Facebook’s “Games Dashboard”: Find Your Friends’ Favorite Games
The Facebook Developers’ Blog recently published an update discussing, among other features, a brand new “Games Dashboard”. In short, the games dashboard centralizes all the information about any Facebook game a user has played. This is a welcome change, as the current application organization scheme implemented by Facebook was convoluted, to put it mildly.
I suspect these changes are going to help Facebook gamers of all types. Casual game players can more easily find their game through the improved UI, engaged users will be able to more easily access information about which games their friends are playing and power-users can more easily sort through the dozens of games and hundreds of friends per game.
Taking a look at the screenshot, we can analyze the specifics of a few key features that will be part of the Games dashboard.
Recently Used Games
- A list of recently completed in-game activities, categorized by game.
- Everytime users see their dashboard, they will be presented with a clear list of their friends’ recent activity in their most-played games. Working in the social games industry, metrics analysis consistently proved that socially relevant links such as these generated the highest clickthrough.
- The number of friends playing a game is listed beside the title of the game throughout the Games Dashboard. Again, social context increases clickthrough and gets users to try new games that are popular with their friends.
Your Friends’ Recent Activity
- A list of games that are most popular with my friends, listed alongside their activity.
- This section is for discovery of new games. Socially relevant suggestions generated the greatest clickthrough into new games, and this area will allow users to choose a new game based on the concept they trust most: which game has attracted my friends.
Your Friends’ Play
- A list of friends and which games they play.
- This section is also about discovery, and a user can look for a specific friend and see which games they play. This is almost impossible to do in the current Facebook infrastructure.
To see a full list of changes, head over the Facebook Developers Blog.
