In a large Facebook group like my service fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, we have a bunch of stuff to post on the main feed for everyone to see. A lot of these posts are documents like: Minutes from meetings, By-Laws, Flyers, and event information. Facebook tries to accommodate this by providing a tab on the main page titled Files. After you press the tab, this page shows up.
Now on face value this feature is very useful because it cuts everything out and essentially leaves you with an RSS type feed of all the documents the group but upon closer examination, and a hell of a lot of posting, we find that the files are placed in the files section as a stack. Placed on top and then pushed down deeper into the depths of the page. There is no organization or filtering on the documents. Simply find the title of the document by scrolling through EVERYTHING. I'm sure in a usability study, the user was not asked to find the FIRST file amongst many thus leaving this problem unchecked. The system is reliable in that the documents are there...eventually but the user convenience is over looked. The only attempt at further organization is this:
In the top left there, you can see the All with a down arrow. This was at first promising...that is until I clicked it. The only options available were documents and files. Essentially allowing you to filter all the files so that there are only word/text documents shown and then everything else. Granted this halved the amount that we had to deal with, but it didn't quite give that edge a usability user would have asked for.
Designing off,
Ahmed Mustafa
I'm not personally or closely affiliated with a large enough group on facebook to understand this phenomenon directly, however I am a member of a fairly massive group, over several thousand, and we I often see posts along the line of : "anyone know where xyz document is?" and people get really annoyed. I'd like to see a user study of this system, as well, to see what the general feedback is.
ReplyDeleteI totally understand Ahmed's frustration with Facebook's file organization. Although I don't use Facebook for exchanging files all that often, I do use it as a main route of communication to my fraternity. Posts on group pages are normally organized in the same way as these files, with the most recent posts at the top. Often times important posts will become buried underneath newer data, which can make it extremely difficult to find pertinent information.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if this is so much a problem with Facebook or just my use of it. Facebook is intended to bring people together, but schedules, important news and files could be distributed in a more organized fashion. I'm guessing there are sites dedicated to this sort of thing, allowing for large groups to stay connected and informed in an efficient way.
As the Over-Secretary of Alpha Phi Omega (and the person responsible for uploading all of these files), this document sharing system is the bane of my existence. The only saving grace is that when you command-f search for a term, it searches every uploaded document—not just the ones within your current scrolling scope. A vast improvement would be a folder-style system.
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