People aren’t going to say what you want them to

Author: Glenn Slaven

31 May

I was listening to the L33t Tech Podcast and they mentioned that Twitter developer Alex Paine said that one of the things that’s causing all the stability problems for them is that Twitter was never designed as a communications platform where people would have back & forth conversations, it was meant to be a CMS. Robert Scoble then said that the Twitter developers assumed that everyone would just answer their question “What are you doing?”

But now with the @replies and #hashtags people are using it for all sorts of different things. People are using it as a bookmarking service, a todo list and geo-locator and so on. Full-on conversations happen on Twitter. And although it may not be the best platform for it, once a conversation gets going, it tends to have its own momentum. Sure sometimes you can say “lets take this over to FriendFeed” or “lets go onto IM”, but if it’s a conversation where people have passionate opinions, that probably isn’t going to happen. People aren’t going to stop and think first. Usually.

Facebook ran into this same issue over the little word ‘is’. Originally all Facebook status messages started with ‘is’, as in ‘Glenn is wasting time on Facebook instead of working” (Anyone from the office reading this, that was just an example, really). They expected people to use it for the same purpose as twitter, as a ‘what are you doing/thinking right now’. But of course, people didn’t want to just do that, they wanted to be able to say other things, maybe things not directly about them, or maybe in a different tense. So you ended up with this weird Facebook-grammar like ‘Glenn is wow it’s really hot today’ (see this group for a good list of them), or you had to twist what you were going to say into something about you right now. So really, Facebook was slowly molding you into a narcissist.

Finally after much lobbying by the user base Facebook relented and allowed you to remove the ‘is’. However, if you go to edit your status, it still puts the ‘is’ at the start and then puts the cursor after that. Facebook is still expecting you to use that textbox in the way they originally wanted you to. Also, applications are now able to update your status. This wasn’t allowed for quite a while too, but the users & developers wanted it so eventually Facebook relented.

People want to communicate, it’s built into us. If you give us a communication tool we’ll use it. But it won’t always be in the way you expect us to. I think this is an important lesson for developers and product designers to learn. You can try and force people onto a certain path, but why bother? Unless there’s a really good reason for limiting what people can do, why not let them.

Non-tech analogy time

My office is a fairly new building in Sydney and just outside it is a park with a path around it. Now we’re on a little peninsula, so everyone coming to our building has to walk past this park. Because of the layout, the direct path to our office goes diagonally across one end of the park, but for what I assume are decorative purposes, the path curves around the end, meaning that following the path takes longer than just walking across the grass. The difference in walking time could be measured in seconds, but of course, that doesn’t matter & people don’t follow the path. Consequently there’s a big path of dead or dying grass in a direct line from the corner of the park across to the path. This isn’t what the designer of the park intended, but if they’d looked at the layout and thought about what people do, they would have realised that a direct path would have made more sense. Also we wouldn’t have this ugly dead bit of grass.

The point

Don’t unnecessarily constrain your users. Sure if there are real technical or financial reasons why something can’t be done, don’t do it. But if you’re building a service or a product that people can use, especially if it involves communication or some form of social interaction, then expect that it will be used for more than what you intended it for. It’s a good thing really. Because if people don’t stretch the boundaries of your service, it probably doesn’t mean you’ve built exactly what people need. It probably means that you’ve built something that people don’t want to use. Yes there may very well be a lot of inane content put out there, but really, that’s true of any human communication form. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. provide the platform, it’s up to us to come up with something interesting to say.