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Figureseven, Inc. has been helping businesses maximize their offline and online marketing efforts for over a decade. This blog provides insight, tips and advice from our experts to help you achieve your marketing goals.

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Oops, Facebook did it again!

By Jeremy Daly, President, Figureseven, Inc.
February 16, 2010 in Web Site Design, Information Architecture, Social Media, Usability

It’s been a few weeks since Facebook launched another major change to their home page, and once again, it wasn’t without some public outcry. Almost a year ago when Facebook changed their site a self-sponsored poll found that over 94% of users disliked it. They eventually caved to user pressure and rolled back some of the changes. I guess people didn’t like the 1997-esque rounded corners on the profile pictures. Similarly, last October, Facebook released another set of design changes that altered the news feed! This even spurred a group called “PLEASE GIVE US OUR OLD NEWS FEED BACK!” that attracted well over half a million supporters.

I’ll admit that I too was frustrated by Facebook’s apparent disconnect with their users, but these previous modifications seemed to simply modify layouts and re-brand some of their features. It was easy for us to dislike those changes because it forced us to relearn something we were already very familiar with. This last update, however, went beyond mere visual and wording changes and actually appears to completely breakdown the site’s usability. Here are a few things that you may not have noticed, but from a usability standpoint, they are key factors in determining successful user experience.

Notifications
According to Facebook’s guide to their home page, Icons have been added “for requests, messages, and notifications...when there’s something new you won’t want to miss.” Sounds good doesn’t it? Well, if you’re like me and you’ve always relied on the little red notification bubble on the toolbar in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, then you might find it frustrating as you scroll through your news feed or interact with user profiles and can no longer see when a new notification comes in. The notifications are now part of the blue header bar and are hidden as you scroll down the page. This forces users to constantly scroll back to the top to see if they have any new updates. Maybe this is by design to force us back to the top more often to see advertisements, but from a user’s prospective, it just diminished my site experience.

There still appears to be the light blue notification bubble that appears at the bottom of the screen, but they’ve moved this to the left hand side and have completely disconnected it from the actual notifications section. So if you happen to be paying attention, then you might catch it before it disappears, but it seems like more of any afterthought now, then a solid usability enhancement.

Bookmarks
How often did you use those bookmarks anyway? I used my all the time! Much to my productivity’s dismay, I am one of the 75 million people that play FarmVille (please don’t judge me). I had a bookmark to that application in the toolbar fixed at the bottom of the page. I would use that, in combination with my notifications, to jump back and forth between the application and Facebook profiles. Now the only place that bookmark exists, is on the home page. So either I need to type “Farmville” into the search box, or click back to the home page and then click my bookmark in order to get to the application. They have added extra steps in order to complete the most basic of tasks. Again, a diminished user experience.

Filters
Another feature that I would often use is the news feed filter. The old homepage allowed you to filter the home page’s news feed by application so you could group all similar posts. This was a handy feature if you were looking for something specific, especially with some of the more popular game applications. I’ve done a lot of searching and it appears that this feature is gone.

Chat
The chat feature hasn’t really changed that much, but from a design prospective, having the little chat boxes float down there in the middle of nowhere just doesn’t look very good. Furthermore, from a usability prospective, having them disconnected from the site makes them distracting. The old bottom toolbar was a constant that gave the chat boxes a fixed place of origin. This consistent element’s presence, while subtle, allowed for elements to be added and removed without dramatically changing the balance of the page’s design. Does it still work? Yes. Does it work as well as it could? In my opinion, no!

I still love using Facebook, and I’m sure over time they’ll figure things out, maybe cave to user pressure and correct the things that are the most unusable. This should be a lesson to anyone designing (or redesigning) their web site. Change for the sake of change is pointless and can be extremely frustrating to your users. Be sure to think through the user experience and make that a top priority as opposed to just trying to make the site pretty.
 

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