Facebook for Deaf

I found a version of Facebook for the “Deaf, Hard-of-Hearing, Interpreters, Teachers of the Deaf, Late-Deafened Adults, CODAs, Friends/Neighbors of the Deaf, Allies/Colleagues of the Deaf, Deaf-Curious, Parents/Siblings of the Deaf.”

Based on my first impression of the website, it looks open source yet professional. It made me excited like a little boy in a candy store. They offered so many features: Forum, Blogs, Games, World Map, Shoutbox (a feature that acts like Facebook's status messages.),  Videos, Statistics, Members, Events, Polls, Youtube, Chat and even more after registration.

The registration process is fairly simple and only took me about 1 minute to sign up. That was nice. Then it took me to my account page That’s when the reality hits like a hard jawbreaker. I became overwhelmed. I often became confused about what to do next. Should I look at videos? How do I find friends? How can I post a picture? History has taught me that too many choices can be a dangerous thing... Haha.

Anyway, after playing around some more, there are some features that I particularly like a lot. For instance, I can view all members and filter it based on many different choices: latest activity, registration date, with photos only, gender, age, birthday, country, etc. See what I mean below.

 

However, I began to look for a way to log out and I assumed it would be simple enough. Well, it ended up taking me 5 minutes to figure it out! It never struck me it would be here… (see pic).

Perhaps creativity has its boundaries with usability.

Nevertheless, it’s definitely worth a look. J. It’ll take time to get used to the new website. The biggest advantage for this version of Facebook is that there’s already a common interest established among each other. Everyone has some kind of affiliation with Deafness such as they may be Deaf, a Deaf advocate, someone who is curious in learning ASL, and etc. Go check it out!

http://www.deafpals.com/