The new and not improved facebook profile page

Continuing our discussions about companies that seem to be run by monkeys is… Facebook. It’s not that I doubt Mark Zuckerberg’s genius or that Facebook revolutionized the way we connect with friends and family, but some of their user experience decisions really make me wonder. If I had to describe them in one word, it would be “juvenile.”

Why juvenile?

Because the people in charge of the changes seem to have no basic understanding of what Facebook members need or want, nor of basic design principles. It’s as though they’re following a whim rather than tracking user actions.

I’ve already written about the 14 biggest usability mistakes on Facebook. Nothing has improved since then. But a few days ago, Facebook rolled out a new profile page. In my opinion, it’s another huge step back in the user experience.

Let’s go over the new page from top to bottom and dissect it to find out why it doesn’t work.

Putting Common Knowledge at the Top

At the top of the page, we have the name — that’s good! — followed by a few details about who this person is in a relationship with, their birth date and education. This part of the page is the most valuable “real estate,” the area that everyone sees every time they look at the profile.

It’s now showing content that rarely changes and that friends and family already know — and it’s showing it ALL THE TIME. Every time I go to this person’s profile, I’m going to see the same information about them. Dear Facebook, this is my FRIEND. I already know who they are sleeping with, and their date of birth.

Dear Facebook, this is my FRIEND. I already know who they are sleeping with, and their date of birth.

On a public social network like LinkedIn, where I view a lot of profiles of people I know nothing about, it is helpful to include basic information at the top of the page (well, except for the relationship bit). It helps me to absorb quickly the basic information I need to determine whether I should do business with them.

But Facebook is a closed membership site. We use it to view profiles of friends and family, people with whom we’re already familiar. Showing basic information that doesn’t change at the top of the page makes no sense at all.

On the old profile, basic information like this was on the left side of the page, which made a lot of sense. It wasn’t in your face each time you visited the profile but it was there if you were looking for it.

Displaying Distracting Pictures at the Top

Under the relationship, education and birthday information, we bump into a bunch of what appears to be random pictures of this person taken from their albums. Again, it really begs the question: WHY? Photos grab attention and distract us from what we really came to do. That’s not to look at an old picture that we’ve already seen, but to see what’s new with our friend, what they’ve been up to lately, what’s on their mind. None of those things is likely to be a ski trip from 1997.

This collection of photos is so distracting and so in your face. It’s like someone jumping in front of you as you try to greet a friend.

Photos grab attention and distract us from what we really came to do

Sharing is Harder

Moving down, we see “Share: post, photo, link, video.” The box that allowed us to enter a comment just by clicking on a box and hitting Send is GONE. Now I have to find the share area and realize that I have to click on “post” before I can write anything. These are just way too many unintuitive steps for doing something that’s very basic.

The old comment box was one of the things that made Facebook such a success. Its simplicity had a huge psychological effect, encouraging people to send quick notes and stay in touch. Having a photo right next to that box was also important. All this is gone now, leaving us with tiny links under random photos that overshadow them completely. Now the feeling is that we need a reason to write.

The old comment box was one of the things that made Facebook such a success All this is gone now, leaving us with tiny links under random photos that overshadow them completely.

No Important Info on Top

Moving further down the page, we notice that we’re missing some useful tabs: walls, photos, info, links. Those tabs were taking us to the information we really needed when visiting someone’s profile — the stuff that changes regularly — and they were right on top, where they should be. But now they are on the left, under the photo, a less important region. The main spot is taken by those old vacation snaps.

It’s pretty basic stuff: put the important information top-center. Put the less important stuff on the left or bottom. Put the call to action at the top-right. It’s the ABC of user experience.

On the left, I can see who my friend is in a relationship with, and this time I can also see a picture of their partner; before it was just a link. That’s an improvement but do I really need to have this at top-center as well?

It's pretty basic stuff: put the important information top-center. Put the less important stuff on the left or bottom. Put the call to action at the top-right. It’s the ABC of user experience.

List of Friends Take More Space Than Necessary

Below the partner, I can see a list of friends, as before, but now instead of seeing six thumbnails that took a small amount of space, I get a list of TEN friends with names and picture, one after the other, that take a huge amount of space. Again, WHY? On average, people have about 150 friends. Since there is no way to show all those friends on the profile page, displaying just a small sample makes sense. Why show a much bigger sample in a format that takes a lot more space?

I do like the separate family list though. That’s useful. But the list of friends and family together is so long that you barely notice the links under them.

Why show a much bigger sample in a format that takes a lot more space?

Call to Actions Are Hard to See

On the right, moving the “chat,” “send message” and “poke” actions to the top right makes sense as far as usability is concerned but the photos to the left and under them make the actions hard to see.The 30 pixel gap below helps a bit though.

The photos to the left and under them make the actions hard to see

The Facebook profile page is the site’s most fundamental feature. Since people spend more time on Facebook than any other site on the Web, it’s important to get it right and not annoy them with visual noise and misplaced priorities. Making sure that the most important elements are top-center, that there are no distractions in the form of photos, that it doesn’t take too many steps to perform the most common actions, and that basic information doesn’t take prominence are all key to doing it right. In fact, the way it was before. Why fix something that’s not broken?

In other words, fire the current designer and hire back the previous one… with a bonus!

That might have been a smart move — smarter certainly than mass mailing CDs to snail mail addresses. But as I discovered recently, they still haven’t got it.

Stumbling upon politicsdaily.com recently, I found an article I really liked and decided to do something I hardly ever do: add a comment. I wrote my feedback, polished it, spell-checked it and, finally, clicked on the submit button to post it. A pop-up asked me to login – irritating, but standard. What wasn’t standard was that the only option to login was through AOL!

AOL won't let me comment unless I am an AOL member

At first I thought I had to be missing something. I was certain that I could login to Facebook and post, but no — the only option was to login through AOL. There, at the top of the page, was an AOL logo, making it clear that this site was an AOL property. Now it all made sense, kinda, sorta, but not really!!!

If AOL’s goal is to become the Web’s #1 content provider, the company needs to put aside its enormous ego — which was made it fail in the first place — and let people login the way THEY want to login and not the way AOL wants us to login. This will encourage user participation and help AOL achieve its goal.

Since I am not an AOL customer, and never will be (unless of course AOL comes up with something new and amazing), my only option was to just drop the whole commenting thing. Oh, well. The world will have to survive without my clever comment about why women who post the color of their bra or where they like to place their purse on Facebook are acting like sheep. With bras and handbags.

I will talk about their mobile ad strategy though. Or the lack of it.

Browsing mashable.com on my iPad today, I spotted an intriguing ad for something related to Usability Testing (my favorite topic). I clicked the ad… and reached the CA website, to my dismay.

Photo of my iPad with the landing page on ca.com

Now, you might think that if a company purchases ads that show on mobile devices, they’d direct the user to a mobile-appropriate page. Not CA! There were all sorts of problem with the landing page:

• The font was tiny, and used white text on an orange background. It was impossible to read even on an iPad.
• Four boxes at the bottom of the page looked like a mistake. I thought it was a broken plugin image, or video that wasn’t able to play on my iPad. It wasn’t. It was just how these boxes appear.  Another tiny box on the right was intended to… do something. I’ve no idea what.
• The call to action begged me to “Download Now.” It didn’t bother telling me what I’m downloading though or explain what use it might have for my iPad.
• The page also suggested that I “Please disable all pop-up  blockers.” First, if you expect people to disabled their pop up blocker just so that they can download your stuff, you are asking too much, surely you can find a better way, if not, maybe you’re in the wrong business. Second,  I can’t even do that   at all on an iPad, but again, you don’t really know I’m on my iPad, do you.
• And as for the copy writing — the one title that I was actually able to read – Read it for yourself and let me know if you understand what it means and what exactly they are selling.

For CA, the whole ad was a waste of money. For the rest of us it’s a useful lesson. If you’re investing in mobile traffic:

• Create a special landing page just for your mobile traffic.
• Make sure that the page is easy to read ON a mobile device and communicates what you’re selling.
• Give a “call to action” that makes sense for that mobile device.

What’s your mobile ad traffic strategy?

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.
A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.
If you see them, show them this information

Who are the YouTube monkeys?

I didn’t see any monkeys, but I did get to see my video in the end. The problem didn’t last long and I was able to find a very cool remake of “Rivers of Babylon” by Sublime,  a great band from Long Beach, CA, a place I used to call home.

Next time your site is giving you grief though, remember that it happens to everyone, including the biggest boys on the Web. Don’t panic. Learn from it, move on, and keep an eye out for the monkeys.

I am not sure how Facebook is making these decisions, but I seriously doubt it involves Usability Testing. Any reasonable tester would have been able to catch these snafus.

Here are some of the most annoying features of Facebook with suggestions of how they can fix them. I just hope someone at Facebook is reading this…

1. I Don’t Care Who You’re Friends With

Facebook’s home page tells me everything that happens to my friends.

But I don’t want to know everything that happens to my friends.

Do I need to know if my friend is now friends with someone I’ve never heard of? Do I need to know if they’ve joined a group of fondue-dipping chocolate lovers? Maybe, especially if they’re sharing the chocolate, but I want to choose what I see on the home page — and what I leave out.

A couple of versions ago, Facebook only showed the status update of friends. Those were the days…

Suggestion: On the Settings page, add a list of all the possible status types and let me choose the ones I want to see.

2. Comment Spam

Sometimes I’ll see a status update that makes me want to comment or mark as “like.” That’s fine. That sort of easy contact is part of what makes Facebook fun. But once I’ve done that, I receive a notification every time another comment comes in after me. I can turn off the email notifications but not the site notifications.

Hit “like” or make a quick comment and it haunts you for days and sometimes weeks. I now find myself thinking twice about responding to friends’ posts for fear of being over-notified.

Suggestion: Forum software got this one right. Forums allow users to unsubscribe from a thread so that they no longer receive notifications. Facebook can implement the same thing easily. Just let me choose whether I want to unsubscribe after I post or “like” a status update, or allow me to unsubscribe from all future notifications of this post.

3. Chain Emails

Chain emails sent to dozens of people at a time have become a thing on Facebook. It’s not always a terrible thing — I don’t always mind it — even if it does increase the chances that I’ll eliminate this “friend” from my Facebook contacts. The problem though is that whenever someone responds to the message, it goes to everyone on the list. So now I have to read all the personal exchange between people on the list even if it’s not directed to me. Even if I delete the email, I still can’t get away from it.

Suggestion: When replying to a chain email sent to more than one person, let the sender ask whether they want everybody to receive the reply or just the sender. Or let me “unsubscribe” from this email thread.

4. Unstoppable Friend Suggestions

Facebook wants us to take every opportunity to make new friends. The site suggests new people based on common contacts. Sometimes though, these people are not my friends for a good reason. Do I really need to see their face every time I log in?

The Close button helps but only for that session. The face is back next time I log in. It’s distracting, annoying and not necessary. Frankly, I’d rather see an ad in that spot.

Suggestion: Allow me to completely turn this feature off on the Settings page, and when I close a suggestion, Facebook should never offer me that contact again.

5. Chat Duplicates

I’ve placed my Facebook friends on different lists so that I can manage them better. That was a nice touch. But some friends are on more than one list. When chatting, I can find myself talking to the same person in three places. Talk about confusion! Friend lists are a good thing. Friend lists on chat, not so much.

Suggestion: Allow users to turn off grouping on chat.

6. Every Road Leads To Home

This is probably the biggest mistake in Facebook’s latest revision. On previous versions, a bar at the bottom of the page allowed me direct access to groups, marketplace, and other pages. This bar is gone. Now if I want to access any of these pages I have to return to the Home page first and look for it on the left. Instead of clicking once to get where I want, I need to click twice.

When you use an application this much, all those unnecessary clicks quickly build up to unnecessary frustrations.

Suggestion: Return that navigation bar or add menu items to access all pages from anywhere.

7. No Notifications On Business Pages

I’ve created pages on Facebook for both my businesses, and I post news about them there for my customers. However, when someone places a comment or asks me a question, I don’t receive a notification. I have no idea that anything has happened. The customer thinks that I’m ignoring them or that I don’t care about their question.

I receive a huge number of useless notifications on Facebook, but this one is important  — and it’s missing.

Suggestion: Add notifications on pages I own or admin, and let me turn them off on the Settings page if I want to.

8. Guess The Icon

Another bad new feature is those strange icons at the top left of the screen. Not only are they hard to see but the icons themselves don’t represent the pages they take us to. The messages icon looks like a chat icon. The notifications icon looks like… a glob? The friends request icon looks like it leads to a list of friends — which it should do but the only way to get to that page is through the Home page.

In fact, what are the chances I really need to access a “friends request” page? I can approve/ignore friends requests by clicking on the link in the email notification. Someone at Facebook though has decided that this one feature is important enough to have its own real estate — and more important than the actual friends page. That someone is very odd.

Suggestion: Make these icons easier to read with more relevant graphics, and replace the “Friends request” icon with “Friends.” If you really want, Odd Someone, you can show me the friends requests on the friends page.

9. Idle Friends Still Chatting

When I click on Chat to see who’s available, I can see many friends marked with a gray dot, indicating that they’re not currently active online. So why do I need to see them? Why not only show me the people that are actually available to talk?

Suggestion: Let me choose whether I want to see idle friends by picking an option on Chat settings.

10. “Go on, make friends. Don’t be shy!”

Facebook doesn’t think it’s enough to give me a tool to manage my social life. It thinks it should manage my social life for me as well by prompting me to talk to friends with whom I have little interaction. “Say Hello, write something on their wall,” Facebook tells me. But I don’t want to! If I wanted to write something, I would. Stop bugging me, Facebook!

Suggestion: Allow me to completely turn this feature off.

11. Where Did My Friends Go?

Clicking on the “Friends” link to see my list of friends is always disappointing. What I see instead of my friends are links to:

• Find friends
• Friend suggestions
• Search for people
• Find people you IM

But I don’t want any those things. I want to see my friends.

Facebook’s priority is to grow by allowing the user every possible way to find and add new friends. But what about what the user wants? Isn’t that a priority?

In fact, clicking the Friends menu item opens options to see “recently updated” friends and “Status update.” Friends are grouped under those options… but I still can’t find a full list of all my friends.

Suggestion: Allow direct access to a full list of friends.

12. The Neverending Page

This is obviously a new trend: Twitter does it and now Facebook does it too. We used to have pagination on pages with a lot of content. Some content would show on page one, older content on page two, and so on. If you wanted to access the last page, you just clicked “Last.” The new, trendy way is to allow users to click a link marked “older posts” which then show up magically under the newer posts.

There are advantages. In particular, you don’t have to wait for a new page to load to keep reading. But if you happen to navigate to a different page, perhaps to look at a linked image, when you return to the long page, you’re right back at the beginning.

And what if I want to access very old posts? Pagination lets me head straight to the last page. With “older posts,” I could be clicking for hours.

Suggestion: Improve technology to remember my last place. Or just bring back pagination!

13. A Video Is Not A Link

When I want to add a video from YouTube, intuition tells me to click the “video” icon then choose “video from external site.” Not on Facebook. To add a YouTube video I have to click the link icon. It makes no sense at all.

Suggestion: Do the obvious thing: let me add a video by clicking the video icon!

14. Bouncing News

Facebook’s home page offers two options: “Top News” and “Most Recent.” I really don’t know how Facebook determines top news, or even why they call it “news.” To me — and to everyone else, I think — they’re “status updates.”

Whatever Facebook calls it though, I just want to see the most recent posts by my friends. I can do that by clicking the “Most recent” link but whenever I return to the home page, the option bounces back to “Top News.” Does Facebook really want us to see what they think we should see?

Suggestion: Get rid of this duplicity and just show me the most recent status updates. Or let me keep the option I choose.

——————–

Because Facebook is used frequently, it’s very important to get the user experience right. But it does give the company a little room to add features that require learning. The “hide” or “delete” buttons that only show when the user hovers over the stream, for example, is not user-friendly but users have learnt it.

Facebook has to get out of its own head and start doing some serious usability testing. The company needs to think about what we want rather than what it wants. The suggestions I made here are not that hard to implement, and all they do is give users the options to make their experience better.

Are there any other facebook features you find annoying? Please comment below…