Facebook has done a good job executing its mission to make the world a more open place, so we are not hiding behind avatars — but rather connecting openly. However, there is a point when users feel like something is being pushed on them and begin to resent the higher power.
Part III, the final post of our Facebook Usability Mistakes series, dives into key usability problems with Search and the new Chat. (To see more Facebook problems, go to Part I and Part II.)
6. Search functionality could be improved, and the user experience more natural
We asked users to find friends who lived in New York City. Facebook, however, wants you finding *new* friends, and users had difficulty finding existing ones. If you click “Find Friends” (which appears underneath “Friends” on the left navigation column if you click on “Friends”), you cannot actually search your own friends.
If you watched carefully in the video above and see in the video below, when both users type in “New York City” nearest results were excluded, specifically New York, New York and Manhattan.
The following user also wishes clicking the magnifying glass would take him to advanced search options:
To search friends by city, users must click “Friends,” then either “See all friends” or “Manage Friend List,” then “Search by Current City.” This user had trouble getting to the right place.
Additionally, we asked users to search statuses for “vacation.” (Yes you can do that on Facebook.) This user had no clue, and she was not alone!
When this user typed in “vacation” into the Search bar and pressed enter, he arrived at the Pet Society Vacation app for iPhone page:
Users expected if they type something in search and press enter, they will go to the search results page, not the first thing that comes up. (To actually search statuses for vacation, you must type vacation in the search bar, click “See more results for vacation,” then go to the left navigation menu and click “Posts by friends.”) One advanced user, answering a follow-up question, wrote that he was interested to learn more about the search statuses feature, who had no previous clue it existed.
Search Suggestions:
1) When you hover over the Search magnifying glass, there could be a dropdown menu to do an advanced search. (The tester in the example above specifically requested this, and we believe this user suggestion has merit as we observed other testers try to click the magnifying glass to perform an advanced search.)
2) Second, the default setting for Friends page could already show all friends and let you search them. Users should not have to click “See all friends” first.
3) Facebook could optimize their advanced search functionality, so if someone searched friends by location (like “New York, New York” and “New York City”), or by term (“University of Texas” and “University of Texas at Austin”), users could still see closest results.
4) Finally, when you press “Enter” in Search, Facebook could take you to the results page. If the first result that shows up in the results preview *is* what the user wants, the user should have to simply click on it, or press the down arrow, then enter, on their keyboard.
7. People are confused and frustrated about the usability of the new chat
First, no one likes how the chat sidebar consumes the height of the right side of their screen. Next, it confused users that friends appeared in their chat list who were not online. Moreover, users are accustomed to scrolling and thought some online friends were “missing” because they could not scroll up or down the list to make sure.
This frustrated user complains he cannot feel certain if he was seeing all his online friends, since Facebook includes offline friends in the chat sidebar:
People who had friends appear in their chat list, none of whom had green dots (because those users either were not online or had limited their availability), were convinced these people were online. When one user realized he, in fact, could not chat with these (invisible dot) friends, he assumed that chat was broken.
This mom was also completely confused when she saw her daughter appear in the chat list, realizing this was impossible since she was standing there right next to her.
There simply is no indication that these users are offline, unless you discover this by trying to message them.
We asked what features they wanted in chat, after they completed the test. (UserTesting lets you ask participants 4 written follow-up questions.) Here’s what they wrote they wanted:
- 5 out of 5 users wanted the ability to be invisible on chat. In most chat services, you can be invisible, but still see who else is online. Users, in their videos and in their written follow-up questions, stated they are more likely to chat if they are invisible, so they can either message friends who are online or go visible so those friends can message them. They said they are hesitant to always be online, because oftentimes they do not want to be messaged by certain people at certain times.
- Interestingly, no one was interested in being “away” — one user commented that Facebook status updates have taken the place of “away messages” as an indication of our current state in life.
- One user requested the ability to have a “do not disturb” option, so friends could see he was online, but chat messages would not be delivered to him until he switched back to online status. He explained he played social games, and did not want to be interrupted. Note: Skype has this feature, Gmail does not.
Conclusion
Move fast and break things works well when you are a start-up. But it just seems like when new features are released by a very successful company that lack usability – the general sentiment of the proletariat is, “They don’t care about us.”
In our testing, users expressed that Facebook makes things difficult ‘on purpose’ as if they were being tricked for some ulterior motive. The palpable frustration of this small sample of 5 regular people should not be ignored — as they probably represent millions of confused users. It would be interesting to see if a sample of 50 felt the same way.
If you care enough to want Facebook to care about you, be ironic, and share this on Facebook to your friends.
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