sugarenia.com

I’m on Facebook. I’m not that active there, but I use it sometimes to stalk learn more about the cool people I meet online.

For this ranting, I’m gonna use Petros’s profile, because he’s a cool guy and I know that he started working on github some months ago. He also went on a trip to San Fransisco! How cool is that? I wanna see photos of that trip. How difficult can it be?

The mysterious case of Facebook photos

That’s Petros’ profile page, complete with goofy avatar. I see some random photos on the top strip, but I wanna see all of his photos. On the left sidebar, there’s a (6) right next to photos – so I guess there’s only six photos of him on Facebook? Puzzled. I click on it.

I don’t see 6 of anything, I just see two sections – “Petros’s photos” and “Photos and videos of Petros”, I guess posted by other users. That’s twelve thumbs, so I guess the (6) metaphor got lost in the way.

Let’s start with “Petros’ photos”. The six albums shown seem fishy – I know there must be more! There’s absolutely no other indicator for that, only a tiny link on the top right with a label “See all: Photos”. So there must be more, right? If you click on a link, you’ll see that there are more, indeed. sigh

Anyway, back again. There’s another link to see all videos by Petros. Video’s cool! Let’s click on it.

Nada. My question is – why have a perfectly normal link to something that doesn’t exist? Make it grey. Add a (0) indicator. Remove it altogether. sigh

Underneath that section, there’s “Photos and videos of Petros”. Well first of all, which of them are videos? You guessed it, there aren’t any, eventhough the title hints to it. And there’s a cryptic link on the top right that says: “See all Photos”. I click on it – nothing happens, except that the link text changes to “See all Photos and videos”.

Excuse my french, but what. The flying. Fuck.

Why so unusable?

There’s no question that Facebook is huge. Their developers and designers are hard-working and I understand their struggle to keep up with millions of users every day.

But they should get theis grip together and properly address the gaping UX holes they created over the years.

The whole situation is foul and dangerous. Not for the future of Facebook per se, I couldn’t care less about that – plus, people don’t really care about usability when they stalk their exes or poke random blonde girls.

I consider it dangerous for the future of all web applications though, and for user experience in general. I can already see a full generation of people, hardly ever using web services apart from Facebook, sitting baffled in front of perfectly functional design patterns because they learned it the Facebook way.

Naysayer? Maybe. Pissed off? Definitely.

And I didn’t even touch the “tiny 11px Lucida Grande font” or “horrendous new photo viewer” subject.

Dear Wikipedia,

don’t do that.

Users act by habit. Yours is a search-based service. You moved the search box (the single most-used element of your design) from the center left to the top right. You have a fluid design. People love 24” or even 30” monitors.

Do the math.

It’s a wonder users haven’t started a riot yet. If I were a hardcore Wikipedia user, I’d have started one for sure.

I absolutely love most of the work of Squared Eye. So much attention to detail and lovely designs, I always love that. They even went as far as to provide us with two awesome looking case studies based on two of their works – lovely, lovely.

I often use one of their sites, PatternTap.com, to find design tidbits and get inspiration when designing a widget (since I don’t have my LittleSnapper library with me when at work). Most often than once, I found myself trying to search / browse among the stored screenshots for a specific style.

PatternTap provides two ways of filtering images: by tags and collections. I haven’t had much luck using both. Let me explain why.

Are those all?

First of all, when clicking on one of the options above, you get a nice sum of relevant keywords. I always find myself wondering, what, that’s all? Are those all the possible tags that people used? Are those all the possible collections of all users? For some weird reason, this way of showing stuff does not convince me that it’s accurate.

Alphabetical? Reverse Alphabetical?

Are those tags / collection names sorted? If yes, how? I’d prefer it if they were presented in an alphabetical order, I wouldn’t have to scan the whole list to make sure the tag I look for is not included.

Collections without Images?

Some collections I’ve tried (namely Borders) yielded zero images in expected results. How can that be? Why is the collection there anyway if it’s empty?

Dude… wait, what?

Users are notorious of their short memory. Then how come there’s no indication whatsoever of the sorting filters I’ve used in the next page? The breadcrumbs only say, Collection / Sort. Yes, sort, but sort by what? There is a (wise) Reset button, but no obvious way to see what you’re resetting. You have to re-open the Tags or Collections menu to see what’s selected and what’s not.

Plus, uhm…

A tiny “no results” bug!

I may be nitpicking there, I don’t design better than those people but I found those flaws while using their site, not while admiring their work. It’s just some issues that could be easily resolved, in my humble opinion, leading to an even better service.