The Evolution of Social Media Features: A Deep Dive into User Behavior and Design

One feature that that software might still evolve over time, but that one feature is in lots of different uh bits of software, lots of different social networks, so in Instagram we see the same heart button next to everything. What they show you about what other people have done with your artifact to your instagram pictures is this kind of a an icon which is a number of hearts and then another one which is number of uh comments on it. So you kind of get a metadata view as you hover over each picture that you've put out, and that that seems to permeate all sorts of collaborative things. You know, youtube has that how many comments you've got, how many likes, how many dislikes, facebook, instagram, etc, etc.

This ubiquity of the heart button raises interesting questions about its functionality and purpose. Originally, it was intended as a way to indicate approval or liking, but in practice, people often use it to express their emotions without directly saying so. For example, someone might press like without engaging with the more deeper ways of expressing their emotion, simply to show that they've seen something without adding any further commentary. It's worth noting that there may be cultural differences at play here, as some cultures may be more inclined to openly express their emotions than others.

The design of social media features is often driven by a desire to make them easy to use and accessible to a wide range of users. However, this can sometimes lead to complexity, as you see with the various ways that people like and comment on posts. The introduction of new features, such as likes and dislikes, was intended to add depth and nuance to these interactions, but in practice, they have created their own set of problems. For example, having a dislike button can be problematic when it's used to express disapproval or annoyance, rather than simply indicating that someone didn't like the content.

To address these issues, social media platforms often use design tricks and technologies to make features more intuitive and user-friendly. For instance, the "like" button on facebook was originally intended as a way to approve of posts, but over time it has been used in many different ways. Similarly, instagram's heart button is used to show appreciation for content, rather than directly expressing emotions. The use of these buttons and other features is often dependent on cultural norms and user behavior, which can vary significantly from one group to another.

The shift towards more expressive communications non-verbal communications has been facilitated by advances in technology, which have made it easier to design and implement new features without sacrificing the usability of existing ones. As a result, we're likely to see even more innovative uses of social media features in the future, as users become increasingly comfortable with expressing themselves in new and creative ways.

In our next video, we'll be exploring how systems are designed certain ways, and what behaviors they encourage or discourage. We'll examine the theories behind system design, and see how they relate back to the social software systems that we're using today. By understanding more about why systems are designed in certain ways, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the complex dynamics at play in online interactions, and start to think about how we can use technology to create even more positive and engaging experiences for users.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso we've just done a video on feedback and feed through and we had this board layout helping to explain the difference in the last video we had a google doc as the kind of artifact user interface and a user times multiple people so let's quickly connect that to twitter because we're going to talk about twitter and facebook for twitter the artifact in the middle is a kind of tweet this is something that people produce and then people look at it through different user interfaces their phone or browser whatever to interact with it and in facebook uh let's let's say that the main artifact on facebook is a social media post which might be a video or a picture or a message so let's get this out the way now without losing all the deliciousness um so now i'm going to talk a bit about an example study we did uh it was a few years ago now it was a collaboration between me and a friend in germany and his student who came to visit and we worked here for a while and we were interested in why people use the favorite button as it was at the time on twitter there's a little heart button which i think they call the like button but it used to be a star and it was a favorite button so we did a pretty large survey we had 606 people for that survey and there were multiple aspects to that survey but the key detail for this discussion is that we ask people to in general say why do you favor to tweet or like a tweet favorite tweet um and then we said so thank you for that example uh can you show us the last one you favorited and explain why your favorite that one and the reason we do both those things is because if you get people to talk uh hypothetically about situations you end up with pathetic data hypothetic data um and then if you uh ask people to talk about an actual example of something they've done you get more factual data is what i tend to say so we had these examples of why people had favorited all these tweets lots of examples and this was quite interesting and then we coded up all the examples and produced a taxonomy of 25 reasons which got picked up by buzzfeed and they called it why we favorite tweets according to science there were quite a few comments backwards saying it's not exactly science but uh it's a survey study we did and it was interesting and helped us to examine the design of a particular feature one aspect and how it does feed through feedback and everything like that in that regard we can talk about why did they change it to a heart i mean i think it was early to know what was it at some point they changed it to a heart i did have it logged on my computer somewhere but at the time they argued that it was because it was a more universally recognized icon for showing that you liked things and actually we can see that the function of a bookmark star which is where we see the star most commonly used is mostly assigned to just kind of collecting things or you know it being a kind of thing you want to come back to which was only one portion of all the reasons we saw people using the favorite button whereas a heart like represents the majority of the cases we were we were talking about uh that they liked it or they found it useful information or emotionally stimulating or worth it worth their kind of like to it um or to say that they approved of it and things like that this is more aligned with non-verbal communications to say that something was good or approved or that you like it essentially and so the icon matched more the multiple use cases this the next question you could ask then is well if we have so many use cases for this like button or this favorite button whatever it is at that point should it be more than one button and here we're talking about the complexity of the user interface versus the likelihood that people want to say different things versus the amount of space you have to let them do those things you're forcing the user to think until it becomes intuitive what they're saying by clicking on this button so if you add options you add choice and therefore you add think and then you add barriers to them doing it so you want to make sure the technology's designed so it's super easy to do those things if you want them to do it if you make it possible to do it but super complex of it then you're increasing the barrier to actually doing it and the motivation you lose the motivation to do it and people don't do it um so they could for example have a kind of save button next to tweets which would fulfill the separate functionality of keeping things fused for later and have those go into a certain space uh where you find those because and then have a separate one which is just you communicating you don't want to see that tweet again necessarily but you said you liked it and that was allowed you to do that so yeah if you had these two separate functions that might uh make it clearer why you have the buttons and use them separately and to give you more power and more functionality without adding too much but if you start having 25 different buttons in there you're challenging the uh tolerance that people have for using your software there's user interface designers or software builders it's our choice it's our decision then to try and support the things that people are trying to do with your software as best as possible and a lot of user interface design is trying to first establish all of those ways that people might use software and then uh monitoring how people use the software then helps you to refine and improve things over time which is why we see social networks changing on us quite a regular basis to allow people to do things they are trying to do and then finding hacks to do so you could say that the way they're using the favorite button was kind of a hack of its main functionality especially with the competitions this is people reusing the function for something else and maybe that's why we know we start to see specific polls being built into twitter because now you can actually give people options and have them click on it and then show the results because it's giving people the functionality that they want to do with their community and without them having to reuse and confuse the use of a particular function they've already built in you just have your list of favorite tweets and now it's your list of likes tweets and you still have access to that um but it's got in there all the things you've sort of told someone you liked or you're non-verbally communicated and you don't necessarily want to keep those long-term i don't know um i can imagine this is a way from this particular one feature that that software might still evolve over time but that one feature is in lots of different uh bits of software lots of different social networks so in instagram we see the same heart button next everything and what the way they show you the way they feed through information about what other people have done about your artifact to your instagram pictures is you see this kind of a an icon which is a number of hearts and then another one which is number of uh comments on it and so you kind of get a metadata view as you hover over each each picture that you've put out and that that seems to permeate all sorts of collaborative things you know youtube has that how many comments you've got how many likes how many dislikes facebook instagram etc etc so it's interesting imagine youtube because youtube's got a thumbs up and a thumbs down and then you start to see kind of people getting quite uh upset or what does it mean that you've had you know so many thumbs downs is it the technical quality of the video yeah is it the editorial content yeah absolutely unless in the next video we're going to talk briefly about uh the social phenomenon that those different functions create because there was also this desire if a lot of people wanted to have a dislike button on facebook and they were always saying they you know we want to have this one have this bit and then never really existed um and that's because the button was originally there to approve of what was posted uh and so if you get approval and that's good because you put something out you think people will like to see and then you get account of whether people like it um but there are obviously lots of examples where people post things that they think other people would like to see because it's a bad situation they want other people they think other people would want to know that that's happened yeah somebody they know you know is ill or something like that yeah so they're spreading the news but then then there's this quandary as to well how do we how do we notify those people that we've seen that without saying like because we don't like the yeah you'd see lots of examples of people liking it and then saying i pressed like because i want i want you to know yeah that i've seen it and i i know that you're ill or like that you know they want they want to show approval non-verbally but without and then they have to back up so yeah so so facebook in early 216 did have this fuller range of responses that they could use so you could express upset but without directly saying that you think something is bad like you think a post is a bad post you could express a fuller range of emotions and what they would have done is work quite carefully on how easy it was to do that because obviously you're adding complexity to the process and i guess a lot of people do just probably still press like without engaging with the more deeper uh ways of expressing their emotion to it i think there's possibly uh cultural differences as well because i mean in britain we're not likely to throw some tears at something necessarily just because you know whereas i think in other cultures that their people are more direct sometimes but that's maybe me being a bit i don't know stereotyping does brits yeah i think you're right in terms of the difference between some cultures but it's interesting to know whether or not there's a difference in use or quantifiable difference in use for the icons so yeah so it's interesting to think why have they got these extra features how do they design it to make that easy people to use without it being a cost barrier and the way they did that is by having the button there for you to press if you want to but then if you hover and interact you can be more expressive if you wanted to be more expressive um and it's now easier there's technology is better such that it's easier to do that so the barrier of doing it is less so it's now easier to build it into your social network without ruining the use of it this is the technology barriers being reduced to the technology readiness which is back from our first video to make the motivations of people wanting to do it easier so there's less of a hurdle to jump over and it'll be interesting to see if we see these types of more expressive communications non-verbal communications come into other platforms as it becomes easier and so what we're going to do on the next video is start to talk about why systems are designed certain ways uh if you change house design what behaviors it encourages or discourages and then how those uh different bits of software relate back to the theories we had originally and see what behaviors they encourage on social networks or social software systems so sometimes if floppies would die so you often would make backup copies let's try this one sounds more hopeful and so there's this game called landerso we've just done a video on feedback and feed through and we had this board layout helping to explain the difference in the last video we had a google doc as the kind of artifact user interface and a user times multiple people so let's quickly connect that to twitter because we're going to talk about twitter and facebook for twitter the artifact in the middle is a kind of tweet this is something that people produce and then people look at it through different user interfaces their phone or browser whatever to interact with it and in facebook uh let's let's say that the main artifact on facebook is a social media post which might be a video or a picture or a message so let's get this out the way now without losing all the deliciousness um so now i'm going to talk a bit about an example study we did uh it was a few years ago now it was a collaboration between me and a friend in germany and his student who came to visit and we worked here for a while and we were interested in why people use the favorite button as it was at the time on twitter there's a little heart button which i think they call the like button but it used to be a star and it was a favorite button so we did a pretty large survey we had 606 people for that survey and there were multiple aspects to that survey but the key detail for this discussion is that we ask people to in general say why do you favor to tweet or like a tweet favorite tweet um and then we said so thank you for that example uh can you show us the last one you favorited and explain why your favorite that one and the reason we do both those things is because if you get people to talk uh hypothetically about situations you end up with pathetic data hypothetic data um and then if you uh ask people to talk about an actual example of something they've done you get more factual data is what i tend to say so we had these examples of why people had favorited all these tweets lots of examples and this was quite interesting and then we coded up all the examples and produced a taxonomy of 25 reasons which got picked up by buzzfeed and they called it why we favorite tweets according to science there were quite a few comments backwards saying it's not exactly science but uh it's a survey study we did and it was interesting and helped us to examine the design of a particular feature one aspect and how it does feed through feedback and everything like that in that regard we can talk about why did they change it to a heart i mean i think it was early to know what was it at some point they changed it to a heart i did have it logged on my computer somewhere but at the time they argued that it was because it was a more universally recognized icon for showing that you liked things and actually we can see that the function of a bookmark star which is where we see the star most commonly used is mostly assigned to just kind of collecting things or you know it being a kind of thing you want to come back to which was only one portion of all the reasons we saw people using the favorite button whereas a heart like represents the majority of the cases we were we were talking about uh that they liked it or they found it useful information or emotionally stimulating or worth it worth their kind of like to it um or to say that they approved of it and things like that this is more aligned with non-verbal communications to say that something was good or approved or that you like it essentially and so the icon matched more the multiple use cases this the next question you could ask then is well if we have so many use cases for this like button or this favorite button whatever it is at that point should it be more than one button and here we're talking about the complexity of the user interface versus the likelihood that people want to say different things versus the amount of space you have to let them do those things you're forcing the user to think until it becomes intuitive what they're saying by clicking on this button so if you add options you add choice and therefore you add think and then you add barriers to them doing it so you want to make sure the technology's designed so it's super easy to do those things if you want them to do it if you make it possible to do it but super complex of it then you're increasing the barrier to actually doing it and the motivation you lose the motivation to do it and people don't do it um so they could for example have a kind of save button next to tweets which would fulfill the separate functionality of keeping things fused for later and have those go into a certain space uh where you find those because and then have a separate one which is just you communicating you don't want to see that tweet again necessarily but you said you liked it and that was allowed you to do that so yeah if you had these two separate functions that might uh make it clearer why you have the buttons and use them separately and to give you more power and more functionality without adding too much but if you start having 25 different buttons in there you're challenging the uh tolerance that people have for using your software there's user interface designers or software builders it's our choice it's our decision then to try and support the things that people are trying to do with your software as best as possible and a lot of user interface design is trying to first establish all of those ways that people might use software and then uh monitoring how people use the software then helps you to refine and improve things over time which is why we see social networks changing on us quite a regular basis to allow people to do things they are trying to do and then finding hacks to do so you could say that the way they're using the favorite button was kind of a hack of its main functionality especially with the competitions this is people reusing the function for something else and maybe that's why we know we start to see specific polls being built into twitter because now you can actually give people options and have them click on it and then show the results because it's giving people the functionality that they want to do with their community and without them having to reuse and confuse the use of a particular function they've already built in you just have your list of favorite tweets and now it's your list of likes tweets and you still have access to that um but it's got in there all the things you've sort of told someone you liked or you're non-verbally communicated and you don't necessarily want to keep those long-term i don't know um i can imagine this is a way from this particular one feature that that software might still evolve over time but that one feature is in lots of different uh bits of software lots of different social networks so in instagram we see the same heart button next everything and what the way they show you the way they feed through information about what other people have done about your artifact to your instagram pictures is you see this kind of a an icon which is a number of hearts and then another one which is number of uh comments on it and so you kind of get a metadata view as you hover over each each picture that you've put out and that that seems to permeate all sorts of collaborative things you know youtube has that how many comments you've got how many likes how many dislikes facebook instagram etc etc so it's interesting imagine youtube because youtube's got a thumbs up and a thumbs down and then you start to see kind of people getting quite uh upset or what does it mean that you've had you know so many thumbs downs is it the technical quality of the video yeah is it the editorial content yeah absolutely unless in the next video we're going to talk briefly about uh the social phenomenon that those different functions create because there was also this desire if a lot of people wanted to have a dislike button on facebook and they were always saying they you know we want to have this one have this bit and then never really existed um and that's because the button was originally there to approve of what was posted uh and so if you get approval and that's good because you put something out you think people will like to see and then you get account of whether people like it um but there are obviously lots of examples where people post things that they think other people would like to see because it's a bad situation they want other people they think other people would want to know that that's happened yeah somebody they know you know is ill or something like that yeah so they're spreading the news but then then there's this quandary as to well how do we how do we notify those people that we've seen that without saying like because we don't like the yeah you'd see lots of examples of people liking it and then saying i pressed like because i want i want you to know yeah that i've seen it and i i know that you're ill or like that you know they want they want to show approval non-verbally but without and then they have to back up so yeah so so facebook in early 216 did have this fuller range of responses that they could use so you could express upset but without directly saying that you think something is bad like you think a post is a bad post you could express a fuller range of emotions and what they would have done is work quite carefully on how easy it was to do that because obviously you're adding complexity to the process and i guess a lot of people do just probably still press like without engaging with the more deeper uh ways of expressing their emotion to it i think there's possibly uh cultural differences as well because i mean in britain we're not likely to throw some tears at something necessarily just because you know whereas i think in other cultures that their people are more direct sometimes but that's maybe me being a bit i don't know stereotyping does brits yeah i think you're right in terms of the difference between some cultures but it's interesting to know whether or not there's a difference in use or quantifiable difference in use for the icons so yeah so it's interesting to think why have they got these extra features how do they design it to make that easy people to use without it being a cost barrier and the way they did that is by having the button there for you to press if you want to but then if you hover and interact you can be more expressive if you wanted to be more expressive um and it's now easier there's technology is better such that it's easier to do that so the barrier of doing it is less so it's now easier to build it into your social network without ruining the use of it this is the technology barriers being reduced to the technology readiness which is back from our first video to make the motivations of people wanting to do it easier so there's less of a hurdle to jump over and it'll be interesting to see if we see these types of more expressive communications non-verbal communications come into other platforms as it becomes easier and so what we're going to do on the next video is start to talk about why systems are designed certain ways uh if you change house design what behaviors it encourages or discourages and then how those uh different bits of software relate back to the theories we had originally and see what behaviors they encourage on social networks or social software systems so sometimes if floppies would die so you often would make backup copies let's try this one sounds more hopeful and so there's this game called lander\n"