Howard's chapter on remuneration in Design to Thrive explains why the concept is so important to the success of any social media site. Remuneration means having the consumer believe that spending time on this site is worth their while, that the investment of their time will reap some sort of benefit for them. The best way to insure a consumer believes his time is being spent in a worthwhile fashion is to make the site user-friendly. A site that is brilliantly designed and coded, that is efficiently functional and effective, can only appeal so much to the user if it is not also easy to use for them. It's easy for the designers of these sites to get caught up in the behind-the-scenes aspect and forget about what it looks like from an ordinary user's perspective. When this happens, user-friendliness gets lost and the consumer along with it.
Two examples that Howard uses to illustrate the importance of remuneration are Google and Wikipedia. Both of these sites came late in the game of their respective markets, but they sailed away with all of the clientele. Why is this? Because they understood the importance of remuneration. Google, unlike the foremost search engine directly prior to it, AltaVista, was simple, direct, and easy to use. Rather than cluttering the home page with many words and options for how to search or what to search for, Google kept it simple with one place to start your user experience. Wikipedia, too, appeals to the user far more than its competitors because of its user-driven nature. Consumers like to feel in control of their experience as opposed to feeling lost in it. Wikipedia goes to show that this is true for more than just social media sites. Remuneration should always be kept in mind when building a social media site because it's what the consumers will keep in mind as they are using it.
I think it is interesting that you talked about how companies get lost in the behind-the-scenes aspects of their social media site. All too often websites go down because of this and that proves that viewers enjoy eye-friendly, and easy going websites. They don't want something else to stress them out, but something to take the stress away.
ReplyDeleteAlso, an example of change that I thought of was Facebook. Think about what it looked like when you got one and what it looks like now. Periodically, Facebook makes changes and viewers go crazy because it is something to complain about, but in the end they usually like it because it is something new and fresh and keeps them interested.
Brady,
ReplyDeleteI agree that social networking sites must be user-friendly in order to maintain users’ interests. When I am browsing a site of any nature, I will quickly close the tab if I feel overwhelmed by links and information. If, on the other hand, the webpage is well organized and easy to navigate, I will remain on the site for a longer period of time. Facebook, I believe, capitalizes off of being user-friendly. The different pages are well organized, and no technical expertise is necessary. Because of this, users are of all ages. In fact, I know many grandparents with regularly-updated Facebook pages!