The Broken Context — April 15, 2008
I often observe how other people use products and services in their day-to-day life. This has helped me to identify user experience blunders in other products and remember not to do the same in mine. A recent observation made on Facebook made me realize the importance of context in natural interaction flow.
On Facebook the main navigation is on the top of the page and it show links to Profile, Friends, Inbox, etc. This is fine as long as you are on the home page or on your own profile page. But often users visit other people’s profile pages for obvious reasons. What happens here is that (naturally) users associate the top navigation with the current profile owner. In other words, even when not in your own profile page people tend to associate the top navigation bar with the person they are looking at. So in order to see who’s friends with the currently profile owner, users click on the ‘Friends’ link on the navigation bar. Consequently the association between context and task has been broken and hence the user is mislead.
In experience design word such as ‘my’, ‘your’ and other subjective terms are used to prevent this misleading when the same action can be performed on different objects of the same class. Although this won’t make everyone aware of the current context; it will at lease reduce the confusion among the majority of users.