12
Feb
2010
Dear Facebook
Dear Facebook,
Generally I don’t care when you mess with your UI – for the most part I like seeing that changes are being made. But seriously there are a few things that SUCK with your new interface – and for once, I don’t blame the 1000′s who have changed their status updates to complain and rant about the fact that you changed a site they probably spend half their days stalking people on.
For starters, when I attempt to lurk through people’s pictures I loose the entire left-hand navigation. SO when my user flow is to select ‘Photos’ and then some random album – the only navigation I’m left with is a contextual menu back to that person’s profile and their other albums.
What if said album isn’t worth creeping through and I want a quick way back to the main ‘photos’ section – hell I may not even know this person if it was just a tagged image. So now, I have to click back through on the Facebook logo to return to the homepage and select ‘Photos’ again. Thinking of it from the use case of a professional lurker that is A LOT of clicking just to look through 4 or 5 albums.
While we are on that note – why can’t I filter down by tagged images v. new albums? Lame, give me my filtering back.
I’ll give you points for moving notifications up to the left hand corner – but then take them immediately back for leaving the chat box floating in the bottom right-hand corner, even though you list my online friends when chat is on over on the left-nav, it doesn’t matter cause you take them away when I look at an image! Why repeat the functionality? Just do it once and do it right.
I’ll end my rant on your search box. I cannot tell you how many times I have attempted to do a search and accidentally put it in the status field. Hmm that could be embarrassing – imagine, creepers everywhere accidentally publishing the names of people they are looking at – all because you moved a search box into the middle of the freaking page above another element with the same functionality.
Now, I know you have money, and I know you hire UX professionals – because I’m pretty sure that I applied for a job with you once… but seriously – maybe you want to look at investing some more of your money into user testing before you start adding more features. Just a thought.
Sincerely,
Loyal Facebook Lurker
