ONSTAR WILL DONATE up to $250,000 to the families of police officers killed in the line of duty. For every person who fans OnStar, they will donate a dollar to the families. This is a great cause; I encourage you to fan Onstar and help the families of the fallen.

Sadly, I can’t do so myself, as Facebook has told me I have too many friends and fan pages.

How many friends is too many? Whom should I remove? Which fan pages should I unlike, if I could manage Facebook likes?

Here’s the nuttier part. Although I can’t add friends or pages, people can still add me. Every day at least half a dozen people do so. Some of them may have attended An Event Apart. Some may like A List Apart or A Book Apart. Others may have read Designing With Web Standards. Or this website. In some cases I know why people are reaching out to me; in others I don’t. This doesn’t bother me. I pretty much always say yes to new Facebook friends.

My reward for contributing significantly to Facebook’s content and networks is that I can never add another friend or fan another page (although anyone can add me as a friend).

Fanning Onstar to help the families of the fallen is much more important than this silly problem. I don’t lose sleep worrying about the friends I can no longer make on Facebook. I’m not complaining for personal reasons. I just wanted to point out—for my friends who work at Facebook and read this site—that Facebook’s rules about friends are arbitrary, incomprehensible, and broken. And in this case, this foolishness hurts (however slightly) the families of fallen officers. And that’s really not right.

Filed under: Design, facebook, Usability, User Experience, UX

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I’M ON FACEBOOK. I want to see everything I supposedly “like” and prune the list of things I don’t. There should be a page where I can do this—that’s UX Design 101—but instead there’s just a sidebar box on my profile page showing a rotating, random sampling of liked items. The box is fine as an outward-facing device: on my profile page, it gives visitors a teasing hint of some of the cool stuff a deep guy like me digs. But inward-facing-wise, as a tool for me to manage my likes, it’s useless.

At the top of sidebar box, there’s text stating that I currently have “372 likes.” The text is a hyperlink. Here’s what should happen when I click that link: I should be taken to a page listing my likes (or the first, say, 100 of my likes, with a pagination tool). Each liked item should link to its corresponding Facebook page in case I need to refresh my memory about it. (This is the one part Facebook actually gets right.) More importantly, each liked item should be preceded by a checkbox. I should be able to check off 50 items on the page that I no longer like, and press a button allowing me to delete them all at once.

A number of elegant variations will occur to even the least experienced interface designer at this point: Perhaps there’s a drop-down allowing me to choose functions other than deletion; perhaps there’s a link to “select all” or de-select all; and so on. Such variations could make Facebook’s hypothetical best-practice “like management” page easier, faster, or more pleasant to use. But they are pretty much beside the point, as Facebook does not provide a like management page when I click that stupid link.

When I click that link, what I get instead of a useful, simple management page—the kind we’ve been building in hypertext for over 15 years—is a small, in-page pop-up window, with a scrolling sidebar … because, like the sidebar box, this window is also a tease instead of a tool.

Inside that scrolling box is every item I’ve liked. I have to scroll to see anything beyond the first handful of liked items. There are no checkboxes. There is no master switch to delete one or more items. There isn’t even an in-place deletion button beside each listed item, like the primitive edit tool in the first iPhone 3G.

No, my friends. There’s nothing.

If I want to delete a liked item, get this! I have to click the item’s hyperlink, go to the individual item page, and then hunt around on that page in search of a tiny link that would let me “unlike” that item. If I manage to find that link and unlike that one item, there’s no confirmation dialog, and I’m not returned to the floating box, because the item’s like page doesn’t know about the box.

All that JavaScript, and no connections. All those pages, and not even the most basic tools.

And nobody complains. Why? Because nobody really uses liked items. Indeed nobody really uses Facebook, except to post links and photos and comment on their friends’ links and photos. Liked items are for advertisers, they’re not for you. In Facebook’s estimation, you don’t need to remove a page you no longer like, because you are never going to visit it anyway.

Hey, they have the stats, they know what their users do and don’t do.

Facebook is a charnel house of features that appeal to advertisers and businesses without actually being used, supported by tools that don’t work, for people who don’t care.

Now I, uh, like Facebook fine, for the same reasons you do (if you do), and I generally ignore its well-branded but otherwise abortive gestures toward key features that have made it famous without actually doing a damned thing—“like” being the people’s Exhibit A. But as a designer, it bothers me, not only because badly designed things bother designers, but because badly designed things in a highly successful product spur a lust for imitation. I don’t want our clients to think “like” works. I don’t want them desiring similarly broken functionality on sites we design for them. I don’t want them thinking users don’t need tools that work, simply because millions of users don’t complain about broken tools on Facebook. Tools like like and its sad little pop-up.

Me no like.

Filed under: Design, Usability, User Experience, UX

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Xiaoxi (Nancy) Zhan

Filed under: art, Illustration

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Don’t worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop.” – J.Zeldman LTTP 12.14.10

twitter.com/#!/iamdiddy/status/1835882504003584

Filed under: Acclaim, Design

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“WEB DESIGN” NEEDS HELP. Authoritative though it may be on countless other topics, when it comes to web design, Wikipedia sucks. In short, Wikipedia’s entry on “Web Design” needs your help. You know what to do.

Filed under: Design, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards

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Filed under: Apple, twitter

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GARY VAYNERCHUK is our guest on Episode #26 of The Big Web Show, taped live before an internet audience at 1:00 PM ET Thursday 4 November at live.5by5.tv. Gary is the creator of Wine Library TV, the author of the New York Times bestselling book Crush It!, and the co-founder with his brother AJ of VaynerMedia, a boutique agency that works with personal brands, consumer brands, and startups.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is recorded live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

Filed under: Big Web Show, books, Brands, business, Career, content, Dan Benjamin, New York City, people, Publishing, Respect, Self-Employment, Small Business, speaking, The Big Web Show, The Profession, work, writing

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I am in glorious California where it bends down to kiss Tijuana, about to begin Day II of An Event Apart San Diego, the fifth and final sold-out AEA conference event of 2010. If you are here with me, party on, Garth. If not, the links below will help you soak up some of the flavor. Next year, An Event Apart will host six spectacular conference events “for people who make websites.” Register early and often.

• A Feed Apart – official aggregator of An Event Apart
• An Event Apart San Diego – Photo Pool on Flickr
• Luke Wroblewski’s notes on AEA San Diego

Filed under: Design

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Happy Cog has won a “Best In Class” Interactive Media Award for the official Philadelphia tourism site, visitphilly.com in the travel/tourism category.

According to the IMA:

The Best in Class award is the highest honor bestowed by the Interactive Media Awards. It represents the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism. In order to win this award level, [the] site had to successfully pass through our comprehensive judging process, achieving very high marks in each of our judging criteria – an achievement only a fraction of sites in the IMA competition earn each year.

Details at happycog.com.

Filed under: Design

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