Today’s hot topic on the internet is “What’s this new Facebook Lite application?”
It looks like FaceBook jumped the gun on asking users to evaluate their new FaceBook Lite version. It wasn’t quite ready for prime time, it seems. But that’s only given people an opportunity to speculate about the purpose of the application.
The beta announcement that went to some users looked for very open-ended feedback:
We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.
I'm sure Facebook got to recapitulate every tester's nightmare about a release that escapes too soon. But there's another interesting thought here. This message has a succinct, one sentence statement of intention here. It would be interesting to know whether this is enough direction for users to give useful feedback. Would it be more useful to ask “Do you find this interface simpler to understand?” or “Do you get faster response time?”
Classically in usability studies, we go to great lengths to observe what people do with the software without prompting – with as few clues from the observer as possible. But the skilled observer is crucial here. In a usability study, that person is in a good position to interpret any difficulties with respect to the expected behavior of the user and the system together.
Untrained users are bad at accurately self-reporting their own behavior. That's why we have to train junior testers to express their observations in terms of expected versus actual behavior. I don’t expect most users to express themselves in those terms. I’d expect the vast majority of feedback to boil down to “like/don’t like” which is of limited helpfulness. User feedback with a "like/don't like" indication and some reason why they feel that way can be quite useful though, especially when aggregated over a large set of users. The folks at Facebook will have the opportunity to collect the data about the expectations of the users and how Facebook Lite matches to their actual requirements.
