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.
7 comments on this post
Zero Gravity #1
10.Mar.11
It was just about time someone brought that up! Nicely put sugah!
#FN$# #2
10.Mar.11
Indeed, that’s very annoying! I bet they can do better that that, but it will probably take quite some time… Anyways!
Daniel Nordstrom #3
10.Mar.11
Indeed it’s about time someone said something. Retweeted the link to this because it has bothered me for quite a while now. Been wondering if it was just me that really didn’t get how they justify this UI with number of photos and everything but I see now that I’m not alone.
Thanks for hopefully bringing it to more people’s attention!
Best regards,
Daniel Nordstrom
Nintera(ctive)
b: mrnordstrom.com
w: nintera.com
leo #4
11.Mar.11
Well said, but there’s more.
Try clicking at “Photos” at your homepage.
Check out the updated photos of your friends in the first page.
Now navigate to the second page, just to find out that includes photos from the first page.
Go to the third page, same situation…
Svelon #5
17.Mar.11
Well said.
And there’s much much more!
Arun #6
12.Apr.11
I think the number in parentheses (6) is a count of how many photos (and videos) the person has been in tagged in.
I reckon that the See all: Photos bit is a filter. If you have both photos and videos, then it reads something like See all: Photos | Videos where Photos and Videos are clickable.
Agree about the link to the empty videos section. YouTube also does something similar where it suggests related videos: when you click on a suggested/related video, it tells you that the video is unavailable to view in my region (or similar). Although, the YouTube issue may be related to performance constraints.
Interestingly though, in the lower section of tagged photos and videos, it seems to detect whether you have been tagged in at least one video and outputs See all: Photos | Videos or See all: Photos accordingly (unlike the top section). Bug or missing/inconsistent functionality?
And I also agree about the comment the enormous influence Facebook on usage patterns.
But isn’t Facebook built on top of primitive web components like links and buttons etc? If we addressed the shortcomings you’ve addressed in this post in a hypothetical web app, then the end user would probably not even notice anything (which is good!) If there exists other bits of functionality/features not similar to Facebook in this hypothetical app, it might take a little while or a small bit of training to get used to, but if something is functional then it’s, well, functional. As an example, I’d like to use the power button on an iMac — it might not be immediately obvious being there at the back, but it’s quite functional and out of sight. Is this extra bit of training that might be necessary what you’re referring to with this remark? Or have I misunderstood?
Overall, in Facebook’s defence, I think they functionality wise, they’ve achieved their goals with the Photos application. But in terms of user experience, some more works needs to be done to remove the annoyances. Valuable write-up, Sugar!
I’d also be interested to hear your thoughts on the 11px text and the photo viewer.
On another note, I really feel grabbing a handful of Jujubes or gumdrops after looking at the tasty footer image thingy whilst writing this comment. Huzzah!
Sugar #7
12.Apr.11
@Arun
Thanks for the eloquent comment, I agree with your points. Facebook is such a huge force of Web nowadays it can’t afford to be unusable.
Quite the sugar rush, those candies eh?