On Facebook

I started using Facebook more seriously when Brian told me that’s how his brothers stay in touch with their high school friends. So I thought that might be a cool way to hook up with friends I’ve lost touch over the years. So the nightmare begins.

First of all, the UI design of the site sucks. And it doesn’t just suck a little, it’s a design disaster from usability standpoint. Every time I want to do something simple, I have to think about where that feature may be, or if clicking on that button will do what I think it’d do. In UI design terms, the site has very low “affordance” to usability, meaning it’s not very intuitive.

One thing I like about Facebook, though, is how it allows outside developers to develop mini-applications that allows users to plug them right in to the existing infrastructure of the site to “enhance” existing features. But I hate how abundant and frequent people have been, or sometimes are forced to be, sending invites to add those mini-applications just because they are there. Over a short period of time, the UI get cluttered up and is littered with trivial and useless crap that other people have too much time doing. So I simply ignore 90% of them.

Facebook started out with noble goals and intentions. But all it is now is a slightly more improved version of MySpace (which belongs to all-time horror site of fame). It’s arrogant to say this, but when “ordinary people” with no design sense are given the ability to do whatever they want, they will make absolutely the worst design decisions ever, hence making the Internet a worse place to be. Sorry to be such a web design Nazi. 🙁

Having said that, at least Facebook doesn’t yet allow people to mess with crazy backgrounds, obnoxious auto-play audio tracks, movies and other crazy things like MySpace. And for that, I reluctantly still use it from time to time just to respond to messages. And I’ve gotta to admit, it’s gotten pretty easy to find people on that thing than even Google!