Victory!!!

What’s the problem here?

If you are familiar with Facebook, you’ve seen this many times. This is called the “Composer” by Facebook engineers, but that’s not important to anyone who casually uses it and probably nobody cares. Like the Mac “Finder” and the Windows “Explorer” they are the tools that get used so often that we take them for granted (different topic).

What is important is a problem I observe with the cleverness going on in the Facebook “Composer”. The image above shows a before and after scenario (before I click my mouse in the field and after I click in the text field). At a glance there is no apparent purpose of the Composer except “a place to type some text”. The real purpose can only be discovered.

I ran into a problem in early 2008 when the UI changed drastically (pictured above)—how do I upload photos? It completely baffled me, and for good reason. The last thing I thought to do would be click on something disguised as a mere text field and have it magically provide me with photo-uploading powers! Only when I gave up and was about to type a desperate message to my friends did I see those options. Huh?

Why the hiding?

Why are they not available from the top-level without requiring a mouse-click in the text field? I don’t know. What higher principle of UI cleanliness does this uphold by hiding common, important actions from me? I don’t know.

I suppose the same “violation” exists within the Macintosh single-button mouse. Does it mean that you can’t “right-click”? No. But it frustrates PC users that there is some “magic” that they have to become familiar with before the action becomes intuition and habit.

However there are all sorts of trade-offs and aesthetic tastes concerning UI design and Facebook does very well. They did at least stop trying to make me talk about myself in the third-person (so annoying!) with their status prompt “Dylan is…”.