A friend of mine was stymied by the complexity of Facebook. Being a usability nut, I whipped up a guide for him, and figured, heck, why not share it with everyone?
HOW TO USE FACEBOOK IN 9 EASY STEPS
Step 1) Go back in time to be one of the original users, when Facebook had just enough options to make sense. This may or may not be possible.
Step 2) Meticulously follow the changes, and incorporate them into your psyche, much like America was forced to adapt to the wonderful new greens, browns, and oranges of waiting-room furniture in the 1970's.
Step 3) Meditate upon every new feature they add, every bell and whistle, and arrive at wisdom concerning the use of these features, calibrating your understanding against the backdrop of the ignorant bliss of an infant, eventually creating a knowledge web that accurately portrays their current use model. Avoid coffee at this stage.
Step 4) Remember the formula for the complex-plane hypotenuse, and take the line integral across the resultant wave form of the flux-time capacitor; this should be possible with a rudimentary understanding of interplanetary gravitational coupling. Then, account for the magnetic field to yield border equations, plug in values, take a partial anti-derivative across the intersection in space, and you should get a relatively stable theory of what they expect you to do in order to bring up your friends list.
Step 5) Toss everything you understand out the window, because some 23-year-old became a majority shareholder, and now everything's different. Spend weeks trying to make sense of this brave new world without the trappings of modern convenience, like running water or dead food, kneeling naked and alone in front of your computer in the center of a poorly lit room covered in a thick layer of used post-it notes connected by thumbtacks and colorful bits of yarn. Remember to shave during this phase, or the candles you use to see by may accidentally set your beard on fire.
Step 6) Break out of the asylum using a paperclip and whatever improvised weapon their cheap, folding tables provide. When you arrive home, bloody and haggard, feed your cats, steal your old computer (assuming your wife didn't barter it to make the mortgage payment to make up for the job you lost a year ago), and find a power outlet outside a mall. Throw a tantrum at 2am when you realize that the electroshock therapy made you forget 4 of your 7 passwords you installled on the computer when you were in a haze of security paranoia brought on by warnings emailed to you by friendly FB admins, reformat the whole thing, and then spend the next few days begging random strangers on the street for a copy of XP to put back on the system. Be willing to settle for Linux.
Step 7) Make sure that reality is turned the correct way out, and come down off the mind-bending drugs you used to hold back the psychological pain of internet withdraw. Realize that the only way out is through, and as such, take the computer to the top of a high-rise apartment building in the projects, and throw the fucker over the side. If you accidentally kill a pedestrian, you should jump too. If you don't, then wash yourself clean of guilt, pick the roof-gravel out of your bloody feet, hitchhike out of town, and try to find a nice, mid-western village to start anew in. Coffee is okay again.
Step 8) When they peel your dead, malnourished fingers off the keyboard of the Win 95 machine in the local internet cafe, try to have died with that sightless smile that says you finally figured out what "writing on your wall" meant, whether or not it's true. Try to remember to have worn clothing that day.
Step 9) Await judgment.
Hope this helps!
No comments:
Post a Comment