Week 2 - Facebook

Being someone who's followed Facebook since its near inception, it has undergone a multitude of changes over the years and, as is widely known, grown in popularity every year. Whether these changes are necessary, or liked, is a matter of debate between different people, but changes come and go and, occasionally, user input is taken into account when changes are made especially when certain features become very unpopular. The current setup is likely to change before the year is up, but I would like to discuss the current setup briefly and whether certain features and buttons are all necessary.

Though there are many pages that can be analyzed, the two most popular would have to be the main page and the profile home page. The main page is loaded with content from the latest updates your friends have posted to the latest groups joined to pictures added to requests, be they friend or event. With all this content, one might think things would be too hard to find, but I think the setup is well organized and supports even those users who are new to Facebook and not technologically savvy. The main updates all appear in the middle and central location. Less important or perhaps updates with more substance are on the right and can be followed via links to find out more. There is a short and sweet menu at the top to help people get to the most used pages and there is a complex search feature that continues to evolve. All in all, the main page is well organized despite the tons of information it spits out at you.

The profile page is well organized as well and follows a somewhat similar organization to the main page, but it is split up into sub-sections with similar content. You enter the page with just your feed information, but you can open up the photos tab or the information tab and so on. This fairly intuitive tabbing system, used even in filing cabinets of days gone past, is easily understood even by new users to Facebook or even computers in general. In addition to the main tabs, there are also boxes that appear on the left hand side of the page. These can easily be re-arranged by dragging and dropping them in the order that you find to be the most useful. While this feature may not be readily apparent to newer users, it is also not as important and therefore not a major drawback.

All in all, the Facebook website is well organized considering the amount of data it contains and tries to ft into one page. There are definitely places where minor, or perhaps even major, changes and tweaks can be made, but the current setup gets an A from me.