The Design Analysis of Faces.com

I decided on Faces.com because every time I would accidently start to type Facebook and his enter abruptly, I would end up at Faces.com. I found out Faces.com was a site basically geared towards teenages in the UK. The landing page basically shows "faces" of either new people who have joined, random faces and the most popular faces, which is bias because they are usually good looking people.

In order to sign up, I created a username, n00blet2010, entered in an email address, my age to make sure I was over 13 and was sent a confirmation email. From there I activated my account by clicking on a link which took me back to the Faces.com login with an additional verification passcode, put in my "real" name, a new password and presto I was in! From here I set up my profile, picking out a template created for me or editing the CSS and creating my own page design. I decided to be lazy and pick one of the most random designs called Pulse. From here I got to make up my fake profile. This reminds me of the time I set up an Avatar in Second Life. I picked out a random picture of a puppy online to use as my profile picture and I was finally set up. After you log in, the homepage appears which is where you do all of the fun stuff on Faces.com. You can set your mood - happy to stressed (I felt FUNNY today), "Promote Yourself" which is setting up your profile, adding more information, etc. There is a contact center, where you read your messages that people personally send to you or where secret admirers can send you messages (creepy). There is also a spot where you can see who viewed your profile. Their faces appear at the bottom of your homepage, so I decided to look around myself.

There is a Search tab at the top where you can find other Faces. On this page, it suggests around 30 faces to view so I randomly clicked on a few. On Faces.com the profiles have trophies signifiying if they are cool, if they are "real", if they are popular (you can give people stars on Faces.com), etc. You can also Explore (in the Explore tab) blogs, videos, photos, etc.

This site is a popularity contest. It's actually pretty boring and brings me back to the times of MySpace. To me the design isn't my style at all. Everything is very linear with horizontal blocks of info with simplistic text. I actually got bored viewing other blogs and videos. Everything I viewed was about that person and I actually feel like I am over the self-promotion aspect of social networking. With that said, here is a screenshot of my profile. I don't have an avatar up because the picture has be be approved by an administrator.