[IxDA Discuss] Changes to Facebook (Perceived Privacy)

[Susan Farrell]

I've given this a lot of thought during the ruckus too, and I think 
the problem has to do with several factors that might not have been 
uncovered by traditional user testing with a small number of 
representative users. A usability professional on the spot would 
likely have known that and employed other methods as well.

At Facebook and MySpace, etc, there is a passionate user base, and 
the site consists almost entirely of content they create, so the 
users naturally feel like it's their space. This user-ownership is 
what you want, because it makes the site popular, but it changes the 
role of the users. People are emotionally more invested at sites with 
user-created content than they are with many other kinds of websites.

Virtual remodeling of someone's virtual home without asking them is a 
violation of trust in this kind of relationship. It's worth 
mentioning that this is not the first time this sort of breach of 
trust has happened in website (and gamespace) redesigns, but it is 
one of the more dramatic and vehement so far.

Standard advice is to make incremental changes that are first 
beta-tested, when rolling out any significant design changes of an 
established site, in order to avoid shock and rejection.

Maybe if FB had turned on the new features for a volunteer group of 
user accounts and asked people to check them out and give feedback, 
they would not have lost so much trust and could have modified the 
feature rollout to be more palatable. What Jim Drew pointed out about 
scaling is also very important though. In order to show the realistic 
effects of the features, the test group must include both average 
accounts and extremely friend-heavy accounts. I think in a case like 
this that simply mocking up accounts would not have been as effective 
as volunteer accounts, because we care a lot more about privacy when 
it's our intimate detail that's being syndicated.

One of the blog articles I read this week (sorry I can't recall which 
one) also pointed out that "friend" means something different in this 
kind of social space. Being someone's friend in this context does not 
convey the kind of intimacy that the newsfeeds provided about profile 
changes and one-on-one interactions, but instead "friend" there is 
more like an acquaintance, a friend of a friend, or even just an 
indication of social token passing or endorsement.

Maybe if FB had also offered the new features as goodies that users 
could opt in for, people could have tried them over time and given 
more constructive feedback.

Opt-in and beta-testing would have left the users feeling in charge 
of the site in important ways. This is the real lesson here. Websites 
exist for their users, and they need to behave accordingly.

Susan