Fail: Facebook Hides Unconfirmed Status

Now I understand what’s going on that bothered me in my previous posting. Since a Ping.fm posting was the first time I had tried to Like an item and couldn’t find the link to do so, it naturally occurred to me that the problem was with Ping.

But Ping is not at fault here, Facebook is! I didn’t realize why until I read another Ping.fm posting that I wanted to Like. It turned out to be from the same friend as the first, and when I went to his wall to sleuth some more, I discovered that he had not yet confirmed me as a friend. Which of course means I can’t Like or comment on anything he posts, even though it is appearing on my Facebook news feed.

There are multiple causes of my confusion, all related to Facebook’s failure to communicate.

• There is no indication on my news feed, or anywhere else items from people I’m following appear, that I have friended them but they have not confirmed me as a friend. Since this condition creates interesting restrictions on how I can interact with them, this status needs to be indicated visually on each appearance of their content.
• The Comment and Like links that are normally below each entry on your News Feed are simply missing when they’re not available, instead of appearing grayed out (or in strikethrough). The end result is that I spend time looking for these links instead of being given a visual clue they’re not available.
• There is no way to get an explanation of why I can’t comment or like something. I should be able to find out, if not by reading a text label or icon near the posting, hovering over or clicking on some status icon that would explain any limitations about this friend or posting.
• Most, but not all, of the icons Facebook puts in front of its annotations lack hover text that explains what the icon means. One exception is of course the thumb-up like icon, which has the hover text “Click here to like this item” when I can like something, and absolutely nothing when I can’t.

As badly as they have handled the privacy debacle, I believe it is merely a symptom of their designers not putting enough thought into the usability and the overall system design. Facebook will have greater success in overcoming their privacy gaffe if they go back to first principles and work at making the whole product easier to understand and interact with as a whole, instead of trying to fix one part of it they mistakenly believe is isolated from the rest of the system’s behaviors.