Part 3
Read the article and answer the questions below.
A. For a long time, Facebook had a tool that allowed people to report photos as spam or abuse. But of the cases reported, only a small percentage of the photos were actually offensive. One of the designers on the team felt there probably was a reason for this, so he studied the cases carefully. He found that in most cases users just didn’t like the photos of themselves their friends had posted, and wanted them taken down. To enable people to report cases like these, the Facebook team added a new feature. This feature allowed people to message their friends to ask them to take the photo down. But only 20 percent of people used the function.
B. The team worked on the case further—it spoke to communications experts and studied rules of polite language. It discovered that users didn’t just want to tell their friends to take the photo down—they wanted to tell their friends how the photo made them feel. So the team made a small change. People could select a message to explain why they didn’t like it, such as, “It’s embarrassing.” This small change had a huge impact—60 percent of people who reported photos used the function. Surveys showed that people on both sides of the conversation felt better as a result.
C. While data about how people are using a product can help designers make decisions, it isn’t always as simple as following the numbers. Other factors such as intuition, research, and testing of design are equally important. As design expert Margaret Gould Stewart points out, “Data can help you make a good design great, but it will never make a bad design good.”
D. At one time, YouTube was looking for ways to encourage more people to rate videos. When Gould Stewart and her team looked into the data, they found that most people were only using either the highest rating (five stars) or the lowest rating (one star). Almost no one was using two, three, or four stars. So the team decided to simplify the rating—it gave users a choice between good or bad: thumbs up or thumbs down.
E. YouTube tried to prepare people for this change by sharing data about how the five-star rating system wasn’t being used as intended. It announced that it was going to change the system to match user behavior. When the change was made, it was still frustrating for some users as they had become attached to the old design. However, because of the preparatory steps taken earlier, it was easier for YouTube to get users to accept the change.
1. Which statement is true according to the information in paragraph A?