Comments on: A Technology Reality Check — The Fable of the Facebook Login

By: Geeky Mom » Blog Archive » Is this my beautiful Internet?

Geeky Mom » Blog Archive » Is this my beautiful Internet? — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:54:52 +0000

[...] Scholarly Kitchen, a link to this ReadWriteWeb post that many people confused for Facebook in its new incarnation. [...]

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:33:46 +0000

A good take on the story is here, suggesting that it should be more of a humiliation for interface designers than for the hapless Facebook users.

By: David Wojick, Ph.D.

David Wojick, Ph.D. — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:27:28 +0000

There seems to be a pernicious law in product development that I call the “Law of More” (not to be confused with Moore’s Law). Each new version of an app, website or device has more features than the last, presumably because some users want each new feature, or just because we can do it. As a result the overall complexity of use goes up. Total complexity roughly equals the complexity of each feature plus the complexity of each useful combination of features.

The problem is that each user only has so much time to put into learning how to use the thing, especially new users. (I call this the cognitive budget.) The net result is that usability, measured as the fraction of actually usable features to total features, goes steadily downward. Frustrated users retreat into a niche of simplicity.