Facebook: An Individualist or Collectivist culture?

Last month Catharine P. Taylor wrote about the fact that Facebook is a network of individuals.  Perhaps this statement is somewhat paradoxical, but personally I think that it’s genius.

No matter how many groups you join, events you RSVP to and places you “check-in” as a Facebook user one cannot escape the fact that you are ultimately alone in the online world of social interaction.  Every time you log in to your Facebook account you are doing so on a personal level – you use your own password, you control your own profile and you de-tag any pictures that you don’t want your boss to see.  You are in control.

People may be increasing their online presence on a daily basis, but they also are gaining more and more control over that presence.  While you may be documenting every mundane moment of your life online (how many status updates do you post every day?) you also have the ability to filter out those less-flattering moments (Cinco de Mayo 2010 anybody?).

It is this contradiction that makes Facebook an “Individualistic Network.”

People join Facebook because they want to connect with their friends – whether they’ve actually met them in real life or not.  However, when you first set up your Facebook profile you fill out information about yourself (favorite books, music, movies etc.) and choose a picture in order to create your new online identity.  Creating an online identity is a process of reinvention, like when you’re starting high school and you can be anyone you want to be because nobody knows you there.  All of that sounds pretty individualistic to me.

Once you establish your new identity online you begin to join networks and groups in order to connect with people you may know.  All this connecting may seem pretty collectivist, but the thing is that you don’t have to connect with everyone.  You have the choice to be as involved as you want to be.  You are now an individual member of a collectivist system.

Confused?  Yeah, I am too.  I joined Facebook to network with people, now old Markie Mark Zuckerberg is telling me all the ways I can prevent people from seeing my information.  Seems a bit strange if you ask me, but then again, nobody really asked me at all.

Adapted from Catharine P. Taylor’s article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=137263

Usability: Use It or Lose Them

Imagine you are visiting a website for the first time. Your brain is processing information at rapid speed. Your eyes are shifting up and down and side-to-side as they zero in on keywords, headings and images. Your index finger seems to be on edge as it hovers over the mouse pad, similar to that of a sprinter itching to catch an early lead at the sound the a gun.

But wait. Now you’re lost. Where did the home page go? How did you end up here? Looks as though it’s time to consult Google and find another site.

This scenario is unfortunately not uncommon, and in fact, it’s quite normal among Web users. So what can be done to avoid the dreaded increase in “bounce rate” that represents the number of the site’s initial visitors who “bounce” to another website after viewing only the page they first hit? The bounce rate is determined by dividing the total number of visitors viewing only one page by the total number of visits.

A high bounce rate problem can be solved by becoming aware of some usability practices.

Usability is a huge buzz word in the Internet community. Basically, usability encompasses multiple ways for which you can improve the overall usefulness of your website. Such ways include minimizing the number of clicks it takes a user to find a piece of information, structuring content in a F-shaped pattern, and taking advantage of the information available in the browser.

The three-click rule

The myth about the “three-click rule” – the guideline that states a user will exit a website after he or she has clicked the mouse three times – is just that, a myth. A study conducted by Joshua Porter of User Interface Engineering monitored the clicking patterns of numerous subjects while interacting with a website. The research concluded there is “no correlation between the number of times users clicked and the success in finding the content they sought.” In fact, the study found that about 80 percent of the tasks were completed within 15 clicks.

F-shaped structure

The IT world recently has been rocked by usability findings that track eye movements of people when viewing websites. Study after study confirms that when interacting with information displayed on the Web, the majority of people scan for content in an F-shaped pattern. This means that users are initially searching through headlines for larger keywords – the vertical stem of the F – and when the desired keyword is located, the users snap to the standard left to right reading pattern and begin reading the Web content – the horizontal lines of the F.

Browser Information

Web developers know that there is information hidden from the average user in the browser that developers can access. This information can be retrieved by taking advantage of the document object model, which stores multiple items of user data.

This available data, such as a user’s location, for example, can then be used to fill out forms when submitting information. For example, if a user is purchasing shoes from an e-commerce site, the website should recognize where the user is located and supply the city, state and country input fields for the customer’s order.

Accessibility: The Standard for Good

Have you ever tried surfing the Web without relying on your hands or fingers to navigate the sea of information?

How about blindly tunneling through the depths of the Internet and relying on a computer program called a screen-reader to read every piece of text displayed on a website aloud?

And when is the last time you visited YouTube and streamed your favorite video – with the sound off?

Although these tasks – and even the thought of these tasks – may be irrelevant to a “normal” person’s everyday Web experience, people with disabilities are faced with a daily struggle to interact with a Web that caters to a world without encumbrances.

To combat this struggle, many governments around the world – including the United States – passed laws that require any person or business with a website to follow guidelines in order to make the technology accessible to people with disabilities. These policies – though more stringent in some countries than others – strive to promote the ultimate goal of the Internet: the universal availability of information to everyone.

Even though these laws encourage Web developers and business owners to adhere to standards of accessibility, they often are overlooked.

Most of us get lost in a Web that is drenched with data and hyperlinks and that is powered by loyal patrons who love to skim, share and soak up real-time information. In 2009, an Internet monitoring company, Netcraft, released figures that reveal the Web contains more than 215 million websites with registered domain names, and that display some sort of content. That was a year ago.

With our real-time addiction and these overwhelming figures for content-driven websites, how can we possibly police every website for thorough accessibility compliance?

Sadly, we can’t.

But we can make sure that if we have any influence over the creation of or the maintenance of any type of Web presence, we must strive to advocate accessibility standards as best we can.

Here are a few best practices to promote the greater good of accessibility standards:

► Closed captions for videos – On Oct. 8, President Obama signed an accessibility law that requires any video displayed on the Internet to have a closed captioning option. Sites such as Hulu and YouTube are embracing this standard, offering closed captioning on numerous videos throughout their sites.

► Alt text for images – For those not familiar with website design code HTML, the element image – the code used to post an image to a webpage – contains a tag within the element called “alt,” which means alternative text.

The original purpose of the “alt” tag was to provide a textual summary of an image that will replace the image if an image does not load.

The alt tag now is used by the blind and by anyone else using a screen-reader, which reads the text within these “alt” tags in order give information about the images that are displayed on a page.

► Do not trap users in content – For those users using a keyboard or voice command software to maneuver through a site, it is good practice not to rope someone into the content of an external plug-in.

For example, when a user is tabbing through the content of a website, he or she may have to tab through an external plug-in in order to reach the bottom of a webpage and may have to go through the plug-in in order to reach his or her final destination.

Some plug-ins are built to restrict access to content within the plug-in; therefore trapping a user in the mini application. To avoid this, install plug-ins that do not promote this inaccessible behavior.

For more accessibility standards, visit the Techniques and Failures for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 provided by the World Wide Web Consortium.