Mailbag: Facebook Page Notifications

A family member, after teasing me for not knowing someone was married because the only place they announced was on Facebook (and Shredder? You’re not off the hook either), finally asked:

Why do you still hate facebook?

Because the interface is inconsistent and sucks. Let me explain by showing you about my Page Notifications.

I still use Facebook under duress and happily go weeks without noticing I have alerts waiting. When I do remember to check in, this is usually my first clue I have that there are unread notifications:

If I click on the group, the toolbar at the top of the page gives me a much better idea of what’s going on:

So I logically click and I get this:

I don’t like that I have to click three times just to see my notifications. Yes, I can click on that teeny-tiny number to go to the page properly and wipe them, but what if I don’t want to? Also have you noticed how small the number is? It’s hard to hit if you’re not ‘great’ with your mouse. Guess what I’m not? Great with my mouse. I like larger icons because they’re easier for me to tap. I’m not the only one.

The next problem is the text color. It’s not really all that distinct. It changes to a useful red/orange on other pages, but the subtle grey on blue grey, combined with the size, makes it weird. Compare it to the alerts you get for unread posts in your timestream, or personal notifications:

Clearly their goal is to keep me on that front page (which is obviously why they swap my ‘recent posts’ to ‘top posts’ every chance they get). But even then, once you click on the item, the number goes away but the items are not marked as read. You still have the mark-as-read buttons, which are not very noticeable or distinct. In the case of a page, the number count on the sidebar goes away, but not the one on your toolbar or the notifications page. Welcome aboard the inconsistency train, thy name is Facebook.

Interestingly, this day when I clicked on the “Mark as Read” link, the number dropped from 20 to 1. But there was nothing else to mark as read. All the backgrounds went from pale blue to white, and there was no other indication as to how I might find what was unread.

Eventually I saw the sidebar:

There it was. I hovered over it, clicked ‘Mark As Read’ and that number went away. I had to refresh the page to make the orange alert go away, because apparently that level of Ajax is hard.

My conclusion is pretty simple. Facebook wants me on the main page of their site, my timeline, all the time, and that’s fine for a user. But in doing so, they’ve made administration of their pages and groups overly complex and inconsistent with the rest of the flow of their site. They want me to add in content, but they’re going to decide how I, and others, consume it, which means my ability to easily input and manage is secondary (or even tertiary) to their consumer design.

The pages and groups are a nice idea, but still ill planned for a ‘MySpace’ replacement. The only reason that even worked was because MySpace blew up on itself.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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