Bio
A Lifetime of Creativity
Hi, I’m Srishti, and I have an obsession with BuzzFeed. Figure 1 is a screenshot of the tabs open on one of my Google Chrome windows (I also have a problem with having too many tabs open):
Figure 1. One of my open windows.
As you can see, there are at 6 tabs that are just BuzzFeed. Clearly, I have a problem. But I’m not the only one. Over just the past few years, BuzzFeed has amassed millions of users around the globe and has a reported value of over $1.7 billion. For a website whose main articles revolve around the Kardashian family, the infamous dress, and tweet compilations, that’s pretty amazing. While BuzzFeed already takes up 90% of my time, here are my tips for them to make me spend 100% of my time on their site.
For first time users, BuzzFeed is intimidating, to say the very least. Learnability isn’t too hard, as you just click on an article to read it, but the overwhelming display can make it hard to understand at first. There is no reasoning to the sections, and they appear very randomly. My guess as to why is to introduce the user to new thoughts and sections, but sometimes it can be unwanted, especially if you aren’t in the mood to read something serious.
Figure 2: A screenshot of the random sections of BuzzFeed.
As you can see in Figure 2, an article about potential sexual assault appears below a silly video, which appears below BuzzFeed reviews of technology and next to a list of recipes. It can be nice to read random articles, but speaking from experience, sometimes you just want to read a funny article, or only look at recipes. I believe BuzzFeed wanted to advertise all its new sections, but it only adds to the clutter and gives you something you may not want. It is actually possible to see categories in BuzzFeed, but the affordances are unclear, so it’s like it doesn’t exist.
I suggest that BuzzFeed should reorganize and actually have defined sections on their page. When you enter the site, there seems to be no order. At the top, there is a bar of random articles that you can see if you hover over them, as shown in Figure 3. In my opinion, this bar has no purpose, and really just adds to the clutter. To simplify the site, they should just get rid of the bar.
Figure 3. The top bar of random articles.
The top menu section, as shown in Figure 4, with “News”, “Tasty”, and “Quizzes”, makes sense, and it almost gets overshadowed by this bar. The affordances there, like “LOL” and the trending arrow, make sense, so they should be the most important part of the top.
Figure 4. The top menu section says “BuzzFeed News Videos Quizzes…. LOL Latinx →”
For fun, they could even have you enter a mood in the beginning, so you don’t get depressing news articles when you need to laugh. Sort of like the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google Search. Figure 5 is a diagram:
Figure 5. A schematic of the pop-up that should appear when you visit the site. It lets you pick a category and log in, but allows you to close the pop up if you don’t want to use it.
For frequent users like me, the site can get very annoying, as it never remembers what you have already read, so you continually see the same articles. When you hope to waste time by reading a couple articles, you need to see new ones, so they should provide them, because they do have enough to show you. One idea I had was to have users log in. It could be one of those logins that let you log in with your Gmail or Facebook accounts, like so many websites. This way, BuzzFeed could save information about articles you like or categories you like, just like Netflix, so it could provide new recommendations for you. It could still let you browse the site without logging in, but it should prompt you to when you visit the site.
In addition, if they organized the page a bit better, it may make more sense. Instead of putting random sections everywhere, they could have defined sections based on what the user likes. They could also put random articles, but they wouldn’t need to have News next to Recipes if the user never reads Recipes. This would be much easier if they gave the user the option to log in or otherwise remembered what they visited (as I’m sure they already do to collect advertisement data).
Overall, I love BuzzFeed, along with millions of others. However, BuzzFeed could make a few improvements, specifically to enhance learnability, as most users don’t know about all the features, like picking categories, when they first visit. They also could have an optional tutorial like other sites for that. In terms of affordances, symbols like “LOL” are very clear, and they should keep those and add other symbols if relevant. Thank you BuzzFeed for making this article take hours as I read plenty of tweet compilations.