Posts tagged digg

Today YouTube became the latest in a spate of social networks to offer an alternative design to users. It follows on the heels of Digg Lite and Facebook Lite, both attempts to strip down to the bare essentials and reduce the clutter and cruft of all the widgets, related content, menus and other bits of (usually) relevant information that have crept into most social sharing sites.

Digg’s initiative is far more developer-focused; it’s really intended as a showcase for its new API. Still, the point is equally taken: Sometimes it’s refreshing to get the Other Stuff out of the way and get back to basics. Facebook Lite is more about the user experience; since its latest big redesign earlier this year many users have complained about feeling overwhelmed. The Lite version is a way to once again focus on core features and tune out some of the more extraneous variables that tend to encrust the typical Facebook profile.

Simple Is Good

YouTube and Facebook’s Lite versions are both in direct response to user feedback. They clearly fill a need on the part of the audience to occasionally reduce the noise and boost the signal. But it’s also important to note that neither of these options have replaced the “full” default versions of the sites — they’re alternative views, not primary views. There’s still value in all the extra “related” information that accompanies the content we’re sharing, but Lite versions acknowledge the fact that there are different modes of viewing content on the Web.

The Lite trend also acknowledges the inherent value of simplicity in reducing friction, both in terms of cognitive processing and in literal page load times. It’s a busy world, and sometimes saving those few seconds can make a big difference in our perception of productivity and faster workflow. Twitter is another great example of how simplicity can reduce friction and increase user participation thanks to sheer ease of use. There’s something extremely pleasurable about using a simple interface, in that the service itself is designed to get out of your way and get you to your goal — whether it be writing a 140 character update, watching a video clip or sharing a link with friends.

Toggling Between Modes

From a user experience perspective, it’s a great thing that product managers and designers are catering to this idea of being able to toggle your browsing mode between “simple and focused” and back out again to “search and discovery” mode, where the “distractions” can often lead to serendipitous discovery and unexpectedly interesting new experiences. The Lite trend also reflects that there are different types of Internet users — some who are intimately familiar with complex interfaces and relish diving in to an information-rich environment, and others who simply don’t spend the same ungodly amounts of time on the Internet as many of us social media-fluent users do.

Take World of Warcraft players, for example, who can customize their own user interfaces to a degree whose complexity level borders on that of a jet plane instrument panel. Even so, some still choose a far more minimalist approach to managing the influx of real-time data. There’s value in both options, and either can be preferable to an individual user at different times. Building in tools to make that switch possible is a great move on the part of these networks.

Is Customization the Future?

What if you could actually customize your user interface experience on every site you visited? A number of sites already take this highly customizable approach, from Netvibes and iGoogle to the MOG music social network, who recently-launched a subscription-based music service to accompany its music news and social features. MySpace took the same approach, allowing users to customize their own profiles in an almost too open playground that admittedly allowed a number of crimes against HTML to be perpetuated.

But what about going beyond simply customizing how your own profile looks, and on into a more remixable interface for social sites in general? It’s easy to see how much value there could be in giving Facebook or YouTube users the ability to go nuts with UI customizations to a degree similar to that of World of Warcraft, where a smorgasboard of user-created add-ons makes very specific information management tasks possible.

Ultimately, users will make their own way as technology progresses: Some will stick with “as simple as possible,” some will adopt interfaces resembling complicated spreadsheets and others will jump at the ability to toggle between the two… or several. And in an Internet era already embracing the ethos of openness and third-party access to APIs, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched to imagine something like that could be possible.

Would you like the ability to customize your user experience on social networks?

Tags: design, facebook, Facebook Lite, LITE, simplicity, UI, user interface, youtube, youtube lite