A good User Interface Design is Indispensable

A simple and uncomplicated user interface design is the key to a successful website or mobile application. We all know how annoying it can be for users who cannot access the function they need, especially when the link they click on doesn't deliver what its tooltip has promised. What's surprising is that even successful online platforms like Facebook have user interface designs that aren't always user friendly. This fact raises the question: why doesn't the user interface design of a huge company like Facebook seem so well thought out? This enterprise should have more than enough money to hire excellent UX design experts.

Facebook UI design

A user interface design should not hide its functions. Yet judging by the Facebook app, this rule isn't always followed. Of course, they have a neatly arranged UI design to navigate between messages, news, groups or events. However, when it comes to privacy settings, Facebook was never known for an uncomplicated user interface design. When I want to select who has the rights to see certain content on my page I have to scroll down the whole user interface within the Facebook-App for iOS devices to access this. Then I ask myself: "do I have to go to privacy settings or account settings?" (This makes me think of Steve Krug's main rule: don't make me think.) I decide to click on privacy settings. At first, the user interface design seems to be lucid. There are different subcategories with an explanation and then a link to finally change the settings. But while taking a closer look, the user interface design turns out to be more complicated than it should be. The explanations are too long. Even after reading it I still don't know exactly what I can change in some cases. When I look for the right subcategory to set how companies can use my personal data within Facebook, it's more than challenging. It comes to my mind that this was maybe done on purpose.

A bad user interface design to make people do what you want?

It is definitely not a good idea to deliberately create a bad user interface design. It is tempting to hide certain functions, for example privacy settings and hope the user will not notice or give up trying to change it. What we see based on Facebook is exactly what a company does not want. They start to have a bad reputation. They'll always be people checking on every change and surely the media will report about it. As a consequence, users will feel uncomfortable, because they are afraid of losing the authority over their personal data. Even when the number of registered users in the US only gone down 1.1 % in the first half of the year 2012 Facebook has to be careful to not lose its status as the most used social media platform in the world. Bad media regarding personal privacy means that users are skeptical about every single change in the user interface design. They are likely to share the least information as possible within the application. This is something Facebook surely doesn't want to encourage. I suggest making a user interface design transparent and basically telling people that the platform finances itself through advertisements and asking the user to which extent he wants to be reached with personal adverts. Being honest creates trust and probably will make the user be more open about the commercial content of an application.