User-Interface Tweaks and Facebook
// February 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // web thoughts
After reading the brilliantly titled $300 Million Button article over at User Interface Engineering I found myself looking at small changes on the sites I frequently use, that might make a difference to their effectiveness.
The first one I thought about was Facebook’s Login screen which they are constantly tweaking (it’s been changing over the few days I’ve been thinking about it). The login itself is a simple combination of e-mail/password, but with the addition of an optional Remember Me tick box. Recently I ticked the box and an additional option titled ‘Make Facebook my homepage’ appeared – genius I thought, they’ve detected I’m engaged by Facebook and they want to see how far they can take me. Then I thought what about people that don’t trust the Remember Me feature, but would like Facebook as their homepage? Are they missing a trick by not showing both options to everyone? Quite possibly… Or is it a case of saving homepage real estate? If it is the later, then maybe overtime they change Remember Me, for the people that don’t use it to Make Facebook my homepage?
The key point from this suggested tweak, as with the £300 Million Button article, is that on such a well used part of any site, a small change could offer a potential benefit for both you and your visitor – keep tweaking! See what works (analytics are vital here) and keep striving to improve the key parts of your website.
Facebook is without doubt changing the way a generation of users use the internet. A vast number of users begin their online journey on Facebook and explore from there, so the simple tweak suggested above could convert an even larger number of people to get instant Facebook gratification when they fire-up their web browser. Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook to get a slice of the Facebook action, for a period of time the Facebook search option had two options – search Facebook or the web (with Microsoft). That second option has now disappeared, was this causing session times to drop as people left Facebook to explore the web? We can’t know for sure, but we do know it’s not there any more.
Although this change of internet entry-point is taking place for some, people still love Google, their share of search is continuing to rise (recently reported up to over 80%). Maybe Microsoft’s investment in Facebook was purely to avoid Google acquiring them? After all if Facebook and Google were to collaborate that would be a fatal blow for anyone else trying to gain market share in an environment that’s so enamoured with social media.