How Facebook can easily improve its UX
Facebook is a great inspiration for designers like me. Millions of people use it constantly and even the least technological ones know how to handle it. However — the platform still has some simple UX features it’s missing to improve its User Experience.
Pausing a song/video playing without having to scroll all the way back
Turns out the song your friend just posted is crap, but you’re already way ahead in the page. So now you ask yourself “How do I stop this nonsense?”. You scroll up and down to find that youtube video (and maybe unfriend the guy who posted it), but it’s just too hard to find anything with so much noise in there.
Notifying the user he’s about to get thrown to another page after clicking to reading comments.
When a post gets very popular, facebook won’t load its comments in your feed. instead — it will redirect you a different page. When that happens — it will unexpectedly force you to lose content you wanted to read.
‘Back’ button for in-app screens
Many times when viewing an image or a video in a modal, there’s a link in the comments to another image, which opens a different modal, but closes the current one.
News feed customization
I think Facebook should ask us for the subjects we care about, and let us reduce the amount of posts we get from certain people and pages, so that the ones who are actually interesting to us will have more place in our feed.
Going through my feed now, and here’s what I find:
- Someone I don’t care about liked a photo of someone I don’t even know
- Random people posting ‘Happy Birthday’ to someone I never talked to
- Sponsered content
Facebook offers a survey to ‘Help Make News Feed Better’, but it only asks how much certain posts feel like ads or not. They don’t really care about your feed being more entertaining, they only care about you clicking ads.
I think if Facebook wants to stay relevant, then it needs to start showing the user what HE wants to see. Flipboard, Twitter and many more are doing this much better.
Having said all that, I still think their team is doing a great job. I guess it’s not easy to keep a usable site with so many users and also keep the profits to the maximum.
As for me, I think the best way I can improve my Facebook experience is to spend less time there.
