Rule #1 Do not cram anything down your users throat.
Rule #2 Do not cram anything down your users throat.
it's all about giving the user choice
Tai Nguyen
· 1 year ago
That's ridiculous. Does Amazon offer people the option of multiple layouts for the site? Digg.com? Mashable? Every site has to make its own choices about what layout/design will be best for the majority of its users and then provide that. What a waste of money and manpower to have to support multiple layouts. It would be great if their decision was "right" (which I think it is, I like the new layout), but even if it's "wrong", it's their prerogative to make that decision.
Dave
· 1 year ago
"It would be great if their decision was "right" (which I think it is, I like the new layout), but even if it's "wrong", it's their prerogative to make that decision."
I agree, but then you'd have no customers. I mean, how else do organizations survive?
Jillian C. York
· 1 year ago
"Previously, the only indication of the new Facebook (outside of the endless blog posts of course) was the bar at the top giving users an opportunity to try it out."
Not true - my profile was automatically switched to the new Facebook on the second or third day of its deployment (of course I had the choice to switch back if I so wished).
Adam Ostrow
· 1 year ago
indication to users of the old site I meant ...
Patrick Sweeney
· 1 year ago
Andy: There is a BIG difference between giving them choice and keeping two majorly different front end systems rolling. Giving them some better choice on how to arrange their new profile, that's just fine and should be done. But you can't expect them to keep both.
leonwestbrook
· 1 year ago
Once it officially switches there is going to be SO much bitching about it.
I love the new look. Either get used to it or leave facebook.
sarah
· 1 year ago
The idea that there is NO option what so ever really upsets me. I'm predicting that this big change will be the end of facebook's popularity.
amanda
· 1 year ago
I do not understand why there is a need for change. I do not like the new layout and I do not plan to stick along if this is how they plan to treat their users. I have been a member for about three years now and it does not seem to me to be fair.
Bert
· 1 year ago
Lol. It's funny to me how people feel entitled to something. You're not entitled to anything. Quit your whining and leave if you're not happy. It's not that difficult.
Tsreim
· 1 year ago
Don't take it personally. If you like what you get out of facebook, then you can adapt. It's really about getting the majority of popular content to viewers eyes faster and easier. It'll be slower at first because you don't know where anything is anymore, but once you figure that out the new layout is much more streamlined.
dotDavid
· 1 year ago
The new facebook is simply not as functional as the original.......that being said...
Facebook is smart for allowing such a soft, non-commital entry of the new format....lets users get used to the idea, and at the very least, puts it in their mindframes so at the very least they know a complete switch will be sometime in the future.
Who knew the future would be here so fast.... Either way, we're trying to get a poll going over at tinymash.com. Check it out and vote which version you prefer.
OK, this is a true confession...like a lot of people, I hated the new design and didn't want to deal with it. Over the last couple of weeks my eyes and habits have actually adjusted to it now and AM actually using it. No, it's still not as user friendly and concise as the old, but it is cleaner as a look and feel. Change is inevitable - just a matter of whether to go kicking and screaming or not.
D.
· 1 year ago
Haha, I keep forgetting that some people are even still using the old design. I opted into the new asap. But truth be told, I absolutely loathed it at first. Two days later, in love with it. Sure, there will be a lot of hating when it's mandatory. I just listened to a friend of mine (part of the 'against the new facebook' group) ramble on about how she hates it. Give these people a few weeks, and they may see that it actually is better.
Especially the part where you don't have to see 70 apps when you visit a friend's profile. Best part about the New Facebook.
gill
· 1 year ago
As long as Facebook picks up the tab they can do whatever they fucking please.
The site's free, people. We don't pay to use it. We can go fuck ourselves if we think we're better than paying customers.
Neal G
· 1 year ago
The new facebook, in my opinion, looks a lot less professional than the old site. It seems as if a less qualified designer took over for this redesign. I'm also very confused on the "new wall" It almost as if my update feed is my new wall which I don't particularily like. They should have also given an option to drag "boxes" into the main page or at least move stuff around easier. Maybe I haven't tried it out long enough and it already does that but those are just a few things I've noticed thus far. I've already switched back to the old design.
Stuart Johns
· 1 year ago
I don't like the new facebook appearance, I really prefer to use sawigg, it has the same awesome features that facebook has and more, and it has a pretty cool appearance www.sawigg.com
Bernadette
· 1 year ago
I didn't like the new facebook when I first started playing around with it, but it grew on me. It is so much cleaner and much easier to manage my apps and my 300 other request that I have. I'm a fan so far.
Tomas
· 1 year ago
The New Facebook is horrible... Im actually gobsmacked that designers could be so stupid to have thought up this piece of crap and that people agreed with the model?? To me this had to have been agreed in a windowless Board room during a power outage. I imagine when you re-design something, you have terms of reference for a project... With an overarching theme of improving, modernising whats loved allready.
Its got a huge, incredible design flaw. Something along the lines of the entire Facebook Staff Team tripping over their own shoe laces, knocking their heads together and getting temporary Amnesia, where the definitions and purpose of Social Netwoking are lost somewhere deep in the psyche. Where is ONE click, to ONE page gone that users fill with all the quirkeness that defines their personality and friends see their vitual world?? Gone forever!!
Tomas
· 1 year ago
That is the problem with "New Facebook" and if you read any complaint by the thousands of people who HATE it... It all comes back to the fact that in their Schizophrenic wisdom, Facebook have pulled our profile pages apart into tabs... Nobody will bother to take the time to surf your profile from page to page and without the wholeistic nature of one page, you cannot potray your personality. Your page becomes bland, just like every other Facebook page... The joy is gone with expressing who you are... I dont get it, what on earth they were thinking to do that?? and this isnt just something thats going to go away, or people will be happy after some time... They have smashed apart the basis of a social network page for millions of users... It's very sad really.
Isaak
· 1 year ago
Tomas hit the nail on the head for me. Tabs suck, users are used to scrolling. I want one page to go to with everything like it used to be.
Robert
· 1 year ago
I think facebook is toast. It exploded in regard to traffic over a period of 9 or 10 years but the new facebook is going to be the death of the entire product. It does all the wrong things that all it's competitors do.
Forget about facebook.
Create your own. Make it personal. I can help.
mcfastric
· 1 year ago
i dont feel that i have been reated fairly by facebook when they invade my privacy
i am acting as my own legal council an i am seeking 20 million dollers damages
i am a musican and a artist an also a independent record label an they disable my account an yet have all my information on there servers like my music an all like from the research i have done on mr mark zukerberg hes a computer hacker a drop out of harvard an a thief of the idea of a classmate whos idea was facebook in the first place
i have send a number of emails and there is no costomer service what so ever if ur gonna invade someones account make sure they have done something wrong in the first place
like honestly theres criminal activity that happens on facebook in regards to the hells angels why not target people who are a threat to our society honestly
this is the end of the rops of facebook justice needs to be brought to the attention of these people whom work for this company honestly treat users like trash expect it in return cause u will loose all the customers in the world theres so many sites other then facebook we can go to
dendrobates
· 1 year ago
sounds like you were spamming, bud. good luck getting 20 million 'dollers.'
andi
· 1 year ago
i even do not have any one..
Craig
· 1 year ago
While the design of the new site is better, it is NOT ready yet. It's buggy, and it's less functional than the old site. It will be a HUGE mistake forcefully switching people over to a buggy site with missing features
Dread Knight
· 1 year ago
I've never liked the 'old' look so i barely used facebook at all.
I'm going to check the new design right away. It might motivate me into using facebook more.
Scott Bradley
· 1 year ago
Why change something that isn't broken?
I think they needed to change it to open up more ad space for their advertisers...so they can stay afloat.
I just don't like how it flows though. BLAH.
ry
· 1 year ago
1: i have no friends. 2: Facebook is impossible to make new friends 3: Cant even browse people that live within a few miles away. 4: Fucking losers.
ballsonmyface
· 1 year ago
who gives a fuck. i like the older design better as well though im not going to sit here and cry about. you'll get used to it and all will be fine. anyway, its facebook.
Love
· 1 year ago
Since I never bothered making a facebook profile for myself, I'm sorry to say that I don't have that much knowledge about the social network, but I am aware of how much it has grown and the speed of its growth. It's incredible how they've become so popular indeed.
Now, knowing of what a huge network they are and how many users use them everyday, I'm quite certain that they would not risk what they've achieved by going into a kind of change that would simply be death of their popularity. No, I don't think so, so I'm quite sure whatever they're trying to become, is going to be better than that they already are.
Eventually, users will get used to the new changes.
smarty
· 1 year ago
this is the beginning of the END for facebook.
super12312
· 1 year ago
The new facebook is a lot better. I can't believe anyone liked the older version. You may be used to it after using it for ages but that doesn't make it better. Logically it doesn't make sense and it's hard to get information quickly.
The new design is a lot more user friendly and will open up a lot more in the way of functionality and design. Maybe we will see user skins, like on bebo.
Tony Killen
· 1 year ago
My profile changes 2-3 times a day to the new layout without notifying me. I got fed up with the endless back-and-forth changing so I thought I'd give the new one for a few days. I find it too messy and profiles are completely messed up. Why go from having everything in one place to having it in 10 different places? These things should be about convenience, not categorizing things. I can see a lot of people moving away from the site once they decide to use the 'New Facebook' with no other option..
Soup
· 1 year ago
Honestly, I really though Facebook 1.0 was the better of the designs that they had, for these reasons:
1. No Feeds... Honestly, I didn't like the news feed or the mini-feed, never once. I thought if there was something you wanted to know about a person, you could (and should) just go find it on their profile.
2. Actually interesting "Network" pages, or even network pages at all... I liked having those little facts like "Top books" and "Top Movie" and how many were on our network. Even the parties and events listings were much more up front there. It actually felt like a place to network.
3. NO APPLICATIONS... This has been my second biggest problem with Facebook 2.0 (hence Facebook 3.0). There are useful ones I will admit, but most are games and things that just take up space and send you 50 notifications a day. For the majority of them, they just feel absolutely worthless.
I will say that there are pieces of 2.0 and 3.0 that I do like (usability and load times are great). I do also like how they're using the new UI with tabs and other things like that. But what they're doing for the most part is combing the things that I don't want into the things I do want and doing it wrong.
I'm a member of the Rooster Teeth social network(roosterteeth.com) and they are great to their users, they really are. They beta the new versions of the site with their top users and their sponsoring users beta test for them, and then getting feedback from them. That and they actually talk and communicate with their users. It's a good bunch there and they know how to run a social network, but, still, they're the type of developers that Facebook should be looking at to figure out how to run their site.
I hope I made at least a bit of a good point here.
Spammer
· 1 year ago
I've started using the iphone version of Facebook instead. It's clean, uncluttered and simple to use.
Bernardo
· 1 year ago
Users always react badly to change. It's just the way it is. Everyone likes comfort, and rarely are even additions greeted with praise. We can see this on last.fm, facebook, netvibes and many other sites (including smaller ones like bf2s.com) In the end, things evolve. And we adapt to the new design, and become comfortable with it.
Michelle
· 1 year ago
Honestly, every freaking time that Facebook redesigns, people are up in arms about it. It gets on my nerves -- no I'm not joining your stupid group "1 million against the new facebook."
I actually kind of like the "new" facebook. Yes, it has its issues, but it's a free service, so can you really complain all that much?
Guest
· 1 year ago
I like everything about the designs except that well, it's facebook. And sorry but facebook blows hard for "social" networking unless you're already part of one, like your workplace, or whatever. It's got too many restrictions shutting you off from the rest of the world, all to pretty much appease to self righteous prissy bitches that can't stand those internet "creepers" that they don't know sending them messages on a website. You know, the same chicks who find it to be fine and dandy to get wasted at a club on weekends and have some guy they do not even know come up to them on a dancefloor and randomly grind his genitals against their lower backs. That's fine if it's done in person, however if it's done online, that's unacceptable cause those guys may, you know, jump out of the monitor and slash your throat. It's even worse that the site is ditching their network main pages containing the forums and walls for everyone in your city or college or school's network to play around with which means even less of this whole online social networking fun. The only thing good about facebook is "Who Has the Biggest Brain" game. Otherwise, it's a conservative yuppy vision of what social networking is -- an experience twice wrapping you in condoms and making you still pull out when you orgasm. Sorry, but Myspace still wins for the average person.
Brian
· 1 year ago
This was my feedback to Facebook:
I hear that the "new Facebook" is going to go live soon. My purpose in writing this feedback is to explain why I'm not a fan of the new Facebook, offer some critiques and praise, and offer suggestions for and alternatives to rolling out such a huge change all at once.
I'm not a big fan of the new layout because It feels as if I now have less choices with how to layout my profile. Two examples: Wall integration with the Mini-Feed, and tabular pages. The Wall and Mini-Feed are very distinct, and have different properties. Basically, I decide what appears in my Mini-Feed, other people decide what goes on my Wall. (Yes, I can remove posts, but the point is that control over the Wall is shared.) My friends and I use the Mini-Feed and Wall to get different information and the new Wall hodge-podge just clutters things. Yes, in an ideal world, "Instead of needing to look at a million places to figure out what your friend has been doing lately, you can see the photos she's added, or read what his friends have said about last weekend." But in practice this integration doesn't work because the News-Feed and Wall don't have anywhere near a strong correlation much of the time, the Wall being much more random. Also, adding tabs seems like it would "give you more control over your profile," but with the way it's currently implemented, all it does is add more forced, unnecessary barriers to accessing the information that I want my friends and myself to see. This style only gives me more choices if you assume that I like this layout in the first place. I would love to put everything on one tab, organized carefully and efficiently, and be done with it. But I can't. The new Wall and the addition of tabs aren't the only two features which take away layout options, but I feel as if they are the clearest examples.
Moving on, I do like that the Facebook team is trying to develop ways to reduce clutter and make the site cleaner. This has always been Facebook's strong point, especially when compared to MySpace. I also understand the challenge of trying to balance this goal with giving users control over their own profiles. Where do you draw the line? Ultimately, however, I believe you have to err on the side of giving users more control. Yes, this might mean that users have more rope to potentially hang themselves with (cluttered pages, for example), but the important thing is that many if not most users will use it appropriately, and even if they don't, Facebook won't be strung up with them. While it's certainly hard to argue that the new site isn't clean, it's equally hard to argue that the old site was "unclean." Both layouts have that distinct, clean feeling that Facebook is known for. This is the same reason that makes it seem like the new layout is trying to fix something that isn't broken. The attempts to fix the layout and design of the site actually made it worse from a purely aesthetic point-of-view. I'm not sure I can provide a logical argument for why I feel this way, it's just a matter of opinion. Still, I understand that not everyone will agree with me, but that's precisely the point. Give the users more options, both in how they want to display their profile to others and in how they want to view the site. This seems to be working well right now, at least from the user perspective, so keep it. Keeping two parallel versions of the site (old and new Facebooks) might increase overhead, but it has a huge payoff: the user experience is much better. And user experience is critical to the success of any Web 2.0 site. So please, keep cleaning up the layout and increasing usability. You've done it in the past (with the Mini-Feed, for instance), and the site (and the users) have benefited greatly from it.
Finally, I'd like to address some specifics as to how Facebook can make big changes like launching a new layout without creating such panic in the hearts of so many users. Like I've said before, it comes down to giving people choices. Dividing the features of the new Facebook into individual pieces that can be separately turned on and off would be a great start. While this might ruin the cohesiveness you were hoping for, I believe it's a much better design philosophy in the long run. This way, it's easier you at Facebook to determine which specific new features people like and the user gets the experience they want. Another idea: rolling out smaller changes more often not only should make it easier for you to catch bugs and develop stable code quicker (I'm a sysadmin who works closely with programmers, so I've seen this in action), but allows each feature to be judged based on its own merits. With the new layout, most people will judge all the different features of the site together, unfairly helping poor features and unfairly hurting great features. Instead, a survival-of-the-fittest approach towards new features will help the site evolve much stronger. Besides giving people choices and making smaller changes, try to understand how people use the site. You already understand that it's hard for people to adjust to big changes, "which is why [you] wanted to make it easy for [users] to switch back and forth for a little while, in order to learn where everything went, and how the new site works." However, when the new Facebook launches, my friends and I, as well and many more users around the world, will be completely left in the dark as to where everything is. Why? Because we didn't switch back and forth between the new and old sites. We switched to the new site, then, after trying it out for a while, either kept that as the main site or immediately switched back to the old site, never to intentionally switch back again. It's risky to assume that people switched back and forth in an effort to learn how the new site works. And if that was your intention all along, it would have been great if that had been posted somewhere obvious before September 3rd. Making changes using these bits of advice will make the experience better for the users and make everything easier for you.
Ultimately, you at Facebook are going to decide which direction the site is headed in. You've done a good job so far of merging that direction with the direction that users want to head in, and I hope you will continue to be able to do that in the future. I appreciate the work you've put into everything, however, I think switching to the new Facebook so soon is a terrible idea. And it's not as if my only option is to get used to it. In all honesty, if the new layout goes live, I will probably just use the site significantly less. That's what it comes down to.
Notes: I sincerely hope that my verbosity helps my points more than it hurts them. I figured that it was better to explain my reasoning rather than leave a lot of my claims unjustified. Also, all quotations mentioned above come from Mark Slee's September 3rd post on the Facebook blog.
adie
· 1 year ago
i am a new facebook user. And i'm register exactly when facebook present their new design. I loved the new design because it's feature, specially the bar, it help us a lot. But, as i can remember since i used the new design it seem facebook become unstable, lot of application crash, and page can't open. So i hope they have fixed this before they switch the design permanently.
Branden
· 1 year ago
I actually prefer the new facebook. It's simplified my life a little and it certainly helps keep the damn clutter off those front pages which is the myspace mentality.
I understand people want to "express" themselves by throwing 50 widgets on their front page but when it comes down to it I don't want to see 90% of that shyt. Why? Because I want to get to your profile, read a little of your information, and post a comment.
I don't want to be bombarded by your annoying widgets and if I did I'll just check em out on that wonderful tab of yours. Anyways New facebook for the win!
jason
· 1 year ago
yeah, you have the choice to go to some other site or build your own facebook and make just how you want it. it's a free service, stop whining and go elsewhere if you don't like what's going on. facebook owes you NOTHING.
Ashly
· 1 year ago
I think the New Facebook takes and breaks what was simple, elegant and useful and replaces it with a variety of tabs that hide, disassemble and confuse the carefully crafted narratives and preferences that millions and millions of users chose with purpose. There is about 400 percent more advertising space on the New Facebook. Um, yay? Did we want that?
i never made these commnets someone had posted my name online i am here to say that i never once made these comments
thank you
mcfastric Daniel Weaver
mcfastric
· 5 months ago
i would like to say there has been postings in the past on this site using my name and i never posted them so i wanted to clarify that i was not the one who posted those comments
All Comments
Rule #2 Do not cram anything down your users throat.
it's all about giving the user choice
I agree, but then you'd have no customers. I mean, how else do organizations survive?
Not true - my profile was automatically switched to the new Facebook on the second or third day of its deployment (of course I had the choice to switch back if I so wished).
There is a BIG difference between giving them choice and keeping two majorly different front end systems rolling.
Giving them some better choice on how to arrange their new profile, that's just fine and should be done. But you can't expect them to keep both.
I love the new look. Either get used to it or leave facebook.
Facebook is smart for allowing such a soft, non-commital entry of the new format....lets users get used to the idea, and at the very least, puts it in their mindframes so at the very least they know a complete switch will be sometime in the future.
Who knew the future would be here so fast....
Either way, we're trying to get a poll going over at tinymash.com. Check it out and vote which version you prefer.
http://tinymash.com/2008/09/04/still-using-the-...
But truth be told, I absolutely loathed it at first. Two days later, in love with it. Sure, there will be a lot of hating when it's mandatory. I just listened to a friend of mine (part of the 'against the new facebook' group) ramble on about how she hates it. Give these people a few weeks, and they may see that it actually is better.
Especially the part where you don't have to see 70 apps when you visit a friend's profile. Best part about the New Facebook.
The site's free, people. We don't pay to use it. We can go fuck ourselves if we think we're better than paying customers.
redesign. I'm also very confused on the "new wall" It almost as if my update feed is my new wall which I don't particularily like. They should have also given an option to drag "boxes" into the main page or at least move stuff around easier. Maybe I haven't tried it out long enough and
it already does that but those are just a few things I've noticed thus far. I've already switched back to the old design.
www.sawigg.com
Its got a huge, incredible design flaw. Something along the lines of the entire Facebook Staff Team tripping over their own shoe laces, knocking their heads together and getting temporary Amnesia, where the definitions and purpose of Social Netwoking are lost somewhere deep in the psyche. Where is ONE click, to ONE page gone that users fill with all the quirkeness that defines their personality and friends see their vitual world?? Gone forever!!
Forget about facebook.
Create your own. Make it personal. I can help.
i am acting as my own legal council an i am
seeking 20 million dollers damages
i am a musican and a artist an also a independent record label an they disable my account an yet have all my information on there servers like my music an all like from the research i have done on mr mark zukerberg hes a computer hacker a drop out of harvard an a thief of the idea of a classmate whos idea was facebook in the first place
i have send a number of emails and there is no costomer service what so ever if ur gonna invade someones account make sure they have done something wrong in the first place
like honestly theres criminal activity that happens on facebook in regards to the hells angels why not target people who are a threat to our society honestly
this is the end of the rops of facebook
justice needs to be brought to the attention
of these people whom work for this company
honestly treat users like trash expect it in return
cause u will loose all the customers in the world theres so many sites other then facebook we can go to
I'm going to check the new design right away. It might motivate me into using facebook more.
I think they needed to change it to open up more ad space for their advertisers...so they can stay afloat.
I just don't like how it flows though. BLAH.
2: Facebook is impossible to make new friends
3: Cant even browse people that live within a few miles away.
4: Fucking losers.
Now, knowing of what a huge network they are and how many users use them everyday, I'm quite certain that they would not risk what they've achieved by going into a kind of change that would simply be death of their popularity.
No, I don't think so, so I'm quite sure whatever they're trying to become, is going to be better than that they already are.
Eventually, users will get used to the new changes.
The new design is a lot more user friendly and will open up a lot more in the way of functionality and design. Maybe we will see user skins, like on bebo.
I can see a lot of people moving away from the site once they decide to use the 'New Facebook' with no other option..
1. No Feeds... Honestly, I didn't like the news feed or the mini-feed, never once. I thought if there was something you wanted to know about a person, you could (and should) just go find it on their profile.
2. Actually interesting "Network" pages, or even network pages at all... I liked having those little facts like "Top books" and "Top Movie" and how many were on our network. Even the parties and events listings were much more up front there. It actually felt like a place to network.
3. NO APPLICATIONS... This has been my second biggest problem with Facebook 2.0 (hence Facebook 3.0). There are useful ones I will admit, but most are games and things that just take up space and send you 50 notifications a day. For the majority of them, they just feel absolutely worthless.
I will say that there are pieces of 2.0 and 3.0 that I do like (usability and load times are great). I do also like how they're using the new UI with tabs and other things like that. But what they're doing for the most part is combing the things that I don't want into the things I do want and doing it wrong.
I'm a member of the Rooster Teeth social network(roosterteeth.com) and they are great to their users, they really are. They beta the new versions of the site with their top users and their sponsoring users beta test for them, and then getting feedback from them. That and they actually talk and communicate with their users. It's a good bunch there and they know how to run a social network, but, still, they're the type of developers that Facebook should be looking at to figure out how to run their site.
I hope I made at least a bit of a good point here.
In the end, things evolve. And we adapt to the new design, and become comfortable with it.
I actually kind of like the "new" facebook. Yes, it has its issues, but it's a free service, so can you really complain all that much?
I hear that the "new Facebook" is going to go live soon. My purpose in writing this feedback is to explain why I'm not a fan of the new Facebook, offer some critiques and praise, and offer suggestions for and alternatives to rolling out such a huge change all at once.
I'm not a big fan of the new layout because It feels as if I now have less choices with how to layout my profile. Two examples: Wall integration with the Mini-Feed, and tabular pages. The Wall and Mini-Feed are very distinct, and have different properties. Basically, I decide what appears in my Mini-Feed, other people decide what goes on my Wall. (Yes, I can remove posts, but the point is that control over the Wall is shared.) My friends and I use the Mini-Feed and Wall to get different information and the new Wall hodge-podge just clutters things. Yes, in an ideal world, "Instead of needing to look at a million places to figure out what your friend has been doing lately, you can see the photos she's added, or read what his friends have said about last weekend." But in practice this integration doesn't work because the News-Feed and Wall don't have anywhere near a strong correlation much of the time, the Wall being much more random. Also, adding tabs seems like it would "give you more control over your profile," but with the way it's currently implemented, all it does is add more forced, unnecessary barriers to accessing the information that I want my friends and myself to see. This style only gives me more choices if you assume that I like this layout in the first place. I would love to put everything on one tab, organized carefully and efficiently, and be done with it. But I can't. The new Wall and the addition of tabs aren't the only two features which take away layout options, but I feel as if they are the clearest examples.
Moving on, I do like that the Facebook team is trying to develop ways to reduce clutter and make the site cleaner. This has always been Facebook's strong point, especially when compared to MySpace. I also understand the challenge of trying to balance this goal with giving users control over their own profiles. Where do you draw the line? Ultimately, however, I believe you have to err on the side of giving users more control. Yes, this might mean that users have more rope to potentially hang themselves with (cluttered pages, for example), but the important thing is that many if not most users will use it appropriately, and even if they don't, Facebook won't be strung up with them. While it's certainly hard to argue that the new site isn't clean, it's equally hard to argue that the old site was "unclean." Both layouts have that distinct, clean feeling that Facebook is known for. This is the same reason that makes it seem like the new layout is trying to fix something that isn't broken. The attempts to fix the layout and design of the site actually made it worse from a purely aesthetic point-of-view. I'm not sure I can provide a logical argument for why I feel this way, it's just a matter of opinion. Still, I understand that not everyone will agree with me, but that's precisely the point. Give the users more options, both in how they want to display their profile to others and in how they want to view the site. This seems to be working well right now, at least from the user perspective, so keep it. Keeping two parallel versions of the site (old and new Facebooks) might increase overhead, but it has a huge payoff: the user experience is much better. And user experience is critical to the success of any Web 2.0 site. So please, keep cleaning up the layout and increasing usability. You've done it in the past (with the Mini-Feed, for instance), and the site (and the users) have benefited greatly from it.
Finally, I'd like to address some specifics as to how Facebook can make big changes like launching a new layout without creating such panic in the hearts of so many users. Like I've said before, it comes down to giving people choices. Dividing the features of the new Facebook into individual pieces that can be separately turned on and off would be a great start. While this might ruin the cohesiveness you were hoping for, I believe it's a much better design philosophy in the long run. This way, it's easier you at Facebook to determine which specific new features people like and the user gets the experience they want. Another idea: rolling out smaller changes more often not only should make it easier for you to catch bugs and develop stable code quicker (I'm a sysadmin who works closely with programmers, so I've seen this in action), but allows each feature to be judged based on its own merits. With the new layout, most people will judge all the different features of the site together, unfairly helping poor features and unfairly hurting great features. Instead, a survival-of-the-fittest approach towards new features will help the site evolve much stronger. Besides giving people choices and making smaller changes, try to understand how people use the site. You already understand that it's hard for people to adjust to big changes, "which is why [you] wanted to make it easy for [users] to switch back and forth for a little while, in order to learn where everything went, and how the new site works." However, when the new Facebook launches, my friends and I, as well and many more users around the world, will be completely left in the dark as to where everything is. Why? Because we didn't switch back and forth between the new and old sites. We switched to the new site, then, after trying it out for a while, either kept that as the main site or immediately switched back to the old site, never to intentionally switch back again. It's risky to assume that people switched back and forth in an effort to learn how the new site works. And if that was your intention all along, it would have been great if that had been posted somewhere obvious before September 3rd. Making changes using these bits of advice will make the experience better for the users and make everything easier for you.
Ultimately, you at Facebook are going to decide which direction the site is headed in. You've done a good job so far of merging that direction with the direction that users want to head in, and I hope you will continue to be able to do that in the future. I appreciate the work you've put into everything, however, I think switching to the new Facebook so soon is a terrible idea. And it's not as if my only option is to get used to it. In all honesty, if the new layout goes live, I will probably just use the site significantly less. That's what it comes down to.
Notes: I sincerely hope that my verbosity helps my points more than it hurts them. I figured that it was better to explain my reasoning rather than leave a lot of my claims unjustified. Also, all quotations mentioned above come from Mark Slee's September 3rd post on the Facebook blog.
I understand people want to "express" themselves by throwing 50 widgets on their front page but when it comes down to it I don't want to see 90% of that shyt. Why? Because I want to get to your profile, read a little of your information, and post a comment.
I don't want to be bombarded by your annoying widgets and if I did I'll just check em out on that wonderful tab of yours. Anyways New facebook for the win!
http://www.unboundedition.com/content/view/8005....
thank you
mcfastric
Daniel Weaver
thank you
Daniel Weaver
Mcfastric