Ahmed El Gabri Portfolio

I don`t like the new UI change made to the comments by removing the button and replace it with Enter, I`ll tell you why this a bad UI decision which will affect the user experience very much on the negative side.

Facebook is now being used by 500+ million peoples across the globe and that is huge they are the the third-largest nation in the world, This means that they have every possible kind of users from the very normal ones — those who looks at the keyboard while typing finger by finger — to the most tech-savvy users — who relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts — and here is the big problem about this change.

Those regular users i mentioned most of them uses text-editors or processors “Microsoft Word, Notepad etc…” heavily so they are accustomed that the Enter button is used for a new line-break and actually all of us are used to this too, So this new UI change is breaking a mental mode for many users even if those are 1% it`s 5 million user.

Let`s have this scenario my mother log into Facebook she founds something interesting, She wanted to post a comment then she moved the mouse to the comment textarea started to type — while looking at the keyboard , believe me she does — while she is typing she hit Enter to make a new line and boom this just posted the comment but she didn`t knew that yet cause she is looking at the keyboard while writing. at the end she moved her head up and to look at her nice comment and found the her first sentence only was posted and nothing else happened, all the typing she made was gone. Imagine how frustrating this would be for her ?

Even worse they don`t have anything that warns you before posting or typing except for the “9px” message at the bottom of the textarea what are you thinking Facebook 9px message ?? , the body copy is small enough at 11px so for something Important like this you made a message in 9px, How would a 50 years old human be able to read this text ? ah i forgot maybe that`s why they invented the microscope at the first place. I`m amazed that a huge company like this haven`t thought about those very clear problems.

I`m no way near a UI/UX expert but those are pretty obvious problems. Although i don`t like this change but i think it would have been a bit better if they switched the Enter with Shift+Enter to post a comment instead, cause using Enter is very normal to many people as i said before to make a new line so it can be easy to forget and mess things up but if they have made it Shift+Enter that would be better cause this would mean that the person is knowing what he is doing – rarely anyone clicks two buttons in the same time by mistake – like Twitter for Mac it`s Command + Enter to post a new tweet and Enter is preserved for it`s natural propose which is a new line.

Here are so ideas i think would have been nice to warn/help users to know about the change

A warning message at the top of the home page

display a tooltip when hover not foucs over the textarea , cause after focus “mom will look at the keyboard to start typing” or maybe disable the action for the first time and display this message after clicking Enter so that the user gets a feedback that they changed something without losing what he wrote.

that`s why i think Shift+Enter is better cause it will decrease errors , it will indicate that the user made this action on purpose and that he knows what he is doing. So Facebook i know that you won`t bring the comment button back but swapping the shortcuts will be better for the users. Please do it so i don`t get those calls “Ahmed ! Help ! my comment is not complete”.