I’ve been a daily user of Facebook for years, primarily at the start just for keeping in touch with family, relatives, classmates and friends at church. As time progressed I started using and creating a Page for my web business and Groups for my personal interests. So one thing I do every morning is look at the left side of my Facebook browser window and scan for new posts on my Pages or Groups, but all of a sudden this morning this info was totally missing from Facebook.
Instead of the very familiar Pages and Groups, now I have something called Shortcuts which isn’t what I want to use at all. It’s so frustrating to use and learn a UI like Facebook only to wake up to a change when nothing was broken before, so it really didn’t need fixing. Instead of instantly seeing my Pages and Groups, now I have to click in the upper-right on the Settings icon:
From this Settings menu I can see the two things that really interest me:
- Manage Pages
- Manage Groups
Of course, this requires me to perform two clicks instead of one click, decreasing my efficiency. Clicking on Manage Pages shows me:
Clicking on Manage Groups show me:
What Facebook really needs to do is allow me to define what I want to show under Shortcuts, which would be a list of my Pages and Groups, just like I had before the change last night.
Big note to Facebook, don’t change my left sidebar without giving me the option to keep it the same way it was. As my dad always taught me, “Son, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”