For this section we are reviewing website usability and what things are difficult on a particular website.
We are supposed to be reviewing a companies web site, and since Facebook is not publicly traded they seem to be fair game.
Facebook is one of the websites that I have the most difficult time working with. If all I am doing is posting a comment or being voyeuristic and reading others posts everything is fine, it is when I try to do something out of the ordinary that things get messy. One of the biggest issue with Facebook is that they are constantly moving functionality around, or are changing what you can/can't do.
It used to be easy to upload groups of pictures, it would default to selecting a folder and choosing what you want to upload. They then changed it a while back so that you had to go to a special screen to do that. This was quite confusing for many people (in my family) and I had to walk them through it.
Another change that they made was on how you created events for business pages that you might manage. It used to be that you could quite easily open your page, click event, add people, etc. and click publish. Everything was done. With the changes they made it took me a while to figure out how to do it, but they have reduced functionality. Now you have to create an event but you can't invite people that "like" your company. It no longer shows on your timeline, so now you have to "share" your event on you timeline to produce reminders. To invite people I have to join the event personally, then invite those that I am friends with.
Finding all of the intricacies of Facebook can be quite daunting especially with the features on each security setting. I don't argue that some of these items weren't needed changes, but finding where things have moved to or how it is supposed to work is not very straight forward.
Due to the issues at hand with Facebook and not trusting them with much security, due to how obscure some of the settings are, I prefer to not post. I don't use the service much other than for specific coordination and for advertising for my company.
Rick, I agree with you about Facebook constantly changing their interface -- they claim it's to improve, but I'm not sure that's really readily apparently to most of their users. They also claim to put privacy as a high priority but the options to change things are difficult to find. I think that Facebook does have a trust issue for many people, although most tend to ignore it in exchange for being able to easily communicate with their friends and family. It will be interesting to see how and if they address this.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. Although I am not on Facebook as much as i used to be, it does seem like they change things frequently. I find it more difficult to do a broad search for friends...it seems to always want to restrict my searches to only the categories my friends are currently listed under (i.e., city, school, work).
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