Facebook App’s Poor Usability Leads To an Embarrassing Situation.

Social media fanatics can all agree that the Facebook mobile app is both a fun and addictive piece of technology. But it can also be embarrassing—or even career threatening—if its usability is unclear.

Take Melissa, an English teacher of ten years, who recently posted her status about how badly her drink was poured at a local restaurant. She snapped a photo of this foamy abomination with her iPhone, typed "Worst poor ever," then tapped the “post” button. Seconds later she realized her mistake, but she could not find a “delete” button anywhere. In a panic, she desperately tapped every button she saw without any luck. Before long, the comments started rolling in. She finally gave up and posted a follow-up comment: "And worst grammar ever.”

It's only human to make mistakes, so when designing an app or a Website; make sure you consider your users and build in easy ways for them to recover from an error. Fortunately for Melissa, she still gets to keep her job teaching English, but her bad user experience could have been avoided with the addition of one, small usability improvement. You’ll be glad to know that Melissa later learned how to delete a post by holding her finger over the post and sliding it to the side to reveal a delete button.

If it were up to me I'd make it more obvious for her, and others, by having the close icon [x] always visible in the upper right corner of every post section. Or, perhaps even take it a step further and design an “undo” button into the OS so you can always go back a step no matter what app you’re using. The iPhone currently has a "shake to undo" feature if you are using one of Apple's built in applications, but unfortunately it doesn't work for third party apps.

I'm sure we've all had bad user experiences with websites or apps. Tell us some of your horror stories and if you'd like help with your next digital marketing project, feel free to contact us. We promise not to make fun of any grammatical errors.