If you’re on any social network you’ll know that Facebook rolled out some major changes to their system over the last couple of days. To say it’s gone down like a lead balloon would be an understatement, Facebook users have always been a bit small-c conservative, and don’t like change. But the rage I’m seeing this time round is a lot more intense.
Having a background in software testing gives me some insight into how and why they’ve annoyed so many people so badly this time.
What appears to have happened is they’ve lauched some potentially powerful new features without really bothering to explain to anyone how they work or how they should be used.. Smart Lists are a good example; They’re similar to the circles in Google+, and almost certainly implemented as a response to that. But again, they haven’t made the implications of adding people to certain types of list clear. This probably explains why we’ve seen more than one rock band adding all their fans as employees. Once could be a mistake, twice looks like careless UI design.
As we’ve come to expect from Facebook by now, they’ve set the defaults for most things to values that aren’t the ones you’d have chosen. And it goes without saying that every new data-sharing is opt-out with the relevent option hidden in a rusty filing cabinet marked “Beware of the leopard”. Likewise, I don’t think they’ve bothered to test it properly before they rolled the changes out. Although in this case it’s not so much that the actual software is buggy, but the the design is not as intuitive to ordinary people as their designers seem to think it is.
Facebook’s problem is that a large proportion of its user base isn’t made up of tech-savvy computer nerds, but people like your mum. They’re not the least bit interested in performing unpaid exploratory testing of new and occasionally half-baked software products. They just want to share pictures of grandchildren.