Facebook back-steps on redesign
By Dave Jeyes
After a prolonged outcry from the user community, Facebook has decided to reverse some of the changes made in its latest and not so great redesign. The only problem is that they still don’t quite get what users love about Facebook.
The Facebook redesign was an obvious rip off of Twitter, from the formatting of the status messages to the elimination of nearly everything else. With the new interface, you have to actively look for new pictures, notes and other friend activity.
While Facebook’s goal of focusing the friend stream more on the conversation going on between users, it has severely underestimated how lazy all of us are. Users don’t want to have to try to hunt down new pictures, notes or other friend activity.
The beauty of the old friend stream is that it contained a lot of data, but you can browse through fairly quickly to find things of interest to you. Without pictures and other friend activity, it’s like Facebook has hidden all the body language from the conversation.
Now Facebook is back-stepping on the redesign by, for starters, putting picture activity back into the friend stream. That’s a good start, but it still requires effort from users to find out about new notes and friends in their extended network.
The other way that Facebook is hoping to make it easier to see information about friends is by making it easier to manager lists of friends. Now you not only have to scour Facebook for information about your friends, you also have to rank and categorize them in the service.
Another hint that Facebook is losing touch with what users want is a hint that the Facebook team is, “thinking about ways of filtering out some of the Wall posts and content directed to specific people to focus more on posts shared with everyone.” I know that Facebook copied Wall posts from Myspace, but really, Facebook, you’re doing it all wrong.
Wall posts are like conversations taking place in a public space full of your friends. If you want to be discreet or private about that message, you would probably send an email, or a Facebook message.
So, Facebook, how about giving the users back all that information that you’ve been ‘tidying up’ from our friend streams. Except for those PicDoodle and 5 Things applications that have been running amok.
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March 25th, 2009
There’s a difference between design and complete alteration. Facebook, Ebay, Yahoo, etc… These websites and companies claim to make changes which improve user interaction but instead cause frustration for their current user base.
What’s worse: changes are forced upon users. “If you want to use our service, you’ll deal with the changes.” – This is not the proper way to handle your community.