Usability study of icon designs with social network functions

Abstract

The social media and related applications were developed and spread fast in our daily lives. Many users of social network sites (SNS) would use social network functions to communicate with their friends, such as share, like (or dislike), check in, upload interesting information to website, etc. Research on visible icons design in SNS user interfaces were one of the most important direct manipulation research issues. Moreover, how the privacy setting in different interaction model were discussed in this study. The results showed that: (1) The well-designed icons illustrated higher concreteness, less complexity, higher familiarity and suitable semantic distance than others; (2) There existed higher privacy setting in personal photo content than landscape photo content; (3) The design element used with most highest percentage was the "man image" because the functions were related to friends' photos and popular users' photos in the photo sharing Apps; (4) Different privacy setting considerations were dependent on different interaction models and scenarios. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.