News

Second blog contribution by Niklas Barning:

During the time I have been at hmmh as a trainee media designer up to now, I have learned that a website not only has to look nice, but also has to be user-friendly. You can’t leave any click to chance, visitors must not be pointed down the wrong path. But unfortunately there are not always model sites. The best example, in my opinion, is Facebook. Everyone is familiar with this portal, everyone uses it and many identify with it. However, for some time now Facebook has been putting more and more functions for users on its platform that make sense in terms of the idea behind them, but the sheer number of them makes the entire website more complicated.

As I see it, chaos reigns at Facebook and many of the important basic principles of Web design are left at the wayside. On the right margin of the browser, for example, is a large chat bar and above that they have an activity bar that tells me where my friends are commenting on something at the moment or have been interacting in some other way. A column to the left of that you then find a list of birthdays, people who I might know and, of course, advertising. While my friends, who I may even have put in order using tabs, talk to me further down from that, something is suddenly moving at the top right margin. A friend has again interacted with someone and was put at the top of the activity list. The middle column – the news – was also a source of confusion for me recently. All of a sudden many of the messages of my friends were several hours old although, in fact, someone was always writing something and a half hour never went by without a new message from a friend. This made me take notice of Facebook’s new sorting function, which in the default setting only shows me “highlighted messages”.

Why do I need something like that? This is exactly where I want to be informed about the latest activities of my friends. For me Facebook is no longer the stomping ground for my friends where I can read a bit about what they are doing at the moment. Facebook now wants my complete attention, wants to give me a full overview and at the same time forgets to pay attention to its own user friendliness. Nevertheless, I still have some hope that the people over there in San Francisco have made a good New Year’s resolution. The new “Facebook Timeline” indicates that they want to create order again in the jumble of messages and attach importance to Web design. I am curious about the changes time will bring.

*Source: W&V HRmarketingblog