way, or help educate them to the benefits of the change.

That’s what I think, what do you think?

Skittles unveiled their new corporate site to much applause and some disdain by the Twitter community. Taking a cue perhaps, from agency.com, they have reduced their site to be nothing but a navigational overlay box on top of content provided by social network sites.

screen grab: skittles.com homepage on March 2, 2009

This works by making their:

• home page a Twitter search feed
• product pages, Wikipedia pages
• media pages both Flickr and YouTube feeds
• friends page a FaceBook page

Simple is best right? Maybe not.

So what is the upside for Sktittles? Well today, at least, they have generated plenty of free publicity. Going forward, they will have a lot of fresh content and perhaps some ongoing publicity.

But how about the downside? There are plenty of thoughts that pop into my head.

Perception

How will they be perceived by the social networking community or the social network sites themselves? Within several hours of launching their Flickr page was account “missing” and a “neutrality” warning was posted at the top of their Wikipedia article.

screen grab: the article notice that appears at the top of Wikipedia's Skittles page.

Skittles is “borrowing” a lot of bandwidth from these sites, for free, and what are they providing in return? Users of social network sites provide content, sometimes very interesting content, and that, along with increasing per-page impressions is the fee they pay for using a free service. What is Skittles giving back to the community?

“Social-ness”

The biggest part of being a part of “the social”, and the part that companies often don’t get, is that it’s about 2-way communication. Kudos (excuse the pun), to Skittles for allowing their customers to have an unfiltered voice, but where are they in the conversation? We want to hear Skittles interact with their customers, not just hear ourselves talk about them.

Alienation

What is the experience for many of Skittle’s potential customers? For instance, you now have to be 13 years old to view the site. And even if excluding kids from a candy store makes sense, what about the folks that are Web savvy, but not social network savvy. Perhaps this site will be a little weird to them. Which leads me to the biggest issue, usability.

Usability

Is the site usable? We all know that when considering usability, we must first consider our audience. Some would even go as far as saying that we can limit to a specific target audience, not just any possible site visitor. If we suppose what a target audience for Skittles might be, and even if that audience is entirely composed of social network aware individuals, would they find the site useable?

Well, next we would need to know the tasks the audience might engage in. Let’s also suppose it’s the following:

• find nutritional information – OK, it’s available via Wikipedia, but can I be sure it hasn’t been altered? I also need to do quite a bit of searching (e.g. reading and scrolling) to find it.
• find contact information – perhaps the easiest thing to do on the site and bonus points for not hiding the phone number
• search for information – not available at all. This is a complete failure for many web users who wish to visit a site and immediately search for the piece of information that they need.

So, in 3 tasks that I picked, the site only covers one well. But in addition, I see some other major usability hurdles:

• Poor feedback as to where you are in the site. While this is important in any site, it is very important in a site such as this where the context of the page you navigate to may differ greatly from where you came. e.g. will the user know that WikiPedia is the product page?
• Navigational overlay gets in the way. On many pages the navigation box seems to be on top of the content and it’s not readily apparent how you shrink it.
• Random pop-up explaining how to “drop the box in the corner”. If you have to explain to your audience how to use your site, or worse, how to navigate away from it, you have failed at usability.

screen grab: skittles.com pop-up explaining how to navigate away from their site.

Lastly, while not a usability issue, it is odd that a promotional site would ask you to accept their terms and conditions before they tell you about their product. Given the nature of the content that may appear, I certainly understand the reason, but it seems like a big hoop for someone to jump through just to view your site.

To sum it up, I would say the new Skittles.com makes a great meme and a is perhaps a bit of Internet history, but to me, the site doesn’t make sense. While I think that companies should be involved in social networking, it’s very important how they approach it.

I can’t wait to see what my colleagues at BrandLogic think about the impact this site has on the Skittles brand. And I would love to hear what you think. Please leave me your comments.

Sitting with my Sunday tea, I came across this:

Of there is the usual Adams’ dry humor. But it points out the elephant in the room that isn’t often spoken about. What happens if companies choose to start gaming the system when it comes to social networks?

Quick definition: gaming the system refers to someone who exploits weaknesses in a set of rules to further their own needs. An example would be someone who creates lots of fake Web sites to point back to their real Web site, just to increase their Google rank.

Back to the question. Are companies, and for that matter individuals, gaming the system? For instance, do companies have hired reviewers that create favorable review on Amazon? 

Early on, given the size of social networks, there was a lot of self-policing. We would talk about meritocracy and how you had to earn your right to have a voice—well, at least a voice that would reach the masses. But now social network sites are much larger and more mainstream. FaceBook alone had 222 million visitors in December. How can that large of a group police itself effectively? Who sets the rules?

There have been several notable cases of companies and individuals getting caught faking reviews, creating biased articles on Wikipedia, or voting up their articles on sites like Digg. Despite these challenges, it would seem that there are many factors that help to keep companies in check.  Many people take it as a challenge to try to expose someone gaming the system. Consumers can be skeptical by nature; this plays into it as well.

Perhaps the largest factor is trust. The strongest social networks are built on trust and if you want people to take your post, review, comment—whatever—seriously, you have to have built up social capital. Social network pioneers like Robert Scoble earn our trust even when they tell us they have been hired by a company as an evangelizer. As such it behooves companies not to lose that trust for quick gains.

In addition, the ability for consumers to join in on the conversation and have their voice be heard, not only keeps a company honest, but can also increases trust in the company. As their social capital builds, so does a new level of trust in the company. How can companies make sure they don’t appear to game the system?

Here are some tips:

1. Prepare a strategy for how your company should use social networks. 
2. Appoint a team or lead person to be responsible for you presence on the Web, not just your Web sites.
3. Provide guidelines for employees and make sure your employees know the rules. It may be that an employee that means well will falsely promote a product or service because they feel it will help the company. Let them know how this can actually damage the company. Let them know what they can blog, tweet, talk about and how to do it.
4. Join the conversation openly and honestly. If someone leaves a negative review or comment, don’t respond as a “fake individual”, but rather as the company. Be transparent.
5. Include social networks as part of your touch points in your brand management strategy

A good place to start would be to read Robert Scoble’s book Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.

What are your thoughts? Leave me a comment and let me know. I started a poll on LinkedIn that asks: Do you think corporations should join in social networks, if you have a second, I would appreciate your input. 

Ebrahim Ezzy and Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web put together a nice summary of Search 2.0 and how it compares to traditional search. They define Search 2.0 as the third generation search technologies and that they are:

…designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models; they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make information more productive.

[1]

In their post—which by the way is part 1 of a 2-part series—they examine 5 different Search 2.0 companies. They point out a key feature of each and also compare it to traditional search (e.g. Google).

What was interesting for me is that when I went to try the search engines they mentioned, 2 of them were down, 2 required a setup process, and several of them were simply returning Google results with their own "value add", such as clustering.

Does having to train a search engine or relying on an unknown communities’ rankings really further search? I have always felt that technology should help automate things for us, not require more effort on our part. The lure of Google was—and is in my opinion—the simple page with only one thing to do, enter a search term. And you could be reasonably certain that you would find the information you wanted within the first couple result pages.

I must admit, I did like some of the added functionality in Clusty—although as part owner in a Branding firm, it feels wrong to mention anyone named Clusty.

I noticed a couple of comments to the post with which are worth highlighting:

• …I think the people that want all this Search 2.0 nonsense are the people having trouble coming up with a comprehensible list of phrases to describe what they’re talking about…
• Part of being a good search is… uptime! (and speed).

Check out the post, it’s a good read.

[1] Search 2.0 vs Traditional Search, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/search_20_vs_tr.php, posted July 20, 2006, viewed July 21, 2006