Unpopular comment with a confession
While I read this post about the headache caused to an end-user by diigo’s “find your friends” feature with interest, I had linked to the post because I was expecting to read something more along the lines of how the diigolet (really bad name, by the way–reminds me a little to much of toilet) or the diigo tool bar slowed Firefox way down after install. That’s my end-user complaint and it’s based in no fact, and other than that, my other big complaint is that I keep hitting my “post to delicious” button when I’m on a page I want to bookmark since it’s such a force of habit. And then I have to wonder if it even matters because I have so many bookmarks and tags that my only hope of ever finding something I’ve bookmarked is by using the search feature and praying that at the time of reading I labeled what I was reading in such a manner that will allow me to pick the same key words six months later.
But I did not title this post “my inefficient social bookmarking habits.” So first, my unpopular comment. I think this blog post is a little unfair. Back last fall, I received an invite for Quechup and joined and went through the invite your friends routine. And as has been noted by others, instead of checking against one’s email address book and giving a list of names, Quechup emailed everybody. Now I can certainly understand Dean’s frustration with Diigo, since I was extremely annoyed (understatement) with the Quechup incident. And here is my confession: Despite how annoyed I was with that Quechup incident, I still did the “find your friends” search with Diigo, even while thinking, “These people could be total jerks like that Quechup site was and betray my trust and send an email to everyone I know.” And yet I still did it. Even though I was irate beyond belief last September, I still put my trust out there again. And didn’t click the button to submit to everyone who wasn’t in Diigo already and didn’t spam everyone and their mother’s realtor’s brother accordingly. Clicking a button that is labeled in a way that indicates no one will be emailed –and having everyone emailed –that is duplicitous and underhanded. But when an end-user is led through a series of steps that they do automatically, but which produces undesirable results (from the end-user’s perspective), this is a usability issue but not necessarily an unethical company at work.
What can be done to address this as a usability problem? How important is it to an end-user to invite all their “friends”? If it is not very important and a company’s main goal is user satisfaction, is there a way to make it an extra, purposeful step to invite friends that don’t already use the site? Does anyone even use this feature, especially with gmail, where every contact you’ve ever emailed is saved automatically to your address book?
March 29th, 2008 at 1:23 am
I actually like the ability to see how many of your contacts are using a service. In the case of Diigo, I don’t think they intend anything nasty but it certainly is a way for them to subversively get their product out there. Even with Facebook at least they make a self contained scrolling box for both those who are on Facebook and then invite those that aren’t. You can see it easily. With Diigo, the list goes on forever so unless you scroll down, you don’t know that all your contacts are checked to be invited. Majorly poor design.
March 29th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Were you linking to gmail though? Is it a consequence of several designs? By that I mean, gmail adds every contact you’ve ever had to your address book for convenience and diigo lets you link to every contact in your address book. I am definitely sympathetic to feeling betrayed by having every contact emailed. I also like that you have positioned it as a design issue, although then again, everything can be be boiled down to a design issue. Somewhere in my post I was going to say that the easiest end-user response is to not link to email information, which I think I forgot to cover, but I did mention the allure of participating. It’s just so easy to put in that email username and password. So easy that I might even do it again.