Why is the Facebook navigation scheme so terrible?
Considering what Mark Zuckerberg’s brain child has been valued at, and how many programmers they must have on their staff, why is the interface so crappy? It’s nearly impossible to find out what groups you belong to or what pages you’re a fan of. The various links and options are contradictory or overlap each other. The look of the site is bland and uninteresting. What it does is very cool for some folks. But why do the site owners let it continue with such a stilted, poorly-implemented scheme? I’ve seen many first-time websites made by web newbies that were far better.
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13 Answers
That’s a bit harsh. It works much better than MySpace.
I just joined the 1st of June & yes, it DID take me a while to learn to navigate it. Right now, I’m trying to copy & paste a ‘tag’ & I can’t get it to work. Or else I’m just flat doing it wrong. The site seems awfully slow, too. Some program apps don’t work sometimes & I get an error message. There are improvements that could be done, but personally, I’m getting used to it.
They are trying to force you to join MySpace too.
Good luck. Personally, I will never join MS.
I think their interface gets the job done perfectly. Yes it can look bland according to you, but when you are building a site for millions of users and you’re demographics range from teens to moms and dads, you can’t have a look thats too fancy. Also less graphics on each page = faster load time (and this matters for ginormous sites like facebook). I agree you’ve to dig through to find some of the features but when you’ve got a site with so many features, its better to access them through sub-menus then have it all done with one big menu. Also they’ve a nice customization option on the bottom, where you can bookmark your most used features.
Facebook’s design is simple. Simple design works. Just like google.com looks boring and unattractive but in terms of functionality is better then other better looking search sites. Usability > design
I started out using Myspace then I heard about Facebook. At first I thought it was confusing but after using it for over a year I have sworn to never use Myspace again. Facebook is so simple and clean. When I go to myspace I feel like I am being overloaded with ads all over the place. Facebook just puts them to the side so it is easy to ignore them.
The only thing that bugs me about Facebook (and it really f’ing bugs me) is that if you click a link (say a picture) and navigate away from the home page, the back button takes me back to the top of my home page frequently… even if I was on page two of my home page when I left. So frustrating!
Groups and pages could really use some work but the general interface is pretty good functionality wise. Privacy settings really need some work as well. Though I love how I can create my own friend lists and sort them in any order I want to. Getting to your applications is easy and being able to bookmark them is great to. You have to explore quite a bit to find the good stuff though..
Please, show us an example of a first time website made by a web newbie that has better navigation than Facebook. Cause I’ve seen way way more crappy designs from web newbies than I’ve seen competent designs, let alone one rivaling a site with the sheer number of man-hours in development.
Beyond that, there are plenty of scripts you can use to modify Facebook’s functionality and look and feel, via a Firefox plugin called Greasemonkey.
it is because the main proirity of tis site is to make profit. every click make s them cash!
@AlbertKinng : that’s the main priority of just about the majority of websites out there. And you know you kinda need to make money when just your electricity bill is $1 million a month. That’s nothing compared to what I would imagine there server costs are gonna be like
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