All sorts of friends: Filtering your friends on Facebook
5,000 friends. That’s the amount of friends that Facebook allows a user to have. I will admit that I am personally almost at my cap for friendship allowances, but I probably only know fewer than 10% of my friends in real life. I use my Facebook account to connect with family and friends, to meet new people from all over the world, and to network.
Having so many friends makes it difficult to sort out where everyone is from. There is currently no way to filter your friends by the city they live in. You can only filter them by your own current city.
When doing a general Facebook search for a person’s name, however, you can filter the results by friends of friends, city, education, and/or work. I think this filtering feature is quite nice, and I feel that Facebook should offer these filters when searching through current friends.
Providing these filters would really help with networking since you may be looking to see if a friend has a connection to a company that you are interested in applying to. It could also be helpful when traveling. You may want to see which of your friends lives in a city that you are planning on visiting. In this day and age, the internet has brought us together like never before, and we have friends from all over the world. How nice would it be to see which of your friends lives near where you will be going so you can finally meet in person or get advice about where the best places to eat or go out to are. Currently Facebook is doing it’s users a disservice by not allowing us to search our friends in the same way we can search friends of friends or complete strangers.
One way to fix this could be to change the Current City filter to a City filter with a dropdown where the user can type the city name just as they do in the main search for people. Dropdowns for Education and Work could also be added here to make filtering friends easier and improve usability. (I never use the filters for Followers and Following, and I do not know how popular that feature truly is.) The City, Education, and Work filters for friends would greatly improve the user experience, especially when users have a large number of friends.
Lastly, I wanted to test the people name search so I randomly entered the name Jason Smith to see what would pop up. I was surprised to see that I actually had friends with that name. (Remember I have a lot of contacts that I do not know personally.) I also had a lot of results for people with mutual friends. I, therefore, tested the Friends of Friends filter to see how well it worked, and I was greatly disappointed. When I clicked on this filter, the results came up blank. And if you recall (or look above), I had several results with mutual friends. That would be considered a usability problem, for sure.
It looks to me like Facebook needs to add some more Usability Analysts to their team. I volunteer as tribute! Haha. As you can see from my previous blogs, I’m a nerd for heuristic evaluations. I am passionate about making products as usable as possible and focused on delivering a really great user experience. Discovering even the tiniest of usability problems in a product is what I aim to do. Facebook is overall a great product, but as can be seen, there is always room for improvement. And, after all, that is what User Experience is all about — iteration, iteration, iteration.
Thanks for giving this a read, and if you’re into UX, feel free to send me a message on Facebook to add me as a friend. Happy social networking!
