UI Development: How not to do it, the Facebook Way!
Originally published at Dermot.Canniffe.Org. You can comment here or there.
I wrote an open letter to the Facebook admins. In the short time since writing I've noticed two fairly significant bugs with the system (I think to do with some jQuery-like functionality associated with the in-app chat system1), and one significant omission - users now can't access the Pages of which they have previously declared themselves to be fans. This last one seems very very stupid for a platform that supposedly makes a lot of money from advertising revenue, which is - in part - based on the Pages model. I have absolutely no idea how this UI overhaul made it out of testing. The fact that there's no testing visibility only serves to increase the them-and-us feeling that has been rising on Facebook steadily in the last year or so.
The fact that it is now broken adds insult to injury. My original message still stands - the new discoveries back up the argument.
I decided that I needed to follow up outside of Facebook for two reasons;
- I had to close all Facebook tabs in my browser because the out of control javascript was killing Firefox.
- What's said on Facebook (about Facebook) has a remarkable ability to stay on Facebook. If I blog it, there's a chance that some of the technology outlets might pick this up.
So here is the original message in full;
Hello, I'd like to point out that the News Feed, while purporting to offer "Top News" (a sort of most interesting round-up of the feeds of other entities), and "Most Recent" (the most recent news from other entities), completely fails to achieve either.
Dear Facebook, what is wrong with this picture?
Facebook is incapable of deciding what I find most interesting. In order to do that, I would need to supply a few preferences, for example, no app updates, maybe only status updates, etc. regarding Most Recent - I direct you to my most recent uploaded photo (inset) - Facebook seems to think my most recent news items come from yesterday.
I'm really not sure why Facebook feels they need to filter the latter option - a page cut-off is all that's really necessary outside of a standard feed aggregation.
I continue to be baffled by Facebook's approach to UI upgrades. It seems no discussion is entered into, no public betas, not even lip-service paid to the actual requirements of the platform's users. So, given this is the case, to what requirements are you working? A cynical person might say you're attempting to maximise advertising real-estate, but I don't see that happening either. It seems simply to be a case of Facebook shooting themselves in the foot. Again.
Yours in hope of a speedy resolution,
Dermot Canniffe
1. Just for pig iron, try opening seven Facebook tabs at once. Then in one of them, "Go Offline" in the Chat popup window. See how many other operations you can do, or how quickly you can type.