Finding a Way Through the Social Media Labyrinth: Guiding Design Through User Expectations

Social networking services (SNSs) have become integral in people’s lives to create and maintain meaningful relationships. However, their user interfaces (UIs) have matured into complex structures often manifesting as labyrinthine layouts that result in frustration among users – for instance, when trying to control privacy-related settings. In this paper, we address this problem with two studies. First, we assessed users’ expectations through an extended card sorting exercise, tasking N = 21 participants to group 55 common SNS features. Based on these findings, we describe four design considerations to improve a UI’s discoverability and support users in finding relevant features. The second study utilises our considerations to develop an expectation-based UI, which we compared with Facebook’s UI to demonstrate the effect of labyrinthine navigation. Through both studies, this paper reveals a misalignment between SNSs and their users’ expectations and investigates human-centred opportunities to mitigate unethical design.