June 3, 2009 

Social Media User Experience: Is it the Contrast?

One of the tried and true methods of creating flow state for audiences in broadcast is the use of contrast to create meaning and subtext between shots in a sequence. This concept was first articulated by filmmaker Sergei Eistenstein when he went to the circus. He found that the more rings a circus added, the more meaning and interest the performances took on.

For example, watching a juggling act alone is entertaining. Adding a fire-eater who performs in a ring next to the juggling ring creates a new experience of watching both acts, but also adds meaning between the two acts. When you have three rings of acts performing at once, the viewer takes even more meaning, gets even more entertainment, and simply can’t take their eyes off the action for a moment.

Today, this approach is so pervasive it’s cliche. Think of the shot sequence for almost any product in a television commercial: a master shot that sets the scene, pleasant expressions of people who can relate to the target audience, and product shot. Juxtaposing smiling faces and products along with light/dark color values engages audiences and sells products.

Applying this idea to the user experience through social networking platforms draws some interesting parallels. People are spending exponentially more time on social media sites. If you think of the visual elements of these sites, there is a ton of contrast and meaning built through the typical browsing experience. Lots of faces of people you know, set against each other in various combinations. Between pages, each of the big three social networks also offer varying degrees of contrast between page states in design choices available to the creator of that profile: both in user interface control placement and color.

MySpace: Overwhelming Contrast

MySpace offers users the highest degree of customization: users can affect not only the colors, fonts, and sounds as part of their page presentation, but also rearrange the user interface controls. To tweens and teens, this is appealing as a creator: you can build, tear down, and rebuild your online persona as it relates to your peer group online and off. It also presents a browsing experience akin to what MTV was to television when it first began: rapid-fire, high contrast, and unexpected pairings of visual elements to keep kids engaged.

The problem is when this contrast extends itself to the interface controls. TV takes you through the experience. On the Web, you need to have consistency in the way you control the experience, so the user can effortlessly gain value from the entire experience and not get stuck on confused on any particular page.

This has led to is what I call the “hollowing out” of MySpace as a social experience. It’s just difficult to visit multiple users in one sitting. It gets tiresome, annoying, and overwhelming. To me, this inconsistency will ultimately lead MySpace to fulfill the destiny of Yahoo’s recently defunct Geocities. When the collection of pages becomes an array of mini-sites each with it’s own rules on how to shape a one-page experience, what you end up with is ultimately valueless to any audience. The value is only in the vanity and satisfaction of the individual creator.

Facebook: low contrast, high structure

On the opposite extreme is the freight train of Facebook. Here, the user controls are completely locked down from one page state to the other. Going from one page to the next, the majority of the visual contrast and meaning come from pictures of people. Here we are back to the meaning inherent in collections of faces of people you know. The most dominant visual aspects in the experience are the Facebook logo, and pictures of people.

As applications became popular, they started to create a lot of the visual noise, and meaning that MySpace is (in)famous for. Recent redesigns of the user experience have buried the 15-ring circus of the old mini-feed. I think this is what has vaulted applications like Living Social to be most popular: it provides the feed with a short burst of five contrasting images next to the profile avatar: adding color and meaning to the individual and the page without overwhelming the experience. The same goes for how many photos are posted. The way Facebook presents these photos in the stream is similar to Living Social, and draws the attention of the viewer because it stands out with contrasting color and size, without dominating.

It’s also interesting to me that Facebook’s tight control over contrast and UI control finds a great affinity with suburban people here in the US, versus the mostly urban and artistic members of MySpace. Is social media a reflection of the contrasts in the daily life of its users?

Twitter: finding the balance

What’s interesting about Twitter is how it has found a visual balance between MySpace and Facebook in terms of the browsing experience. Users can express themselves within a range of color settings: image backgrounds, font colors, and avatar pictures. Where information and controls are presented, however, never changes.

What results is contrast and subtextual meaning through the experience between page states, but the controls from page to page are always in the same place, using the same hierarchy (organization in the order of the main functions of the site) and with the same font. So even when someone goes as far as to make their type a color that is virtually unreadable, users can continue down the path of discovery without getting stuck. It keeps the experience moving and interesting without bogging someone down in the blaring auto-play sounds of MySpace, or boring them over a few browsed pages outside of the photo books of Facebook.

This is also the same principal currently driving Tumblr: the quick-blogging platform that resides somewhere between Twitter and blog platforms. Whether Tumblr will ultimately become a major player is still up for debate, but using a similar user experience template to Twitter seems a good bet for the future of Web-based social networks that need to find a balance between personal expression and engaging user experiences.

How much of this will bleed into brand sites?

Also interesting is how corporate and promotional hubs take these lessons of visual contrast and engagement back to their own online presences. As part of my own practice when helping develop strategy to redesign or create a new presence for brands, it’s a valuable lesson to understand: much of a brand’s equity is in the controls and context of the experience. Contrasting image and color choices can help make a brand’s presence more meaningful, engaging, and ultimately valuable to the people who mean the most to that company’s bottom line.

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Related posts:

  1. What is MySpace Good For Anymore?
  2. MySpace: Promote, Facebook: Friends, Twitter: People
  3. The Three Colorful Circles of Social Media Strategy
  4. IDEA2009: Social and Experience Design in Toronto

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  • http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/ gravity7

    Michael,

    Interesting take on use of film! I'd like to complicate matters a bit by suggesting that the function of juxtaposition (contrast) functions on two axes in film: action and time. You mention Eisenstein — at the time he was developing the montage shots unique to cinema (as a form of art), American film-maker DW Griffith was working out the editing language for action. Some say that Russian and American film then took different trajectories: Russians mastering montage; Americans mastering action.

    Both require use of shot juxtaposition to develop and hold a narrative in time, and through editing, to capture action. (One could get creative and claim that the multiple rings of activity on a circus floor are in fact a visual montage.)

    I think time comes into play in social media — after all, communication is a series of (sometimes episodic) transactions *over time*. Perhaps one might also extend the film analytic to close, medium, and long shot techniques of data visualization (around social activities). For example, the shot of the user, the shot of the group, the shot of the site's overall use and activities?

    It might also be possible to extend narrative and dramatic forms to social media: in the framing of talk (posts, exchanges, threads; or testimonials, questions, answers..), in the contextualization of activity (dating, jobs, movies, socializing?), in the use of biography, in production of news, and of course in entertainment.

    That said there's neither script nor stage, really, in social media (if FB were a stage, its audience comes and goes, and there's no “fourth wall” experience that transforms the stage into theater).

    Deleuze's two books on cinema offer a great number of “signs” unique to film — I've thought one might create a similar kind of semiotic for social media: symbolic gestures, acts, tokens and objects; rituals and pastimes; forms of self-presentation; forms of episodic (discontinuous in time but still time-based) interaction; audiences (single, pairs, groups, communities, public); and so on… Would be an interesting project to get some old “new media” folks together and do a wknd on film and social media theory.

    cheers,
    adrian

  • http://twitter.com/mleis Michael Leis

    Thanks Adrian. In this post I was only focusing on image juxtaposition, but you're absolutely right: Film interaction is also like social media in that it needs to also consider the mediation of time and space as part of the overall constructed perceived experience.

    The “stageless” action Griffith pioneered ended up also driving the 180-degree rule, and master-shot format, where you had to establish a longer view of where the characters and objects were in relationship to each other first, and then respect those relationships in space/time through subsequent closer shots so that the audience wouldn't get confused. This was another paradigm that MTV disregarded and changed forever in the music video age… another story for another time :)

    But you're also touching on two other conventions in your comment: metric montage and mise en scene. The former creating flow and meaning from the timing and shot duration during the montage; the latter proposing that every object “within the scene” carries deeper meaning.

    Where this comes into play — for me — in social media is really complex, interesting, and dynamic in terms of narrative construction. First, social media, like screenwriting, at this point in time is more the perception of communication rather than “real' communication.

    Tweets, status updates, and the like are clipped bits of text that are rewrites of our own narratives. They're viewed linearly, with a beginning/middle/end to the session. However, to the creator, the construction has to accommodate circular narrative: a main topic altered and filtered my multiple perspectives back and forth in time.

    And I love the idea of Facebook as a stage, which I think it is. An old adage, and I forget who coined it, goes something like, “The most important parts of any play are the entrances and exits.” Social Media, and especially the current Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter interfaces are largely dramatic entrances and exits. The best being compelling, ambiguous and revealing new information.

    All great thought-provoking points. Thanks again for contributing.

  • http://twitter.com/mleis Michael Leis

    Thanks Adrian. In this post I was only focusing on image juxtaposition, but you're absolutely right: Film interaction is also like social media in that it needs to also consider the mediation of time and space as part of the overall constructed perceived experience.

    The “stageless” action Griffith pioneered ended up also driving the 180-degree rule, and master-shot format, where you had to establish a longer view of where the characters and objects were in relationship to each other first, and then respect those relationships in space/time through subsequent closer shots so that the audience wouldn't get confused. This was another paradigm that MTV disregarded and changed forever in the music video age… another story for another time :)

    But you're also touching on two other conventions in your comment: metric montage and mise en scene. The former creating flow and meaning from the timing and shot duration during the montage; the latter proposing that every object “within the scene” carries deeper meaning.

    Where this comes into play — for me — in social media is really complex, interesting, and dynamic in terms of narrative construction. First, social media, like screenwriting, at this point in time is more the perception of communication rather than “real' communication.

    Tweets, status updates, and the like are clipped bits of text that are rewrites of our own narratives. They're viewed linearly, with a beginning/middle/end to the session. However, to the creator, the construction has to accommodate circular narrative: a main topic altered and filtered my multiple perspectives back and forth in time.

    And I love the idea of Facebook as a stage, which I think it is. An old adage, and I forget who coined it, goes something like, “The most important parts of any play are the entrances and exits.” Social Media, and especially the current Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter interfaces are largely dramatic entrances and exits. The best being compelling, ambiguous and revealing new information.

    All great thought-provoking points. Thanks again for contributing.