FriendGroupVR: Design Concepts Using Virtual Reality to Organize Social Network Friends

Creating friend lists offers social network users the ability to select a fine-grained audience for their posts, thereby reducing the amount of unwanted disclosures. However, research has shown that the user burden involved in creating and managing friend lists leads to the fact that this functionality is rarely used, despite its advantages. In this paper, we propose two design concepts using virtual reality to allow the user to create and organize her friend lists. Whereas the first "pragmatic" concept is targeted towards usability and practicability using a metaphor similar to card sorting, the second "playful" concept has the goal to achieve a high user experience score by offering a VR game to sort and organize the friends. In a lab study, we compared the two concepts with the Facebook interface in terms of usability, user experience and error rate (like missing friends in a group or friends placed in the wrong group). We were able to show that both designs significantly outperform the Facebook interface in both usability and user experience. The playful interface is experienced as more interesting and stimulating than its pragmatic counterpart, at the cost of an increased error rate.