From My to Our Social Network: Surveying the decline of MySpace and the rise of Facebook

Social networks have come a long way since their initial emergence. Thanks to the popularity of Facebook, we could now remain in constant contact with our families, friends and coworkers, and stay updated on their activities, locations and moods even when we are separated by vast distances. The ability to stay connected online became ever important in the current Coronavirus pandemic as we get physically isolated from our loved ones. According to a survey of US social media users, 29.7 percentage of respondents use social media 1–2 hours more per day, and a further 20.5 percentage spent 30minutes to 1 hour more on social media per day as of March 2020 (Tankovska, 2021).

Not all social networking platforms become a powerhouse like Facebook though. Once a popular social networking platform in the 2000s, MySpace has long since plummeted in relevance. As an attempt to understand the difference between the two (once) most popular social media platforms, Rivera et al. examined Facebook and MySpace in terms of their usability and design heuristics, using an adapted Usefulness, Satisfaction and Ease of use questionnaire.

Dimensions and descriptions that measured the usability of social network design

The researchers added dimensions that takes into consideration of human-computer design principles such as consistency.

Examples of new questions added by researchers

The researchers also added items that covers user experience goals. A good social networking platform should allow users to feel relaxed, and should avoid frustration, anxiety and feelings of stress.

The research found Facebook to be performing better with significant difference in all, except Consistency and Proficiency, than MySpace. In particular, Facebook has a much higher mean than MySpace in the aspects of Usefulness and Satisfaction.

Research findings

It is a pity that the research ended at the questionnaire and the researchers did not drill deeper on why users feel that MySpace did not perform as well as Facebook in Usefulness and what contributed to the lack of satisfaction in MySpace. It would have been interesting to follow up with in-depth interviews and task-based usability testing to further understand users’ thoughts on the two social networking platform. That would have offered us more information for further data triangulation.

Nevertheless, the research leaves the community with a rich website usability questionnaire for further use. Since then, there have been multiple other researches designing their survey instrument through adaptions of the questionnaire (Fok et al, 2013; Hancock et al, 2015; Xynidis, 2018). Theresearch is a good demonstration of a verstaile use of Usefulness, Satisfaction and Ease-of-use questionnaire, where items are mapped to different usability dimensions, linking them to more specific research subjects such as simplicity and functionality.

References

Fok, A. W., Procci, K., Flynn, J. R., & Mouloua, M. (2013). The effects of mental model conformity on usability in apps. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 1323–1327.

Hancock, G., & Sawyer, B.. (2015). A Heuristic-Based Re-Evaluation of the IBM Academic Initiative Project Interface. Proceedings 19th Triennial Congress of the IEA.

Rivera, J., Davis, F., Mouloua, M., & Alberti, P. (2010). Usability Evaluation of Two Social Networking Sites. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 1421–1424.

Tankovska, H. (2020). Increased time spent on social by U.S. users during COVID-19 pandemic 2020. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116148/more-time-spent-social-media-platforms-users-usa-coronavirus/

Xynidis, M. (2018). Assessing the Impact of Multi-variate Steering-rate Vehicle Control on Driver Performance in a Simulation Framework. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7252&context=etd

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