Usability tl;dr
Usability is the quality of a product to provide good service. A product or service that is usable is one that is intuitive to the user and does not leave them continuously going ‘wtf?’ I try to keep my usability rants to a minimum. But this is difficult to do when I spend half of my day at work on usability. At work, I am far from lenient when it comes to usability. I will happily jump all over the SW & GUI designers if they are doing something blatantly wrong. However, in the real world, my personal free time, my surfing the web or use of products and services outside of work… I’ll let things slide. Mostly, these things can just be summed up as pet peeves.
My car: the speedometer is poorly lined up and the intense LED lights backing the highbeam light that is perfectly centered at the top of the dash.. Problems, but I can deal. I would have designed it differently. Along with tilting the stereo/heat consoles to accommodate the driver better.
Iphone: I frequently hate this little gadget. But mostly it’s because all the ads that tout that it does everything. It doesn’t do everything. And there’s a lot of things it does really poorly. One example of this is its inability to effectively copy/paste things. And the lack of multi-tasking. I can’t be searching for restaurants and calling them at the same time without going through about 4 extra screens. I have tamed most of my annoyance concerning my phone. I’m sure, I could make a grand list, had this entry been meant for the iphone.
Windows: Has too many to list, but we’ve all gotten so used to their flawed system that it seems so right, now.
GoogleChrome: Excellent usability. It makes sense. It works. It does the job it was intended for, and it does it well. My only complaint is that there is no stop button. I don’t know if I’d even chock that up to fall in the usability category.
However, this is not the purpose of this post… the purpose of this post is to rat on facebook just a little bit more. Anyone who knows me personally has probably heard my rant concerning facebook. It started years ago, when I first attempted to use facebook. I made an account (against my better judgment) and added some friends. The layout, search functions, and whatever other functions made no sense back then. You couldn’t just search for people and add them, you had to know that that Bob Dobbs was the exact Bob Dobbs that you wanted without seeing any of their personal information. No age, no city, no picture. Just a name. I lost interest rather quickly and deleted the account (which as you all well know, you can’t actually do on facebook, this is another complaint of its own).
I tried fb several times over the years. And finally my dear husband sucked me into it. All our friends and family are there! We can keep track of them! Yes. That’s great. But do I really need to see that Cindy Lou needs help plowing her field/moving a cart/digging a hole/killing a rat/belching the alphabet? Ok… so I can turn that off… unless it’s autopublished and then I don’t even know what the hell that means. My page is flooded with stupid games and apps that try to trick you into participating. I’m not a big fan of being tricked… and I don’t really go for games that play on the reward center of the brain (no, I won’t keep playing for one more cookie). So, this is still more rant than analysis. So, here’s my analysis of the current friends request option:
Current Path:
User searches ‘friends’ name: Types into search menu on any page (this is good) “Bob Dobbs”
Site returns 35 results. Displays 5 results per page (this is stupid… there is no reason to make people click through 7 different pages to look at the results).
Results show user name, user pic, and users gender. Nothing more.
So, on an act of faith, the user picks the Bob Dobbs he thinks is the real Bob Dobbs he’s searching for.
He sends a friends request (also very easy to do!)
But fb comes back and says “Do you really know this person?”
And your thinking… uh, yeah. But apparently this is a rhetorical question, b/c fb doesn’t actually care what your answer is. They’re not going to let you friend Bob Dobbs. Confused… you click “friend” again. This time you realize, in the tl;dr section of this rhetorical question that you can go to the help center for more answers. Hnh… ok, Help Center, let me answer your question!
Nope… they don’t seem to care that you know Bob Dobbs, either. Hnh… how ‘bout that. They tell you that you either have too many friends who have not responded to friends requests (but wait… I just started my account in the past 30 days… I’ve added a lot of people… it seems like most of them got back with me, hnh… who hasn’t gotten back with me?).
You go searching to see who you’ve sent friends requests to.
And you search.
And you search.
And ‘lo you can’t find anywhere that tells you who you’ve asked to be friends with! How do you know if you sent requests to everyone you meant to? And if those people never log on, then you may never be able to add friends again b/c the site says that obviously you don’t know anyone! Remember people. In this case, fb thinks you’re a loser with no friends.
Ok… I’ve lost track of where I was planning to go. I have two pages of this and should probably get back to analyzing things that really matter. Like flight lists, and GUI’s for work.
My car: the speedometer is poorly lined up and the intense LED lights backing the highbeam light that is perfectly centered at the top of the dash.. Problems, but I can deal. I would have designed it differently. Along with tilting the stereo/heat consoles to accommodate the driver better.
Iphone: I frequently hate this little gadget. But mostly it’s because all the ads that tout that it does everything. It doesn’t do everything. And there’s a lot of things it does really poorly. One example of this is its inability to effectively copy/paste things. And the lack of multi-tasking. I can’t be searching for restaurants and calling them at the same time without going through about 4 extra screens. I have tamed most of my annoyance concerning my phone. I’m sure, I could make a grand list, had this entry been meant for the iphone.
Windows: Has too many to list, but we’ve all gotten so used to their flawed system that it seems so right, now.
GoogleChrome: Excellent usability. It makes sense. It works. It does the job it was intended for, and it does it well. My only complaint is that there is no stop button. I don’t know if I’d even chock that up to fall in the usability category.
However, this is not the purpose of this post… the purpose of this post is to rat on facebook just a little bit more. Anyone who knows me personally has probably heard my rant concerning facebook. It started years ago, when I first attempted to use facebook. I made an account (against my better judgment) and added some friends. The layout, search functions, and whatever other functions made no sense back then. You couldn’t just search for people and add them, you had to know that that Bob Dobbs was the exact Bob Dobbs that you wanted without seeing any of their personal information. No age, no city, no picture. Just a name. I lost interest rather quickly and deleted the account (which as you all well know, you can’t actually do on facebook, this is another complaint of its own).
I tried fb several times over the years. And finally my dear husband sucked me into it. All our friends and family are there! We can keep track of them! Yes. That’s great. But do I really need to see that Cindy Lou needs help plowing her field/moving a cart/digging a hole/killing a rat/belching the alphabet? Ok… so I can turn that off… unless it’s autopublished and then I don’t even know what the hell that means. My page is flooded with stupid games and apps that try to trick you into participating. I’m not a big fan of being tricked… and I don’t really go for games that play on the reward center of the brain (no, I won’t keep playing for one more cookie). So, this is still more rant than analysis. So, here’s my analysis of the current friends request option:
Current Path:
User searches ‘friends’ name: Types into search menu on any page (this is good) “Bob Dobbs”
Site returns 35 results. Displays 5 results per page (this is stupid… there is no reason to make people click through 7 different pages to look at the results).
Results show user name, user pic, and users gender. Nothing more.
So, on an act of faith, the user picks the Bob Dobbs he thinks is the real Bob Dobbs he’s searching for.
He sends a friends request (also very easy to do!)
But fb comes back and says “Do you really know this person?”
And your thinking… uh, yeah. But apparently this is a rhetorical question, b/c fb doesn’t actually care what your answer is. They’re not going to let you friend Bob Dobbs. Confused… you click “friend” again. This time you realize, in the tl;dr section of this rhetorical question that you can go to the help center for more answers. Hnh… ok, Help Center, let me answer your question!
Nope… they don’t seem to care that you know Bob Dobbs, either. Hnh… how ‘bout that. They tell you that you either have too many friends who have not responded to friends requests (but wait… I just started my account in the past 30 days… I’ve added a lot of people… it seems like most of them got back with me, hnh… who hasn’t gotten back with me?).
You go searching to see who you’ve sent friends requests to.
And you search.
And you search.
And ‘lo you can’t find anywhere that tells you who you’ve asked to be friends with! How do you know if you sent requests to everyone you meant to? And if those people never log on, then you may never be able to add friends again b/c the site says that obviously you don’t know anyone! Remember people. In this case, fb thinks you’re a loser with no friends.
Ok… I’ve lost track of where I was planning to go. I have two pages of this and should probably get back to analyzing things that really matter. Like flight lists, and GUI’s for work.