[Update: The slideshare team just promoted this presentation to the front page of the DESIGN section. wOOt! ]
In an effort to call my own BS, I am presenting an unsolicited UI exploration of the Top Navigation system on Facebook. We all know they are working on the design, with mixed results. And we ALL need them to do a better job of simplifying all the options we have, because Facebook is getting confusing to use, and that is not a good thing.
Yesterday, I was attempting to update my "status." This is the heart and soul of Facebook interaction and I could not figure out how to get the site to let me paste a URL as part of my status update. Every time I had a URL as part of my "status" the Facebook smart-interface would pull possible icon images from the link and give me several choices to pick from. All good, except when I completed the transaction the "update" went to my [Wall] and not to my [Status].
I tried a number of times with no success. At one point I was able to force Facebook to not look-up the URL and post the status as a raw URL. But I could not make any comments along with the URL to describe why it's part of my "status."
So this is an epic fail of UI, where the interface designers attempt to make the process easier and more interactive, BUT they break something else in the process.
So as I posted "The FaceBook UI UX sux." on my facebook [Wall] I will now share a small bit of UI advice with Mark Zuckerberg and company. They didn't ask. But I can ask them to fix the Top Nav. Fair nuff!
[This presentation is posted on Slideshare.net as a downloadable PPT presentation if you want to look at or reference the orginal. CC - Attribution Only.]
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/UI-Facebook
Check out the Facebook Fails Index
And the mother of it all: The F-Bomb and F-Book: The F-Book Manifesto! [Facebook = F-Book]
Required reading: Don't Make Me Think; A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug
