The Usability of Social Software

Abstract

Emergent Web 2.0 technologies and applications (such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, mashups, and folksonomies) present a range of opportunities and benefits and are increasingly used by people to interact with each other. Despite the growing popularity of social software, there is a lack of research on the usability of these tools. This chapter focuses on how users interact with Web 2.0 technology, discusses a conceptual framework for a usability evaluation of social software, describes the different types of social software applications, and offers guidelines for their usability evaluation. The argument advanced is that social software usability should be viewed as a set of principles and practices aimed to deliver more service-orientated Web 2.0-based applications.