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Featured People - Facebook

In the current UI of Facebook if you want to add a relationship you really have to do a little bit of a treasure hunt. That is unless you know exactly where it is. You have to go to Profile>Edit Profile (a grey colored button right below the Home-Profile-Account tab strip)>Featured People. There are issues with this whole mechanism. And this is just one of those things that does not make Facebook's UI "idiot proof". For starters let me point out that the section Featured People does not strike, to most people, as the place where you would manage relationships. Then the whole ordeal of getting there in the first place is difficult. Now for an important feature, such as relationships, this should have been given top access. Now i understand what Facebook has done. It has tried to give the best access and usability to its most used features such as the wall and the News Feeds. It is brilliantly done. And for most people, setting relationships is not on a high priority in their TODO list when they are on Facebook. While all this is done and done well, the team at FB seems to have lost the bigger picture. It has never been able to make the UI very idiot proof. A new user will be lost and the Featured People example was one of the more basic ones. Taking a more sensitive approach, the designers at FB should have come up with a different name rather than, Featured People. Most of my friends on FB, like to keep such information, namely their relationships and family members, away from the public eye, while wanting to establish it in a private manner. Which i think is fair. So, in a very basic sense of the word, "Feature" is not the right way to put it. You never want to feature your lovers or family members. Would you? Today a colleague literally yelled at me for the same thing, while we were debating about it. I could not get his point at first. But the more i thought about it, the more i realized that all my family was under this section called Featured People. I did not particularly enjoy the feeling  i got after that realization. Apart from the name, why is all this in a different tab/section all together, at least the relationship and family bit? Should it not be a part of your basic information? Even if you think that it should not be so (and i will agree with you there), can it not be under a different tab called Family? Why can it not be that simple? As a defense FB will say that you can not only add your Relationship status and Family Members under the tab of Featured People, but you can also add a custom list of friends or groups. This i found after a thorough combing of the whole UI. So when you look at it like that, "YES", it makes sense. But then again, why can't there be a different section for such lists and groups. At a very fundamental level, i would not like to put such groups and my family together, period. Now all that was the sentimental part of the debate. Let me get down to the usability of something as important as relationships. If you go along the same bandwagon as FB has today with featured people, you realize that your friend's list should have the family list as well. Whats more, it should also have a separate link which shows your relationship, in case you have filled it up. While it does not do the relationship bit (thats the first deficiency), it does give you a list of your family. But to get to the whole list of your friends you need at the least two clicks, the first one is required to take you to your profile page. That is very strange. It is a social networking site. To not give a single click access to your entire friend's list is gross foolishness. FB is a fantastic networking tool with its feeds, updates and likes. But it can never be a true social networking site until it gives people and relationships a higher priority. Right now, it is just giving their latest doings that extra importance.