In this age of service websites and apps popping up all over the place, inevitably we as Internet users find that services duplicate each other. (Take the social-bookmarking sites Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us; they are pretty much identical in function.)

When this happens, we tend to weed out which service we’d prefer to use with something that seems more like an instinct than a conscious thought process. We evaluate identical sites, and indeed every site we choose to visit, based on their usability, available community, site structure, and design, and from there we choose whether we want to stay on that page or visit another site.

What we might not realize, as web designers/developers, is that our own sites are constantly being evaluated in the same manner, whether we offer an identical service as another site or not. Our users are often just as discerning as we are (and sometimes more so); if we’re having a harder time with receiving and keeping visitors to our sites, we may need to reevaluate how our sites look, function, and serve in users’ online lives.

In this article, I’ll compare and contrast StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, studying their virtues as well as issues, and how we can learn from their individual troubles and successes as web designers and developers.

The Identical-Service Conundrum

I’ve had accounts at both Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us for ages, because both places used to be pretty good at saving my bookmarks socially, and I used to have different buddies on both sites’ networks. Now…well, I’m looking at getting rid of one of them. It’s not just because it’s annoying to sign into two sites and keep bookmark lists the same across two sites. It’s also because of the QUALITY of the service I’m getting from each site.

For me, it’s pretty easy to choose one to drop, because the usability of one of the sites (Del.icio.us) has gone downhill sharply, while the other one (Stumbleupon) has stayed pretty much the same. These are the issues I experience with Del.icio.us:

Del.icio.us Problems

• Takes forever to load, even on fast connections–and you might as well not even try on dialup. (I waited FORTY-FIVE MINUTES for it to load on dialup, with nothing showing up at all and nothing else trying to load at the same time.)
• Login process works about 40% of the time; otherwise, it either throws you to an error screen which doesn’t help you, or just hangs until you finally get tired of waiting and refresh the page.
• No real way to connect with people on there–you can “follow” them, but it doesn’t really provide a good way to interact, not like it used to.
• Useless feature: “stacks,” which basically do the same thing as tags. Why bother?

Stumbleupon, however, is not free of issues itself, as you’ll see below:

StumbleUpon Problems

• Instead of saving the “real” address of a page, it saves a “StumbleUpon”-shortened link address that tells you nothing about what you’re visiting.
• When you click on a “StumbleUpon”-ified link, an annoying black bar across top of the page tells you everything about StumbleUpon and its service, but takes away from the content you were looking at.
• It’s very hard to add bookmarks if you don’t want to use the black bar–the “Add a New Page” feature is buried at the bottom of the left column on your profile page

When I compare and contrast the two services, this is the full list of pros and cons:

Del.icio.us Pros Can save “real” links Not hard to add links, once you can finally login Doesn’t have a browser-wide feature that detracts from your Internet usage Cons Can’t even login at all sometimes Text-based link format, which should load easier but doesn’t Networking/community is pretty much nonexistent Useless feature: “stacks” Does not offer a way to randomly browse Internet sites Tag system can get unwieldy and hard to manage if you have a lot of links Link-saving process sometimes hangs the whole browser

StumbleUpon Pros Can login easily, even on dialup Pictorial link list, so you know more of what to expect from each link Better ways to network with others No useless features “Stumble!” button easily browses your interests Categorizing takes a little longer, but helps other users as well as yourself Link-saving process takes seconds, even on dialup Cons Not easy to save “real” links Hard to find how to save links, but once you do, it’s easy Takes over your browser window with the black bar when you’re logged in

Given this compare-and-contrast table, there are a lot more pros for using Stumbleupon than Del.icio.us, and the pros are very important structural and design features rather than surface-level perks. The cons, while measurable, are bearable. Meanwhile, Del.icio.us seems to have serious issues with the login and link scripts hanging up, which kills the effectiveness and utility of the site itself. Why would anybody use a service that won’t even let you login most of the time?

What Can We Learn from These Pros and Cons?

As web designers and developers, there are several important lessons we can learn from this compare/contrast example:

1. Make sure all the scripts that make your page function actually work, as close to 100% of the time as possible.
2. Do not accidentally “hide” important/useful features or info from your users, either by putting links to them on obscure pages or making the links appear in small text.
3. Do not take over a user’s whole internet experience with your service/app, without an easy option to opt-out.
4. Make sure that all the features you’re developing for your site actually need to be developed for better functionality.
5. Don’t make changes to your service/app and not let your users know.

The main takeaway is this: we always need to be mindful of the user’s experience when we design and maintain our sites. It’s hard for me, as the Internet mommy to withinmyworld.org, to step back and see my electronic baby objectively–but that is exactly what I must do, and what we must do as purveyors of Internet content. We must be prepared to judge our sites as our users will be judging them, looking critically at how we’ve designed our sites’ layout, graphics, code/scripts, and content to see if there are places we should make it more efficient, elegant, and easy to browse.

Think of it this way–if we don’t take the time to evaluate our sites objectively, then we will never know if our users are having difficulties with our sites, because we won’t have any users!