Geek Drift

Four years ago, Facebook was a site with simple and useful features. Today, Facebook is bloated with tons of applications, a complex user interface and simply strange features (even I don’t know what makes the “Top News” feed useful to anyone). MSNBC found that Facebook has a customer satisfaction rating on par with other companies & industries that most people describe as necessary evils, like airlines and cable companies. How did this happen?

The part that confuses people is that Facebook’s core functionality hasn’t necessarily gotten worse, and they have added a lot of useful features. Taken all together, however, they seem to have experienced what I like to call “geek drift.”

Originally, the site was designed for the average person, with a simple, easy to understand UI that enabled those users to use the site easily. Then, as the company grew, they hired on more engineers. Facebook added lots of additional features, some quite complex. Though they paid attention to the experience for each individual feature, the site now feels like a mish-mash of features strung together haphazardly.

Many core features have been forgotten about. Something as blindingly obvious as viewing a list of all your friends is only possible using a link buried on your profile page - not, say, the home page where you see updates from all your friends - and even then, it’s only accomplished using the tiny friend list window that’s meant for creating lists, not for browsing. The old version was easily accessible at the top bar of the page, and you had a very detailed view to browse. They trashed it, however, so that the top bar would be “simpler” without being more useful.

There is a “friends” button on the home page, but you can only use it to find friends, not see a list of your current friends! It’s a complete lie - since none of the people on that page can be people you’ve already added, technically absolutely nothing on that page is a “friend” of yours.

Each new design rollout that Facebook has done has added new features at the cost of usability. Actually, I think they don’t realize what “simple” really means. Yes, the design is simple, with well-balanced elements. But when you actually want to do something other than view feeds, it’s a guessing game.

Not that geeks care, of course, because learning how to use new interfaces is fun to them. They sift through the options to find new, shiny features to play with, much like a treasure hunt. The average person who wants to find what phone number her friend has posted to Facebook will scream in frustration because she can’t figure out how to get to his profile.

All it takes to avoid “geek drift” is simply keeping in mind the core functionality of the site very time a major change is considered. If you’re going to kill your equivalent of the friends browser, think to yourself “how will this improve the experience?” I’m sure Facebook has a good answer for that one!