Facebook UX feature tweak please: homepage birthdays reminders

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As friends know, I use the Facebook birthday reminder feature quite a bit to remind me to wish folks on their birthday.

So it was annoying a couple of weeks ago, when I almost missed a really good friend's birthday (after wishing a few others :)) simply because the default setting on Facebook stops at showing just five friends' birthdays for the day. You need to click on "See more" to see the rest.

I understand the logic and the UX choice: the little birthday widget just shows you the next five birthdays from your list of friends (Nicely-spaced; works for most users; makes sure the ad below stays above the fold) But on days when you have more than 5 friends with a birthday, which happens more often than most people think, its pretty easy to miss a few friends, because as as user you get used to seeing five birthdays with only a few being today and most on the following days.

So a couple of suggested tweaks to fix this for folks like me:
  • By default, always show more than 5 friends' birthdays if they're today.
  • If the number is ridiculously large (i.e. > 15) - show a link to where the user can see them all.
  • If not default to the more-than-five, put in a text link indicating the user has more friends' with birthdays on that day

Comments

mkk said…
I have a bigger problem with the FB birthday widget. If you don't log in to FB one day (let's say you're traveling or it's a weekend or for some unthinkable reason, your internet is down) and you miss people's birthdays, it is nearly impossible to see past birthdays. You literally have to go to the next year for that date to see who you missed. Or you have to download ALL the birthdays to a calendar to have access to them all. Why would they make it so difficult?
9:25 AM
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