Study: Streams and Feeds are a Mess

Jakob Nielsen studies the usability of RSS feeds and social network streams for professionals and finds that ...

"Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks."

Some of this is easily fixable, however ...

"As the satisfaction ratings indicate, we have a long way to go to improve the usability of social network messaging and RSS feeds.

The problems start with something as simple as the choice of username. For example, the United States Department of Education's Twitter ID was 'usedgov,' which sounded to users like 'used government' and was off-putting. Logos were often bad as well, particularly in the small rendering that some services offer. Users depend on the ability to scan down a stream to pick out logos and user names, but this basic need was often thwarted."

This is why email in business isn't dying anytime soon. For consumers, however, things might be different.

Comments

[charlie davidson]

Steve, the observations are right on and it is getting worse with the proliferation of streaming information and the growing amount of networked business info. There is however growing attention by vendors, organizations and users on the problem and that should accelerate improvements in usability and the value of these approaches.

[ravikant cherukuri]

There are also all the noise from activities in your network you dont care much about. There needs to be much better relevance ranking in the stream to scale it to anywhere near e-mail.

[Yu Yu Din]

It's a matter of choice about what to broadcast in which network. Some folks bundle everything and create repetitive messages, users get bored eventually.

[Dennis Callahan]

Yes, usability is an issue and I think trust is a bigger issue (at least in corporations). At this time, email is a safer, company-approved medium that everyone is expected to be proficient with each day.