Facebook's UX failure: preferences

AssertTrue's summary of 37 Signals' Getting Real: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327598 lists a number of takeaways from the book.

This one crystallizes my objections to Facebook's privacy and other settings:

"Avoid preferences. Preferences are a way to avoid making tough decisions. Instead of using your expertise to choose the best path, you're leaving it in the hands of customers. It may seem like you're doing them a favor but you're just making busy work for them (and it's likely they're busy enough). For customers, preference screens with an endless amount of options are a headache, not a blessing. Customers shouldn't have to think about every nitty gritty detail — don't put that burden on them when it should be your responsibility."

Preferences are a way to avoid making tough decisions.

That's why I dislike Facebook's settings interface. The settings section is huge, convoluted and not immediately understandable. You essentially have to reverse engineer their settings design to understand what you're doing.

They don't merely "make me think," they make me work for them. I become a Facebook engineer every time I open the settings section. It's a classic/stereotypical "UI designed by programmers," and it likely just mirrors the structure of the code.

They need to boil it down, explain exactly what it does (their current attempt fails at that), and make people trust it. It can't be trusted if you can't understand it. And it can't be trusted if it's constantly changing. The UX is not just how you experience something today, it's also whether what you see today is the same as yesterday. More change means more work.

Facebook, take down your internal dashboard and give me a simple, trustable settings page (one page, whose individual settings don't lead me off to other pages) in it's place.