Someone I know recently encountered one of those Facebook scare memes. A friend of hers (who had heard from a friend of hers) said that anything you like shows up publically. And, furthermore, any statuses related to what you like will show up on that “Like” page as well! Your statuses are no longer private, and could be shown to anyone who “Liked” hiking if you mentioned the word hiking in your status!

The “proof” was offered that one had only to go to the Hiking page, and sure enough, your statuses related to hiking were present, along with the statuses of others who’d mentioned the word.

Well, hold on. When my friend posted her concern, I figured out right away what was going on. Everyone’s view of information on Facebook is tailored to the person logged in. The average user gets that. They understand that their news feed is only related to them. It makes sense to them because it’s similar to information they receive like emails. That is, these messages are “for me.”

What’s harder for the average user to understand is how a “public” page can look different for different users. The average person thinks of public pages like static informational web pages, like news sites or Wikipedia. That is, this information is FOR everyone, therefore my experience of this page should be identical to the experience of everyone else of this page.

For Facebook “Like” pages, this isn’t the case. The topic information is likely the same for everyone, but the conversation about the topic is tailored for the individual user, and both show up on the “public” page.

Facebook’s mistake (or one of their mistakes) all along has been they don’t sufficiently understand their users. It makes sense to them, so surely it will make sense to everyone, right? It’s obvious that their user testing is not comprehensive, or they aren’t actually adjusting their strategy based on user testing, or both. As a result, their users often complain about confusion and frustration with the site, and mis-information is easily spread amongst its user base. It SIMPLY ISN’T CLEAR what Facebook is doing most of the time, and their efforts to make it more clear usually don’t help.

Don’t take my word for it. In July of 2010, the American Customer Satisfaction Index conducted a poll and were shocked to find that Facebook scored so low with its users, and were hated as much as airlines and cable companies.

The irony is that Facebook, by being so directly connected with so many users, could easily conduct user testing.  Their Ads system is sophisticated in targeting and feedback, but apparently not so with their usability testing.  The company makes seemingly arbitrary decisions, whether those decisions or subsequent changes are popular or not.

Find out what users want.  Guessing is a waste of time, and a quick way to become the most hated popular company out there.

I was working on a website project recently, put my finishing touches on the web-page layout, and voila, page complete.  Then, I opened the page up in Internet Explorer.

While most beginner developers encounter a shock when previewing their first websites at Internet Explorer, I’d say I’m enough of a web veteran that there’s usually very few things for me to address.

But this was incredible.  I was looking at IE8, and not only was the site rendered wrong, it was wrong to a degree of wrongness I’d never seen before.  And hours later, after trying every trick in the book to squelch common IE quirks, it still was wrong.  And of course IE7 was wrong, but in a different way, and IE6 was wrong, but in a different way from 7 or 8.

Web developers hate Internet Explorer, that much is clear.  But mostly what gets talked about in browser comparison (especially now) is speed, and that’s not the real reason Internet Explorer sucks.  It’s the bugs, the damned bugs.  Not only that they exist, but that they are never fixed, and no, I don’t count a new version as a bug patch.  A bug is where the developer has said, “We expect this to do X,” and it doesn’t.

All other major browser manufacturers fix these bugs, and most of them do it transparently and quickly.  If Firefox 3.6 doesn’t render something as intended, oops, Firefox 3.6.1 is installed which fixes it.  Microsoft doesn’t do this.  Internet Explorer 6 has and will always have the same bugs that it shipped with, as will 7 and 8.  Microsoft is either unwilling or incapable of addressing bugs for one of their most widely-used products, and it’s absolutely baffling as to why.

Because developers interact with browsers at a higher-level, and have to deal with these bugs, addressing bugs proactively means that developers feel supported.  Not addressing bugs means developers don’t feel supported, and, when it comes to IE, Microsoft doesn’t seem keen on addressing them at all.  ”Oh well,” they shrug, “Maybe we’ll fix that when we get to the next version.”

IE9 will eventually be released, but am I looking forward to it?  Not really.  If it conforms to its history, IE9 will pretend to be on par with other browsers, but it will get it wrong.  Chances are, it will get it really wrong.  And it will get it wrong in a different way than 6, 7, and 8, increasing the work for me to figure out why it got it wrong.  And when it gets it wrong, that means that IE9 will never get that particular thing right.  Like every other version of IE, the bug will be studied by outsiders, written about, discovered over and over by new developers, but will forever remain as a kind or archeological artifact, reminding every person of the Microsoft Internet Explorer team who worked on that release: “You f**ked up.”

But no one will ever think of the obvious solution, which is to fix it.

I went to set up a user for a site we’re launching at work, but which is still in development. The setup page had a password field, and when I put one in, an error message popped up: “Invalid password.”

Invalid password why? Was the password too long? Did it use disallowed characters? The error message gave me no indication of what the problem was nor any idea how to fix it, save guessing an unknowable number of times. Needless to say, I sent it back to the original programmer with these tips:

1. Give friendly and clear explanations on errors to users and how to resolve them.
2. The better option than restricting a field is to be flexible in the input and provide warnings, rather than block inputs altogether. For instance, many sites will give you a rating of password strength (low, medium, high), rather than enforce a particular pattern. Similarly, it’s greater usability to allow me to type in my birth date in whatever format I choose rather than force me to choose from multiple drop-down boxes.

In other words, don’t make me think.

I’ve always felt that Google had the ugliest UI of any online entity. I turned away from using Gmail because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand looking at that ugliness several times a day. For a while, they scoffed that design was important, and that only functionality mattered, and then people flocked to Bing when they saw how pretty it was. A TED talk reiterated that how you feel about something you interact with often determines how easy it is to use. In other words, design IS functionality. If it’s prettier, for the human psyche, it’s easier to use. If the design is jarring, I won’t see a piece of functionality that’s right in front of me. The research proves: if we take an old ugly website and preserve all functionality and content, and give it a nicer design, then we will have automatically raised the usability. If the design convolutes or is distracting, then people get confused and discouraged.

Here’s what CNET had to say about Google’s recent use of images on the home page.

Hi, folks.  Yesterday, I was at an awards show in Calgary for Big Rock called the Eddies.  Along with some cohorts, I submitted a beer commercial for their contest, which didn’t win, but was one of the finalists.  Some of you probably will recognize the guy starring in it.    Enjoy.

http://vimeo.com/12315315

Great, so Microsoft doesn’t have to support my old operating system (Windows XP), but, as a web developer, I have to support their old browser?

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2799192/internet_explorer_9_is_bad_news_for.html?cat=15