The Groups App at facebook.com Is Not Very User Friendly

zxue — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:48:00 GMT

I have to admit that I am relatively new to facebook. Among many wonderful things I have really enjoyed using the social site, I encountered some challenges while working with the Groups application.

First, I realized that it didn't let me change the name of the group I created. My expectation was that I should be able. And I figured I could at least delete it and create a different group with the name I like better. But then I realized there was no Delete button or link. To delete an exiting group, I had to remove all members, and selected to leave the group myself. I did get a warning, "You are attempting to remove yourself from a group for which you are the last member. If you remove yourself, the group will be deleted." When I confirmed, the group then disappeared. Lessons learned.

Then I discovered yet another challenge. When creating a new group, I selected a specific network, not Global, from the Network option. That was fine until I wanted to invite people who have not created facebook accounts to join the group. Because their business and personal email addresses were not considered part of the network I selected for the group, the invite was blocked. I was not very pleased with that. So I wanted to change the Network option. But I couldn't; deleting the group one more time was the only choice left to me since I wanted to send out an invite to non-members. More lessons learned.

I understand the need of putting some restrictions to applications like Groups when they are created. I just feel that the restrictions the Groups app put in place are not user friendly. I may be missing something here, but just want to share my thoughts. And I'm hoping that facebook.com can improve the Groups application so that it becomes easy to make some expected changes.

Dr. Z's Blog : Facebook

The Groups App at facebook.com Is Not Very User Friendly