ux

It's old news that Flickr has updated its site. It's old news that thousands of users don't like it. After a solid week of using it I have to say that I don't understand why people are griping so much.

This last update really works for me. I realize in the end that I may pay more for the Flickr service in the long term but I've got 17,210 pictures on Flickr at the time of this writing and I suppose I will eventually go over 20,000 images. That's a lot of images (I plan to go through and delete some over time, particularly some of the less interesting ones). Is it the best service in the world for hosting images? I don't know.

What I do know is that it does what I need it to do - and now it has made new photos from my contacts more engaging on the Flickr main page. This means that my images also get seen by my contacts more easily and, really, on a photo sharing site, visibility is king.

Am I in the majority? I don't know. I do know when you update a service with live users, people get cranky. I've seen it with many services over the years and have seen updates that really suck. Flickr's update, to date, has no down side that I've found.

Updating Services: The Ups and Downs.

Users are strange creatures when it comes to services. Users invest heavily in an emotional way in what they use; that's the hook. In the context of Flickr, we users develop contacts and like it when people favorite or leave nice comments on our photos. It's a pat on the back, an affirmation, a feel good moment. Sad is the photographer whose photos no one likes. I've never been extremely popular on the service because of a variety of reasons and I'm OK with that. The only person I'm really interested in being better at is me, but there are some competitive folks out there who take getting listed as an interesting photo quite seriously. They accumulate likes and favorites as if they were actual currency - and they're not.

It's typically that gaming element that has people complaining most about a service. In Second Life, it was about impacting how people made real currency. On Twitter, it's about how many people retweet you. On Facebook, it's about how many people like your page or like your posts or share your posts. The gamification, often heralded as a game-changer, is a double edged sword.

Aside from the popularity contest, there's the user experience. UX is what they call that now because we humans like to abbreviate things and, in this case, 'UX' allows people who don't do well with 4 syllable words a chance to discuss user experience - perhaps a dangerous thing if one thinks that through. Most people feel an emotional ownership of a service despite the fact that they don't actually own the service. This 'ownership' creates brand/service loyalty but it also doesn't react well to changes perceived as drastic even when the changes positively influence what users can do.

Change is difficult to swallow, not unlike a hot pepper. Mixed in with other things, change becomes more easy to swallow. It's an issue of flavor and gauging the taste of the audience. Smart owners of services take the temperature on issues before they do so, allowing people to believe that they have an effect on the service they get (and reinforcing the false ownership) and that they matter - but the reality is that what people want also has to meet the criteria of the owner of the service. TANSTAAFL.

Every change that Facebook makes upsets people. Yet Facebook users still use it, even if only to complain about Facebook. The same can be said of any service. It boggles the mind at times what users will put up with despite their complaints. From the outside looking in, one has to wonder why people do put up with so much.

That's where User Experience comes in.

I've been toying with Google+, even having created a Google+ Page for KnowProSE LLC, but there's some things that Google+ simply doesn't seem to be doing right - and maybe they will in the future.

First, and foremost, the method for adding people is wonky at best. Much of the social networking done pre-Google+ on other social networks doesn't seem to be leveraged well. The networks built on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn don't seem to be reflected well on Google+. I'd have thought that maybe some brilliant engineers would have leveraged the APIs from at least Facebook and Twitter to connect the accounts as, for example, Klout does. And the process of adding people to circles, while well intentioned, suffers from being - at least in my experience - unpredictable in who Google+ picks. It's not that Facebook is better in this regard, but Facebook at least shows some of the common friends as a reason for suggesting people.

Next comes the issue of people who work for companies that use Google's services and thus have a work account and a personal account, assuring that people have to constantly switch accounts to post things on personal or work related Google+ presences.

Last, but not least, the workflow for interacting with Google+ is akin to stuttering when compared to others social networks - but it is made easier with this browser agnostic Google+ Bookmarklet.  You likely didn't know it existed unless you did a search specifically for it (as I just did). But integration with third party applications such as HootSuite, allowing people to share across networks so that cross-pollenation is possible, is missing still. Despite Mashable's misleading title, Google+ Pages Can Now Be Managed With Third-Party Apps, Google+ pages cannot yet - they are planned to. Bad Mashable. Fix your headline.

Does it mean that Google+ will not improve? Of course not. But in speaking with other social media pros, Google+ has yet to become the river that other social networks are. Google+ grew at an astounding rate not because of popularity as much as leveraging a pre-existing customer-base, but that doesn't mean it's being used as much or that it's as usable as other social networks. In trying to add new features, Google+ is missing some of the most for usability so far.

This is all pretty hard on Google, I know - but it's fair and meant constructively. I've no problem with Yet Another Social Network, it's another flavor added to the mix. More taste testing, though, seems to be necessary.

In a Twitter conversation last week, someone brought up that users are afraid of upgrades. In a sense this is true, but it is not completely true - as someone who does have the perspective of a user as well as that of a developer, I often have to stop and listen to myself as I go about trying to do things on a daily basis. It's rare for me nowadays to be able to say, "I'm going to do something" without some piece of software pestering me about an update that is available, or that I need to wait to turn off my computer because updates are being processed (shakes fist at Microsoft), or that there is some sort of patch available. If your only chore on a computer is to write software, these things are simply things that one has to do to continue writing software.

But users typically don't see it that way. Imagine you wake up in the morning and you're hungry, so you bumble into the kitchen so that you can start the coffee - or worse, to get a cup of coffee because you programmed the coffee maker to have it ready when you get into the kitchen. You arrive in the kitchen, barely awake, and begin pouring the coffee into your cup when you realize that there's no coffee. Squinting through the morning haze, you see that your coffee maker is awaiting you to press a button because there's a security update that could cause your coffee maker to do something exotically interesting. You press the button, waiting for the download and the update to complete when you move on to the toaster.

The toaster, too, refuses to do anything until you upgrade it as well. You give up. You throw some cereal in a bowl, toss some coffee grounds on it and have breakfast.

As ridiculous and humorous as that is - this is what many users see updates as. Certainly, they may be necessary for security reasons and to assure that the coffee maker doesn't catch on fire, but if it's a little download to assure that the coffee maker plays a certain tune while making the coffee, people don't care. They want their damned coffee. And that's the way it is with software. While developers typically use only certain tools and think of their users only using their software, it's much more complicated than that. People simply want stuff that works.