ATTRACTIVENESS OF SOCIAL PLATFORMS: AN INVESTIGATION OF STUDIVZ Waltraud Ilmberger, Martin Schrepp and Theo Held SAP AG Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16, 69190 Walldorf ABSTRACT We conducted an exploratory online study on StudiVZ, the most famous social platform for students in Germany, to find out which quality dimensions influence the perceived attractiveness of social software. The participants (n=722) were asked about duration, frequency and intensity of their StudiVZ usage and their preferred platform features. After a short screenshot walkthrough, the participants rated the user interface with the User Experience Questionnaire (Laugwitz, Held & Schrepp, 2008). The results indicate that features for establishing contacts were used predominantly. The hedonic quality dimension stimulation of the UEQ had most influence on general attractiveness of the user interface. This influence increases with the usage intensity of the social platform. The results indicate that investments in hedonic qualities pay off as they are very relevant, not only for a first impression but also for users that interact with the system a lot. KEYWORDS Social networking software, attractiveness, user experience 1. INTRODUCTION Web-based solutions for social communication, for example Facebook, MySpace or StudiVZ (a very popular German platform for students), become more and more popular. Applications of this type are summarized under the term social networking software. They have different styles and address different target groups, but offer very similar functionalities (Dwyer, Hiltz & Passerini, 2007), like the ability to upload and share information, manage personal relationships, communicate, and to present the own person to other people. The aspect of creating and maintaining contacts is the main aspect of social networking software that distinguishes this type of products from blogs, wikis or social bookmarking solutions (Schmidt, 2006). How do users judge the quality and attractiveness of the interface of social networking software? Currently there is not much information concerning this question available. A first analysis of relevant success factors can be found for example in (Preece, 2001). A recent study (Hart, Ridley, Taher, Sas & Dix, 2008) showed that the user interface of Facebook performed poorly with regards to traditional usability criteria evaluated by a heuristic evaluation using Nielsen’s guidelines (Nielsen, 2011), but received very positive ratings by users concerning perceived ease of use. This could be explained by the fact that the more traditional usability criteria covered by the Nielsen principles are less important in this context than user experience factors, like for example fun, pleasure, identification (Hassenzahl, 2003), or surprise. In this paper, we investigate the impact of quality aspects of the user interface of social networking software on the perceived attractiveness of the product. We are especially interested in how this impact changes with duration and intensity of use. We selected the social networking platform StudiVZ (http://www.studivz.net/) to investigate these questions in a large scale online study. StudiVZ is a quite popular social networking software in Germany. The main target group for this application are students of German universities. IADIS International Conference Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction 2011 257