Tag: facebook usability

Memo to Mark Zuberberg: You are not invincible. Facebook did not get to be the top social media network because it was terrific, but only because it’s so much better than MySpace. There’s always been lots of room for improvement, and yet, in the 4 years I’ve been a Facebooker, at least half the changes make it harder to use and/or more intrusive.

And now, with Google+ waiting in the wings, your position is precarious. Just as it did with search, Google provides a qualitatively better user experience; all it needs now is an active and vibrant user base. Meanwhile, Facebook’s user experience just took a serious turn for the worse. Again.

Some of these bone-headed things I just don’t understand, especially when you think about how much of Facebook’s income stream is generated by professional marketers—marketers who have, in many cases, invested significant time and money into their fanpages and their ad campaigns.

• All of a sudden, the default is NOT to get mail from Facebook. Facebook’s fastest growing demographic segments are 40 and over, and (unlike our children) we, for the most part, don’t spend our entire waking lives on social media. For those accustomed (as I am) to going on Facebook by following an e-mail link, you’ve just cut out much of their viewing time, unless they notice and switch the setting from the default (which I did).
• Used to be, when you added a friend, you got access to your friend category lists and could add someone to multiple lists with a couple of clicks. Now, it shows just a few. Even clicking “Show All Lists” results in only the first nine choices. I have about 40 categories, in part because of the (idiotic and now finally abandoned, I think) 20-name limit on how many people you could send a notice to at once within a friend category. So for categories where I know a lot of people, like high school buddies, residents of my area, and marketers, I have multiple lists. Now I have no way to put people in the right category unless it’s one of the first nine in my selection. UGH! Google+ got this one right from the very beginning, noting that we have different types of people in our lives, and message/interact with them differently. Mark, do you really think paying my VA to do this simple thing for me is going to add value to my perception of Facebook?
• Links from e-mails go to unexpected places. Several times, I’ve tried to click on a discussion and end up in my main page. then I have to hunt for the person I’m talking to, figure out where the message history is that day, and waste time. When that happens, the temptation is great to simply not continue the conversation.

Mind you, I’m not criticizing the changes just because they’re new and different (though it does seem that just as we learn how to navigate the latest interface, it shifts again). Some of them improve the experience. I like getting an e-mail with a whole thread worth of posts. I like the ticker. And I like that Facebook quietly introduced the long-sought feature a couple of months ago that allows owners of a fanpage to e-mail their fans (those who’ve clicked Like).

But really, you have to wonder if they’ve ever heard of beta-testing or focus groups over there. In the words of one well-known marketer who posted a comment on my annoyed post, “Google+ here we go!”