I came across the Fat Face Facebook Application, "Big Fat Resolutions from Fat Face". The basic idea is that you send a resolution to a friend (e.g. learn to ski, go sailing etc), and if you're lucky you (or them, it's not clear) could win a holiday with the activity.
It's a quite good idea, but the application has some serious flaws:
1. No Facebook theme - if you look at any successful application it will use Facebook designs for the Facebook features, e.g friend invites, tabbed browsing. These make people feel comfortable and means they can easily get around the app without having to learn the design again.
2. Invite process - I almost stopped using the app at this point. After choosing a resolution to send, instead of being able to write in a box who I want to invite, the application pre-chooses a load of irrelevent people who I obviously don't want to send the resolution to, and then makes it really difficult to choose the person I do - the 'clear all' button didn't work, so I had to manually tick off each person, then when I went to choose a new person instead of the normal Facebook invite with a name box as well as photos, they'd created their own with no name box, so I had to manually trawl through my 300+ friends to get to the one person I wanted to send the resolution to. Very annoying, and likely to destroy their invite limits under the new rules.
3. No navigation. This is of such primary importance. After I'd sent one resolution, I wanted to go back and look at others, but I couldn't - There was no browsing, just links to a guide they were selling, and the Fat Face site - lovely, but when I want to send more resolutions this just annoyed me, so of course I'm not going to click on the links.
I hate to see good brands wasting their Facebook real estate, so I decided to send my thoughts above to the developer, Ok-Cool. They seem to be a web application company, not sure how much Facebook experience they have.
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UPDATE:
Mark and Tom from Ok-Cool have both responded to my post. It's really great to see them being so open and objective, I look forward to seeing other applications they produce in the future.
It's a quite good idea, but the application has some serious flaws:
1. No Facebook theme - if you look at any successful application it will use Facebook designs for the Facebook features, e.g friend invites, tabbed browsing. These make people feel comfortable and means they can easily get around the app without having to learn the design again.
2. Invite process - I almost stopped using the app at this point. After choosing a resolution to send, instead of being able to write in a box who I want to invite, the application pre-chooses a load of irrelevent people who I obviously don't want to send the resolution to, and then makes it really difficult to choose the person I do - the 'clear all' button didn't work, so I had to manually tick off each person, then when I went to choose a new person instead of the normal Facebook invite with a name box as well as photos, they'd created their own with no name box, so I had to manually trawl through my 300+ friends to get to the one person I wanted to send the resolution to. Very annoying, and likely to destroy their invite limits under the new rules.
3. No navigation. This is of such primary importance. After I'd sent one resolution, I wanted to go back and look at others, but I couldn't - There was no browsing, just links to a guide they were selling, and the Fat Face site - lovely, but when I want to send more resolutions this just annoyed me, so of course I'm not going to click on the links.
I hate to see good brands wasting their Facebook real estate, so I decided to send my thoughts above to the developer, Ok-Cool. They seem to be a web application company, not sure how much Facebook experience they have.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE:
Mark and Tom from Ok-Cool have both responded to my post. It's really great to see them being so open and objective, I look forward to seeing other applications they produce in the future.
1 comments:
Hi Josh,
Interesting post... I've responded on our blog - www.ok-cool.com
I haven't received your feedback personally, I just found this post through a trackback.
Best, Mark
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