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Comment by whatwhatwhat | Hacker News Reader

Usability on facebook is "truly horrific" ...? lol..

I don't know why I'm responding to a comment this vaporous, but yes, I agree with others that usability on facebook is awful.

Their privacy menu, for instance. They seem to have made it confusing on purpose, including the redesign. I guess intentional poor usability is a different issue, though.

As a new user of the site, it was never clear to me what each section was for. Trying to install apps kept leading me in circles. I clicked links and they never loaded. Facebook tells you pages are 404, when actually you're not authorized to view them. I didn't appear to be authorized to view someof my own pages... getting a 404 instead, which just looked like the site was screwed up (I guess it was, and it is, and as far as I can see it always has been and always will be). I don't even remember all the details, but I am very, very unimpressed with the design of their features.

They should try getting a CEO focused on something other than copying everyone else, but then, that's how the company started I guess.

Actually I'd like a discussion on this. Are you kidding? I personally think fb usability is terrible as well. The thing is, I can see how thats likely intentional. It is obvious fb wants you to do certain things like share all your crap with friends all the time everywhere and anywhere. So everything that has to do with updates, pics, and the wall, well thats beautifully and easily within reach. But anything else....good luck.

To be clear, I don't use fb, but I opened an account so that I can learn the api and make some page apps. The documentation is old, sporadic, a pain to find, and ...broken. Locating simple things like where my pages are seems to take me forever!! I just have a hard time finding anything on fb that doesn't have to do with status updates and "the wall".

Course I am hardly an "average user" and half a billion people seem to think its good, right? right?

Any thoughts on this?

The funny thing is, Facebook had great usability compared to what it replaced for many people—Myspace—when its functionality was only comparable to what Myspace offered.

As Facebook attempted to integrate itself into more of its users' lifestyles, though, its UI became unfit for the depth of social functionality it had to control.

Most interestingly, from my personal observations, US users under the age of 18 prefer the "uncontrolled" nature of Myspace versus the structured "social institution" feel of Facebook.

Also, as Facebook's users become more familiar with its workings (social, not technical), it becomes quite apparent that there are limitations to having all relationships equal.

This is truly where Facebook fails. I have friends, I have a best friend, I have acquaintances (both business and social), and I have people I don't like, I may have some enemies, too.

But in the realm of Facebook, all these people are my friends, and I have no way to differentiate that within the Facebook platform. I do not believe it is the UI that is the problem, but the underlying architecture of it's "social functionality".

My mom runs a facebook page not for her self but for an organization and she didn't know how to stop getting email notifications , she was reporting them as spam to no avail, and it was as simple as her not seeing the notification tab in options.

Then after I had shown her that she had about 100 tick boxes to un tick. That is just a recent example of usability problems, to be honest these problems only are apparent in uncommon uses of facebook and for the simple part (messages and pictures and such) it is fine.

Edit: I don't use facebook btw so I may be wrong from my troubleshooting experiences

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