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.
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
@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…..