Facebook’s Ridiculously Cool Story Types Preferences Widget

July 17, 2007

Ok, so who on the Facebook design team is an aspiring bedroom DJ?

The widget below, which looks like a multi-track mixing console, allows Facebook users to reign in fine grain control over the frequency of which “stories” are presented on their dashboard.

Don’t care who’s been writing on Joe Schmoe’s wall? Turn down the volume on the “Wall Posts” slider and you will see less of those story types in your news feed. Always want to know when your friend’s relationship statuses change? Turn up the volume on the Relationships slider and you’ll see more of those story types in your feed.

You can literally “mix up” your news feed with exactly the types of stories you’re most interested in.

Not only is this control an excellent and extremely desirable customization feature, it’s also a pleasure to use.

One suggestion: Make this UI analogy complete by putting a checkbox at the bottom of each slider labeled “Mute”. Clicking on it would cause the slider for that story type to drop to its lowest level (off), and no stories of that type would show in the news feed.

The same page also provides a way to specify up to 20 friends whose news items should be promoted to highest priority, as well as 20 friends whose news items should be demoted to lowest priority- a very handy feature for insuring information from your most valuable contacts gets through, while “noise” from other contacts is suppressed.

As the Facebook population expands and our networks grow, these types of customizations will be crucial to managing information overload and keeping the information presented to us about our networks relevant.

Bookmark to:

Posted in facebook, user interface