Weighing in on the Facebook home page redesign.
On the night of March 11th, 2009, I logged into my Facebook account and was met with the home page redesign. I’ve been holding off on writing any commentary on the subject until I fully experienced the entire update (save the above status update as soon as I logged in). At first, the amount of information I had to parse was overwhelming on top of trying to navigate a new layout—which seems to be everyone’s issue at the moment. I logged out and instead opted to focus my attention on SXSW (i.e.: interacting with internet friends IRL).
Now that I’ve had some time to use the service post-hangover and had really informative discussions with Nirav and Trey, I really like what Facebook has done.
Back in December 2007, when Facebook introduced Friend Lists, I had no idea how relevant they would be fifteen months later. I used lists at first only because the option was there whenever I approved a friend request. Later on, I found it easy to use my lists to populate the “To” field for Facebook event invitations. The utility in compiling lists seemed to end there—until a few weeks ago.
If you’ve created lists or not, your left-most navigation will look similar to what’s on the left, with the News Feed filter set as the default. Facebook will present you with default Network filters immediately below the global News Feed category, so you can try out the interactions with those if you haven’t created any lists yet. The News Feed is a global update of the content and interactions with everyone on your friends list, including Public Profiles (e.g.: LIGHTS).
The large amount of content is what initially drove me crazy until I figured out you can minimize your content overload by creating a Friends List. Whatever list is at the top of the navigation is your default (you can set a default simply by dragging a list to the top).
Once you have a few lists set up for different groups of people that you can quickly click around, you will easily see the beauty of the redesign. These granular filters have let me weed out the content that I really don’t care to see and let the content that’s important to me be frontmost. I should add that these filters aren’t just for people, but also content and external applications like Photos, Videos, Notes, Links, Flickr and FriendFeed.
I think there are still some weird UI/UX and layout issues (like editing lists or placement of Birthdays and Pokes), but it seems every time I log in, I see things getting shifted around. (As an aside, I think these information blocks on the right should be modular since it seems there are disparate preferences as to where they should go.) If there’s something that Facebook has always done well (whether users initially liked it or not), it’s having stellar layouts and being receptive to user feedback. They won’t renege on the design as a whole, but they do listen.
Facebook is creating a product for 200 million users (as of this month)—a redesign is never going to please everyone. With more and more content coming through your News Feed and more and more people signing up for the service by the hour, I think this is a great way to manage that amount of videos, pokes, photos, status updates, imported blog entries, imported Twitter messages and other seemingly endless amounts of digital jetsam cannoned from your iPhone.
Go create a Friends List—prioritizing friends has never felt so good.
The new facebook sucks. That’s my two pennies.
@Jay B Gimme more of a reason why? I told you why I like it.
Sucks sucks suxors
It’s funny to see someone elses account of the facebook changes. For past updates, its always made me crazy to see people whine and complain about change. I like to see people experiment with new things, so there’s nothing that hit’s a hot button more than people who can’t surf and explore with new methods, means and mediums.
..then the latest FB update hit. and I was PISSED. it was really jarring, it seemed to be totally disjointed from aUI/UE perspective. I complained like a whiney, old school media clown.
but I think you’re right. they made a BIG change but now are making things better in the fly. and perhaps (though they don’t show it – they might just be listening in the background and using web analytics to update in the fly.
maybe that’s a better model than little iterative changes and waiting for customers to comment on every little thing. i’m 100% percent for customer centricity – but like a good comedian maybe you need to “say: something jarring on stage..see how people react live, and then adjust your act on the fly ;)
@Andy, I agree, I always disliked it when people just whined about the design. I have yet to hear anyone quantify their dislike for the changes, except for “it’s too cluttered.”
While I agree with this, it can easily be remedied with the creation of even one list, like I illustrated above. This has actually changed the way I use Facebook and I love it.
I’m curious, how did it change the way you use Facebook?
Personally, I had almost entirely made the switch to Twitter for my social media needs. There was a combination of reasons for this, one of which being the hundreds of Facebook friends I don’t want to hear about–a problem that would seem to be solved by the Friends List feature. However, using that feature would make my Facebook experience even MORE like Twitter, since I would prioritize all you guys. On top of that, I haven’t had a working camera for a while and am happy using my iPhone to share moments via photograph (Twitpic).
There are lots of differences in how you use social media vs. how I use it (you have 10 times the Twitter followers/followees I have to manage; you make your living in the media/tech industry; etc.), so perhaps that is what really makes our experiences different. But I’m still curious to hear (a) how you used to use Facebook, (b) how you use it now, and (c) what you get from Facebook that you don’t get from Twitter. Then, what implications does the redesign have for Facebook’s strategy to stay relevant?
Also, what’s UI/UX? Heh.
Personally, I haven’t really had much of an issue with the new re-design of the homepage. When it first hit, I remember so many people in an uproar of how it sucked and ruined their FB experience but didn’t really hear many reasons why. It’s almost as if a few influential folks deemed it unworthy and the sheep followed blindly en masse.
The only issue I have is the disappearance of the navigation that was formerly on the top right which linked to:
http://www.facebook.com/photos/
The UI on that page kills the new Photo feed–and isn’t randomly selective. Also, there’s no navigation that links to the old Groups layout as well. As long as the old layouts still exist and I can access them directly via their URLs, it’s not that big of a deal.
I do like your take on how to use lists adequately with it as the information flow cane be too plentiful for the default feed. It seems like a great way to make some of the chattier friends disappear. Thanks for the tips!
i generally don’t mind change, and the new look didn’t bother me, but there was a loss of some functions i did really depend on like the learn more/learn less feature and i don’t care for the fact that i can either hide someone completely, or see everything. of course i haven’t tried these list adjustments you guys are talking about so maybe that will help things along. i would also like the option of getting rid of all that crap on the right hand side. i do not give a damn about most of it and would like to make it go away.