Week 1: 4chan - User Interface and Experience Analysis

Internet forums have been around for a long time, but it wasn't until the early 2000s that image boards started to become popular. An image board is a type of forum where the text posts are usually accompanied by an image file, which is usually related to the text. One of the most popular image boards, 4chan, launched in 2003 and is still very relevant today.

Although a lot of new features were added throughout these 14 years, the website's user interface remained mostly the same. For today's standards it looks very dated, but the visuals come down to personal opinion, some people might like the old school look. The problem with the user interface is the usability. Without messing with the settings and using browser extensions to improve the UI, it can be difficult to navigate the website.

A screenshot of 4chan's technology board /g/

Images are a very important part of 4chan, but they can't be resized. They are shown as a thumbnail that expanded to full size when clicked on. This is a problem for large images because as a thumbnail they are hard to read, but if you expand them they take up most of the screen.

Posts are ordered in chronological order, and since users are anonymous, all posts are identified by a unique number. While you can see a reply by hovering over the number of the reply (top right corner), you can't see any replies to the reply unless you click on it. And instead of showing the reply when you click on the number, the website will automatically scroll to the reply. This is not intuitive because you have to go back afterwards if you want to read anything you scrolled past. Lastly, unlike other forums such as reddit, on 4chan you can reply to multiple posts within the same post). For this reason, it's sometimes hard to tell which post the reply is for. 

These may not be an issue for someone who is used to it, but I'm sure new users will struggle until they learn how. New users may also find it difficult to discover boards. Below is the header with links to all 4chan boards. Someone that hasn't used 4chan before probably wouldn't know what these letters stand for. An example is "b", which is the "Random" board. The letter "b" is unrelated to the word "Random". Someone that doesn't know might accidentally end up in a board that contains very not safe for work content (some boards have almost no rules).

Header board selection

Thankfully, there are ways around these problems. There are lots of browser extensions such as 4chanX that make 4chan more user friendly. Mobile apps like Clover also have major improvements over the desktop version.