[UPDATE 2010-02-24] There’s an interesting discussion on the subject on the actual facebook.
The popularity and broad adoption of facebook is impressive! So is its lack of usability. Not only do they break EVERY usability guideline out there! The UI is un-intuitive and chaotic. Simply amazing! Here are a few issues that has annoyed the crap out of me lately.
- No sense of home. This is step one in usability 101. The idea is to create a home or start -page that serves as a caring mother for all the child-pages. The user should feel comfortable in that he/she can always go back to the startpage and find common items such as menus. On facebook there’s a Home button which when clicked presents the user with content that differs slightly from whats displayed when clicking the Facebook button, both differs slightly more compared with whats displayed when clicking the Profile button. 3 different pages with similar or nearly identical content but no sense of home. What more; the same functionality is often found on all these pages, such as writing a note.
- Navigational Structure. There are no navigational signposts to indicate where you are or how you got here. A highlighted tab or a breadcrumb would be a good idea.
- Facebook is supposedly all about friends but I fail to find a list of mine. At the friends page (http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/?sk=ff) I found a button saying Create List. When clicking it the user is presented with a list of all his/her friends. I tried this feature and chose to include all my friends thinking I’d get a list of all of my friends. Instead I got another yet another RSS feed of news/actions/somethings, supposedly with items from all my friends.
- Consistent Menus. In order to not confuse your visitors it is good practice to present them with a consistent menu across your site so that they navigate in the same manner on all pages. The left-hand menu on facebook fluctuates when surfing the site. This makes users feel insecure about the navigational structure of the site. An example is the Friends icon which is only available at certain pages.
One thing they have fixed recently is support for non-javascript clients. This is a big step forward.
