I use Facebook more than MySpace for some things just because I think Facebook is more “adult” — the real name thing, more people from work, et al. More often than not, i’ll update my status over there and really don’t use MySpace for that work kind of thing, because, well, I view it as more as the local bar where Facebook is Starbucks where you discuss work and business.
However, uploading photos is a bear, and it demonstrates a real need for examining the taxonomy and labeling of a site. I ran into this over the weekend when I had some professional photos taken of me. I wanted to upload one so I didn’t look like I walked in from the prehistoric period and I had just invented the mouse wheel.
Upon arriving at your home page, there’s an application called Photos that shows everyone’s photos (which is where I clicked first, figuring, hell, I’ll manage my photos in the place where it says Photos). You can select Photos of Me, you can’t upload a photo. You can create a photo album, but there’s no link to says, “Upload Photo, Yo.”
I unless have a serious need to add 1,000 photo albums to my profile without any photos, creating a new photo album is completely useless to me. I would guess that 80 percent of the users have less than 20 albums, tops, so the importance of creating new photo albums is overstated, much like my demise.
(Props to Jason Hewitt for pointing out my overzealous use of Yo.)
I click on my name on the top right corner, and I arrive at editing my profile. I see a number of links front and center:
Maybe if I go to my profile, I can find something?There’s an Add Photos link there, but because of the labeling and taxonomy (it’s under the Wall tab), I think I’m adding photos to my Wall. Why would I do that? I just wanted to upload one photo and replace my profile photo. It has nothing to do with my Wall.
But wait, there’s more!
I hovered over the profile photo accidentally and saw an edit picture link. (Never mind there was no way to know that I could even edit the picture — that was an interesting surprise.) I was able to click on the photo, and it showed me a number of photos I could select, but I couldn’t upload photos from there either.
Note the frustration level growing, but alas the treasure hunt continues!
I click on the Photos tab, and I see my albums, but I still don’t see a place to add a photo. After returning to my home page by selecting the back button on the browser, I figured out the Post a Photo was how I added one. When I did figure out how to upload a photo, the default action after I had figured out how to add a photo wasn’t that, but of creating an album:
And once a photo is up, figuring out how to change the album requires a fortune teller. Can you tell me where I can move the photo to another album is?
Frankly, managing photos and albums shouldn’t be this hard, but it illustrates how labeling and placement within a tab selection is very, very important. I shouldn’t have to take eight or so clicks to get where I want.
I had no idea for months where I could upload the photos, and since this is one of the main features of Facebook (Face is in the name, for god sakes), ease of use for managing photos is important, and I could spend one day with their developers to change it. If there is a Photos tab, that should make it very clear than you can upload and manage photos from that Photos tab, and it’s difficult to find to with Facebook, because it’s under Wall.
Placement of tabs and other links an taxonomy is very important, because there’s an implied meaning of what a link does depending on where it sits in the taxonomy. Here, I had no idea that the Post a Photo wasn’t just to The Wall, but to my profile. I’ve had friends ask how to upload photos (some of whom are Information Architects themselves!), and they couldn’t figure it out either.
It makes much more sense to me to put some of those links under Photos than the Wall.
(And seriously, someone at Facebook should be looking at the usage logs and have figured this one out, already.)
MySpace does a great job of handling this feature in its new interface, why can’t Facebook?
As a side note: I’ve messaged Mark Zuckerberg about this article — let’s see how long he takes to respond.
One of the things I find entertaining in the land of web design where houses can be of any size, there’s this constant need to redesign, redesign, and redesign again (read the always popular “If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers” for a perspective). I tell clients that a lot of small changes have a more positive impact on usability than a single massive redesign that can take months, because users are used to it and have learned how to use the current system within its constraints.
The reason there’s usually a redesign is the CEO usually comes down from the hallowed halls, and says, “we have to make it grey instead of yellow!” And grey it is (read: cnet.com).
Facebook is launching their new design this week to upteen million users (100 million or so, not counting my friend’s cat), and there’s going to be an uproar, and some grumbling, and then people will get used to the new site and stop complaining. Last time I checked, no one is actually paying for Facebook, so they can’t ask for their money back.
Looking at the numbers as reported by Mashable, it looks like adoption is not too bad — I’d be worried if there was a massive change back to the old platform, and that’s just not happening. In fact, I’d even go so far to suggest that Mashable might be spinning it a bit their way in a negative light because they don’t like the redesign. The petitions are at about 800,000 users, which means that there are probably about eight million very unhappy users, but that’s what, five percent of the audience?
Every site redesign I’ve participated in, I’ve seen the same trend. Sites almost never lose users because of a redesign, but it does slow site growth because when you do a redesign, there’s always a lot of bug fixing. MySpace has been going through a rolling redesign of their site, and other than some grumbling I heard from the teenset, there’s no petition there. In fact, that and the adoption of the platform has been very, very positive.
Or maybe the users there just don’t care.
I actually like the new site and some of the features (like uploading a profile photo) require tribal knowledge of driving through Boston’s streets to find the right screen, but overall I think it’s a move in a positive direction, especially since many of the newest features are occupying a space that both LinkedIn and eVite missed.
Facebook is becoming the defacto networking platform for professional groups. You can personalize your page quite a bit more, but still keep the Facebook look. And seriously, running two designs like they’ve been doing is a serious pain in the ass; last time I checked, one of the advantages of the web was one code base, yo.
Facebook has grown immensely over the years, and the application platform has created whole new opportunities for developers to abuse it, so gaining a bit more flexibility with the new design I think is a good thing.
Just try it, you’ll like it.
BizTechTalk is covering this. It’s getting better — really.
Facebook Navigation
MySpace Navigation
LinkedIn Navigation
Groups. All three of them have groups has major functionality, and none of the three have added groups as a component of the top or main navigation. Since all three of the services need advertising and page views to a certain extent, you would think each would try to drive traffic to groups.
My opinion? I think groups are underused; with the right approach, groups could be mini social networks upon themselves. For the services above, maybe they haven’t gotten there. But, if they could increase traffic in highly targeted and focused groups, why don’t they?
TechCrunch has a really good article about the FaceBook platform, one year later.
It’s a rather long article, so I’ll summarize for the reading impared.
The takeaways:
MySpace is actually doing a good job on limiting some of the issues that FaceBook never learned from — it’s not as easy to spam on MySpace because they are throttling the commenting and messaging — so being the second mover isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The applications are also a better fit for MySpace because it’s “teenager’s bedroom” nature of the design and user interface.
This is more or less in response to comments about the limits application developers are having to deal with in building for the MySpace platform. As outlined in a few posts that were out there during my vacation, some of the application developers are providing “incentives” to users to spam their friends through bulletins and the like. Seriously, it’s annoying, because some of the inboxes of accounts I have for testing over there are filling up.
After talking with some of the MySpace platform folks (I’ve designed some MySpace Applications, and was/still am involved with the developer platform yo a certain extent), it’s dramatically increased the amount of mail being sent through the system, and end users are complaining in a big way, because there’s been no stop to the torrent of messages from applications.
This is a message to the developers: if you want the applications to be viral, build great applications that people want to use and spread.
Buy Your Friends is a good application, but it was (and still is) abusing the system. Still, it’s fun, and they’ve done a good job spreading it. Offering enticements to get more people to install it is not the best way to play fair.
Somehow complaining about the rules seems pointless because MySpace’s objective is extend the platform, not extend the spam. They’re looking for developers to come up with great ideas that will turn MySpace into a better site and, in turn, generate more ad views. The whole point is to keep users there longer, and if it’s done with some of these applications, the objective has been satisfied. If there is an application that provides real value, they’ll give you a bit of leeway.
So far, it’s worked. They’re telling me that traffic is way up. You can also bet they’re also working on ways to share the wealth (I would at least hope so) so the application developers will go beyond the usual “poke me” applications and build something better. I know we’re working on better applications.
But somehow complaining about the rules being too restrictive because you are trying to take advantage of the system is the same as saying to a police officer, “hey, I know I was speeding, but everyone is doing it.” It’s not a valid complaint.
The point: Don’t abuse it if you want it around for a while, especially if it’s a free service.
Need a disposable email address? GuerillaMail is for you. You can sign up for the service, and it will create email addresses that are good for 15 minutes, perfect for those online services that will eventually resell those email addresses and spam you.
I have this standard joke because it’s my line of work, which really didn’t exist too long ago: “The internet’s a fad, it’s just going to go away.” While it might be dramatizing it, I do feel that it is if we don’t improve the user experience of applications and websites, like Facebook, so they aren’t just marketing spam. While end users may not be the brightest bulbs in the world, they’re not stupid, and they know when they are being fooled.
I like FaceBook. I’ve hired people off of FaceBook, and find it more useful from a profile standpoint (but less entertaining) than MySpace, but not as useful as LinkedIn. However, I had to do some housecleaning the other day, and I deleted over 100 applications.
Part of the problem is how most of these application developers design the applications, and nothing is a better illustration than what my online budy Andy Sternberg pointed out using an application on my own profile — that since I’ve installed an application, there’s this implicit “wow, Patrick must really like it.”
No, I don’t like it. My friends are selling me, and I’m not getting any of the profits.
A lot of these applications and even some websites, like Reunion.com (I’m not just bringing them up because I interviewed there years ago, but because I know the CEO knows better, and the David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times also brought it up) are using shady ways to promote themselves, like harvesting friend lists and so on.
Note to application developers — if the applications are usable, engaging, and cool, people will use it in droves. They’ll tell your friends. They won’t worry about being forced to tell 10, or 12, or 20 friends. Facebook probably doesn’t know how it’s damaging their reputation, or if they do know, how to fix it.
That Scrabbulous application is engaging.
Texas No-Hold ‘Em Poker is engaging.
FriendFeed is engaging.
Selling friends is not.
Imagine if you could keep track of all of your friends and what they are doing on social networks, and at the same time your friends are notified about what you are doing? FriendFeed does that, and more.
You can share your notifications one of two ways:
The setup was fairly easy — I did so in about ten minutes.
The list of networks they have so far:
Digg, Google Reader, Mixx, Reddit, Bookmarking, del.icio.us, Furl, Google Shared Stuff, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, Gmail/Google Talk, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Seesmic, Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Zooomr, Blog Blog, Tumblr, iLike, Last.fm, Pandora, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Amazon Wishlists, Disqus, LinkedIn, Netflix Queue, Netvibes, SlideShare, Upcoming, Yelp
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
