Post #2 Web App Critique

 The app that I chose to review for this discussion is Facebook. Facebook can be both a web app or a mobile app as it is optimized for both desktop and mobile device use. Facebook is owned by Meta, who also own other popular apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Originally started as a "social network", Facebook has come a long way from what it used to be. It is mainly used for standard social media practices such as, sharing videos and pictures with friends, while also being filled with entertaining videos and news articles from larger pages. There is also a marketplace aspect of Facebook where people can post items they are selling, and other people can ask about purchasing the items. 

The usability of Facebook is rather standard in relation to most social media applications today. Once you launch the app, you are immediately shown the feed and you can begin scrolling through at your leisure. If you see a post you like, you can like that post and you can share it to your timeline as well so that your friends will see it too. There is a notifications tab where you can be notified that your friends have made a post, there is an upcoming event, it is someone's birthday, or that someone liked or shared your post. The Facebook Marketplace tab is easily accessible from the home screen as well if you are looking to buy something particular or list an item for sale. Facebook has a search feature to allow you to search for your friends to send them a friend request or see their page to see what they have been up to recently.

The design layout of Facebook is simple and clean. It is not overly crowded and hard to navigate like some apps can be. There is an option for dark mode which is much more pleasant to some people than the bright white default color. You can find what you are looking for in the app fairly easily since everything is located in a place that makes logical sense.

Facebook is typically functioning as intended with the occasional server outage. Software updates are pushed out on a regular basis to keep the app running smooth and to keep the app fresh for the users. Facebook has gone through several overhauls, changing the way the app looks and feels entirely while still having the familiar feel as it did in the beginning.

One recommendation I would add to Facebook would be to implement an optional setting to only show your friends' posts rather than friends, pages you follow, and suggested posts all mixed together. I also think adding a way to customize the UI/UX would be a nice touch for Facebook to add to make the app able to be tailored to each user's preferences. Lastly, I recommend not showing people that I have no mutual friends with from the "people you may know" feature as it makes no sense why they are there if I have no reason that I might know them. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Post #7 E-commerce Sites

Introduction              Many people use e-commerce websites frequently , without knowing how they truly work. But before we can dive into how e-commerce sites work, we first need to learn what they are. E -commerce, standing for electronic commerce, is the process of customers shopping online and processing their payment. (Hirz, 2025). Essentially, e-commerce is just online shopping, and an e-commerce site is how shoppers buy goods online. A well known example of an e-commerce site is Amazon.com. People search for what they want to buy, add it to their virtual cart , pay using a payment method, and then the site will deliver the item to the customer in a set amount of days. What many people do not know is just how these e-commerce sites work and how much programming goes into building a f unctioning e-commerce site. From front end development, back end development, database management, and all the programming that connects them all tog...
Read more

Post #4 Travelling Through a Network

Image
 I pinged Google, a website from Japan, and a website from Germany. Both the websites from Japan and Germany averaged at 21ms, while Google averaged at 23ms. I am not sure how this happened. Logically, it should taken longer for the pings to go to the domains that are farther away than Google, yet somehow they were both 2ms faster on average. Other times where I have used ping and traceroute, the geographical location and distance directly and proportionately affected the speed of the pings and traceroutes. The more distance they had to go, the longer average time it took. The results I have gotten here are very peculiar to me and I will have to look more into why Google was the slowest. Ping and traceroute can be used to troubleshoot servers or websites if you cannot reach what you are trying to reach. Using the ping command will simply let you know whether or not a host is reachable or to give you latency times about that host. You can use traceroute if you need a more detailed a...
Read more

Post #1 Programming Languages

Scratch Project   I have some previous experience using Scratch from a programming course I took in high school, roughly 4 years ago. Some insights that I gained after completing my Scratch project were grasping the fundamentals of how a computer requires the information to function the way I want it to. If  I was not precise enough with my instructions, then the program would do something I did not intend it to do. This showed me that when coding, I have to know what I am planning to do beforehand, and code exactly that in order for it to work properly The differences I noticed between Scratch and other written programming languages are plenty. In Scratch, the blocks are pre-coded, so it is a drag-and-drop system to get the program to do what you want. But with other languages, you have to type everything out. The programming language I found to be easiest to understand, aside from Scratch, is Python. I found the syntax that Python uses to be simple and easier to understand ...
Read more