Social Control

09 March 10

Have you ever walked into a fast food restaurant you'd never been to before and just stared blankly at the overwhelming menu on the wall behind the counter? There are so many options and it's hard to know where to start. That's a challenge in the industry: They want to give people options but every additional option risks overwhelming their clientele.

The same concept exists in creating digital media like social media apps and websites. It's called the functionality/usability trade-off and it basically means this: The more functionality you want the less usability you get.

Think of it like the remote control you use for your TV. You want tons of buttons to be able to control everything but, because there are so many buttons, you end up with huge remote with a bazillion buttons and anyone with a regular-sized thumb has trouble finding the right button to press.

This is something we deal with every single day at Social Control. You can see in some of our websites and apps just what we've done to manage this trade-off. Sometimes we offer larger category buttons to drill down to more options. That's one effective way of dealing with it. Other times, especially in social media apps, we don't give very many options to keep the user experience as easy as possible.

As your brand is planning new communication and marketing initiatives, consider the functionality/usability tradeoff and what essentials must exist in your project.

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