Facebook apps: Not too late to compete on the user experience front

Brian Dillard, Thursday, May 29, 2008 @ 4:12 pm

Despite the hype, Facebook's a frontier rather than an established metropolis. There's still room to ride into town on a white horse and save the day, earning yourself a healthy reward in the process. Exhibit A? The so-so user interface standards of the social network's most popular applications.

I recently, belatedly started playing Scrabulous with various friends and I'm shocked at the just-okayness of its UI. The lack of an on-screen legend for the mechanics of the variously shaded bonus squares? Puzzling. The drag-and-drop interface for shuffling tiles around in your tray? Maddeningly persnickety. The mismatch between the word lookup feature, which uses thefreedictionary.com, and the application's own, internal whitelist of valid words? A real bummer.

Scrabulous provides an adequate ripoff of a venerable and justly loved board game. But the rough edges of its user experience suggest that Facebook still has plenty of room for folks who know how to polish a UI till it gleams. Sure, first-to-market advantage gets magnified on social networks. But as these new application platforms mature, I'm convinced user experience design can provide a compelling means of product differentiation.

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Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   But how did you miss the auto-shuffle function attached to one of those colored balls above your tile tray? Which one you ask? Well, I can’t be sure without going into the app but its there I assure you. Careful though because I think one of them clears your board

   Comment by Vince, Thursday, May 29, 2008 @ 4:47 pm

2. 

   @Vince: Yes, I always love totally random icons whose functionality is mysterious until you click on them. True, true, there are always the mouseover captions, but still…..

   Comment by Brian Dillard, Monday, June 2, 2008 @ 11:21 am

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