The Facebook interface is rich and ever-changing. In the rush to keep pace with the needs of adaptation, many of the grammatical constructions, visually speaking, of the graphical user interface made popular by MIT's X, Apple, and Microsoft, get cast aside, and the literalism and tentative understanding of older people, for whom 'speaking GUI' came later in life, is subverted constantly. Mostly, I think, this is the reason why older people tend to be more disoriented and subsequently disgruntled with the constant succession of ways to visually declare an action in Facebook's interfaces.
Here is an example. Facebook, like it or not, is a cultural nexus. People who grew up in MySpace and 4Chan, Memepool and the WELL, have an easy time figuring out what the developers were trying to get at when the return key suddenly morphed into a simple carriage return within the edit-control. The multi-line edit-control was well-defined in Apple, IBM, and Microsoft design guidelines by about 1990. It was not easy to grasp at first, because it tackled a lot of ambiguity, in the management of white-space in particular, through convention. Since a tab was used when any non-editable control had focus to indicate a desire to move to the next control in the z-order of the current window, tab only took you out of a multi-line edit into the next control in the z-order, rather than adding a set of spaces with a well-defined endpoint, as in any full-blown text-editor.
This is annoying as hell when you're not thinking of the type of control your focus is in, but instead concentrating on content. Nonetheless, it is useful, much as silly-seeming linguistic conventions in English such as saying "may I" instead of "can I" to express desire for permission instead of doubt about basic ability. The reason persnickety mothers 30 years ago insisted on that point is because of conviction in the formalism of a good grammatical style ultimately empowering the objects of their love to express more, to be more communicative.
Walking through an edit-session in Facebook Questions is an object lesson in the trouble with a pidgin developed to satisfy the desires of a frustrated mob when faced with a challenge on how to make specific navigation pathways available to a large mass in a small amount of time. I wrote an answer recently to a question about motorcycle storage. My original answer looked like this after I clicked the "Publish Answer" button:
I was not happy, because when I was in the edit-control, I had taken pains to organize the answer visually, and my finished product had looked like this moments before:
It is obvious that poor white-space-handling has butchered the visual organization of my answer, rendering the post a little tangled, so I click "Edit" and go in to use the numbered list option instead of adding the numbers myself, hoping to fix the formatting so I will simply have two points with a bulleted list within each. The control then decides that every item in the inner lists is an element of the outer list, adding numbers I do not want, so I press return and make a blank line. Conventionally, according to all three aforementioned interface design guides, this should stop the automatic number generation, but not here. The blank "2" & "3" are testament.
So I go ahead and select the list of 2 with sub-lists, and deselect the automatic numbering tool. Then I highlight just the first sub-list, and click on the bullet tool. My result is disappointing:
OK.. Now, three different list-elements with carriage-returns in-between are rolled up into a single bullet. Even a machine could have noticed that this is probably not the desired effect. Just take a moment to visualize the frustration of a septuagenarian cowboy who has dominated the interface to get this far. I decide to de-select the bullet tool, since it failed pretty spectacularly, but once again, the result of my action ran contrary to the way bullet-list tools have worked for 20 years:
Ten seconds later, I have solved the problem by cutting the sub-list out of the post, writing it in TextMate with carriage returns, pasting it back in and only then selecting the radio-button tool. I am laso wishing I had never decided to try to answer this question, and annoyed that I am having to go through cargo-cult rituals to make a bullet-list. At least, I am ready to tackle it in the second sub-list:
All ended reasonably well. The post finally came out, if a little bit butchered. Of course, there's the lasting effect, that I am less interested now in answering Facebook questions than before. The happy accident arising from that is that I decided to try Quora. I have been immediately impressed with the seriousness and quality of answers across the board there.
The difference is strangely parallel to the difference in quality of interfaces. Facebook does some very fancy interface work in places, and has some real disasters like this going on simultaneously and seemingly all the time, while Quora is starting out at an amazingly sophisticated level, yet obviously with fewer features than Facebook. At the same time, Quora seems very tight and bug-free, especially for a beta, but the proportion of the number of function points in the respective platforms is so high that I could not say for sure. Add to that the fact that Quora looks very RoR, and it may all be down to development methodologies and the necessary compromises and optimizations Facebook must have to make to keep up with over 10% of the internet's traffic!
No matter the reason, it is hard to ignore these navigational improvisations and the poor user experiences that result. It's hard for me to tell if these problems are localized for a certain group of users, or these are full-on releases across the entire user community, but there's no question that the user experience suffers from what looks like de-centralized and very perishable interface design that will be duplicated rapidly in other sites and ultimately contribute to segregation of the Facebook user-base.
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