MMMeeja

This is the first in a series of (hopefully many) entries detailing design decisions that have really impressed me. It is a complement to the annoyances series, and it will be interesting to see whether I find more nice touches or more annoyances.

Knowing my personality, there’ll probably be more annoyances.

Facebook Status Entry

There are loads of well thought out user interface items, but their status update window is a great example of a change that is not intrusive.

Many months ago, Facebook switched from forcing everyone to use “is” at the start of their status texts, to allowing anything. This was a welcome change for many people, but many others were used to just clicking on the edit link and typing.

There was a danger that people would forget that “is” was no longer mandatory and their statuses would make little sense or appear neanderthal, like:
Andy disappointed in United’s poor performance

The solution was pretty clever and one that I think many designers would not have thought of - if the previous status began with “is”, then all words except “is” would be automatically selected, otherwise the entire status would be selected.

This is great, for many reasons:

1. It gives people time to adjust to the change.
2. It visually emphasises the new functionality.
3. The editing process is just the same as before - click and type.

The whole Facebook site is awash with great usability features like this, although some features seem deliberately hidden (preventing application spam, for instance) so I’m sure they will be appearing in this series later.