Legado digital no Facebook: avaliação de comunicabilidade da transformação de contas em memorial

Abstract

With the advancement of technology and the widespread use of digital media, people divide their lives between the real world and the virtual world. All belongings of a deceased person constitute their legacy. Accordingly, the set of digital belongings—such as accounts, data, information, f inancial assets, content, and more—makes up what is known as the Digital Legacy. In this context, the social network Facebook allows users to decide what happens to their account after death, offering the choice between deleting the data or transforming the account into a memorial. This work aimed to evaluate the communicability of this functionality, seeking to understand whether the design choices are appropriate to make it clear, intuitive, easy to understand, and usable. To this end, we employed the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) and the Communicability Evaluation Method (CEM), which identify communication problems in the message transmission from designer to user, from the sender’s and receiver’s perspectives, respectively. The results showed that, although the designer demonstrated several concerns to avoid user confusion and interaction difficulties, their choices were not always effective, and some user challenges were not foreseen. Comparing the results, some issues were identified by both methods, reinforcing each other, while others were mainly revealed through CEM when observing users interacting with the functionality. Finally, suggestions for possible improvements were proposed, which may be implemented or serve as examples for others working with similar features, allowing for more assertive decisions in this context.