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- Grandmother: Has not learnt how to use a computer, but due to the simplicity of the iPad, can browse through pictures of family. Her family can take care of setting up the Facebook account.
- Parents: Like the simpler interface just for browsing pictures as a way to say connected with children.
- Facebook Photo Downloader: Just wants an easy way to download photos from Facebook as an album (or a smart album) containing photos uploaded by friends or the user himself or herself.
User Interviews
We interviewed three users from both of our primary user classes: Facebook Photos power-users and Casual Facebook users. The first two interviews were done on a Mac, and the third was done on an iPad. Note that Facebook’s interface is nearly identical on the Mac and iPad, so the same issues noted on the Mac also apply to the iPad. The final interview notes some of the usability issues a user found that were specific to the iPad.
Facebook Mom
# We first interviewed a 56-year-old female “Facebook Mom,” a member of the fastest growing Facebook age group. With only 21 friends, she is a very casual Facebook user. She goes on Facebook about once a month to read messages and view photos her friends have uploaded. She posts very little content to Facebook. However, throughout the interview, she expressed an interest in better ways to view and find photos others have uploaded. We asked her to perform several simple photo-related tasks using the Facebook website on a Mac computer. We observed her as she performed the tasks and recorded the results:
- Finding all the photos that a particular friend was tagged in
- Before she began the task, she asked us what it meant to be “tagged” in a photo. Indeed, Facebook uses the term “tagged” frequently in the interface, and she had trouble understanding the term.
- She first identified the friend on the Facebook home page (she did not use search) and went to the friend’s profile.
- She saw a line of five photos at the top and thought her friend had only uploaded 5 photos. We told her that there were more photos to find.
- Eventually, she found the “Photos” link in the sidebar and clicked on it.
Wiki Markup The Photos page was divided into two sections: “\[Friend’s name\] Photos” and “Photos and Videos of \[friend’s name\].” She did not understand the difference between these two sections (the former shows photos the friend has uploaded, and the latter shows photos the friend is in).
- Viewing a photo
- She identified a photo she found interesting and clicked on it.
- The photo viewer HUD window appeared, which she found intuitive.
- She navigated between photos easily using the arrow buttons and used the back button to go back.
- After viewing several photos we asked her to close the photo viewer and return to Facebook. She could see the Facebook page behind the HUD window but had trouble reaching it. She did not notice the “Close” button, marked by an “X” glyph. She eventually decided to hit the back button in her browser several times until she reached the Facebook home page.
- Finding a specific album
- We asked her to find an album containing Hanukkah photos. She quickly decided to try searching for “Hanukkah Pictures” using the search field at the top of the page.
- The search did not find photos; it only showed names that sounded like “Hanukkah” and Bing web results. She looked around the search page for awhile trying to find photos.
- She tried different spellings for Hanukkah with the same results and gave up.
Frequent User
We interviewed a 20 years old college student who has over 900 Facebook friends. He uses Facebook on average 45 minutes every day to get news about his friends by going through the news feed and their profile pages, and to communicate with them. We asked him to perform the same tasks as for the first interview, but it was clear that he was experienced enough to navigate his way successfully. We thus asked him some other questions:
- How would you describe your interaction with photos on Facebook? Do you find anything too complicated and are there features which you think are missing?
- He said that the interaction with photos was rather complicated due to the fact that photos were divided into three categories (profile pictures, tagged pictures, and albums) and that you would often find the same pictures in each of them. Furthermore, although he knew exactly where to find each type of picture, he agreed that it was illogical. Also, he explained that Facebook lacked features to have more specific searches, such as searching for all pictures in which a specified group of people are tagged.
- How do you enjoy the viewing of individual photos through Facebook?
- He said that he was bothered by all the unrelated material that appeared next to the photos. For example, while he looked at a photo, he saw all the comments, which he thought reduced his ability to immerse himself in the picture. Furthermore, he thought it was a shame that it was not possible to view an album in full screen.
- Do you ever download photos from Facebook to save them on your computer? If so, how usable is Facebook’s interface?
- He said that he sometimes did, but that if he wanted a whole album, he would ask friends to email them to him, or get them directly from their computer, as going through them on Facebook took too long. To save an album, he would have to load each of them individually, and save them with the old “Right Click + Save Image”, which he found very cumbersome. He seemed very excited about the possibility of downloading whole albums by using the App.
Photographer
Finally, we interviewed a 21-year-old male MIT student. He has a strong interest in photography and owns a DSLR. He checks Facebook several times a day and enjoys exploring his friends’ photos. He frequently looks for specific albums and uploads his own photos. Recently, he tried to download a family member’s photo album to share on his family’s personal website, and found it very difficult. He also owns an iPad. So, we observed him trying to download an album on his iPad:
- First, he used the search bar at the top of the page to find his family member’s profile.
- He clicked on the “Photos” link in the sidebar. He missed the “Photos” link and opened the “Info” page instead. He zoomed in and hit the “Photos” link the second time.
- He browsed the albums, and clicked on the one he wanted.
- He clicked on the first photo to open it. Then, he pressed down on the image, and chose the “Save Image’” option.
- He used the Back button to go back to the album page and repeated these steps for several more photos until we told him he could stop.
- He also expressed how, after he downloaded all the photos, he had to spend time organizing and naming the downloaded files.
Task Analysis
Login to Facebook account
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