Usability comparison of two social networking sites: A I-ICI based approach

Abstract

This paper compares the differences in its usability of two most popular social networking sites (SNS) Facebook and MySpace in terms of their adoption of features in its interfaces design by considering human computer interaction (HCI) design patterns. First, this study concerns on brief history of social network websites that have dominated the Internet in popularity and then declined over time due to major setbacks or system design failures of each SNS. Second, this study focused on the usability heuristics and how they can be incorporated to social network websites to improve their chances of success and how they influence in the field of HCI among people. Thus, this study considered a broad review on these two sides according to worldwide reviews on its statistical rate of active visitors after each change made, then assessed the usability of each sites across six dimensions such as simplicity, efficiency, satisfaction, proficiency, security and privacy. As per result of that, this paper proposes that there is a significant difference between both networking sites that is mainly based on proficiency which indicates Facebook is rated higher than MySpace. This review also indicates that Facebook site has a lack of privacy in order to compare with MySpace site. Furthermore simplicity, efficiency, and satisfaction of Facebook are a bit higher than MySpace. In a nutshell, among the two social networking sites, Facebook is rated higher than MySpace for recent years as it adopts eye catching I-ICI design patterns. Moreover the researcher reveals good practices for customizing the Facebook's interface by adding more I-ICI patterns for enhancing its usability.