Liking Facebook’s new design

I seem to be the only one who likes Facebook’s new design. Everyone else I’ve asked hates it.

Ok, I admit, I’ve only asked a few people but all of them dislike the new design. An online poll by Facebook shows that an overwhelming majority of respondents hate it too.

Here are the latest three comments about it (when I visited it, 66,1411 members had voted).

“It has turned crazy” – Mujeeba Batool
“It wasn’t broken, so why’d they fix it? Now it’s just all f’d up!” – Jaci Langford
“It’s crappy and has taken the fun out of Facebook” – Manish Yadav

The most standrd complaint is that there’s too much clutter – stuff that they find irrelevant even though the newsfeed is generated by people in their own network.

Actually, the previous version offered this too. The newsfeed is not something new but how it is presented is. The main difference is that it is now in real time.

It’s only normal that people would hate the new design. People always do. Why? Because humans are creatures of habit. Whether the new design is good, bad or neither good nor bad, people will complain. Just because it’s different from what they are used to.

Even I’m like that, though I try not to be. That’s why I don’t like using new phones. I’m used to functionality and the interface of my existing phone. New models are ok as long as they are from the same brand and use the same operating system. But give me a new phone with a new operating system and user interface and I’ll say “No thanks.”

We recently launched a new website (www.theedgemalaysia.com) with additional features and a brand new look and feel. Design wise, it’s a total departure from our previous site. Internally, all of us are convinced it’s a better site in every respect. But we still get complaints. Shortly after it was launched we received an e-mail from an avid reader who said he just doesn’t like the new design.

In the past, Facebook used a complex algorithm to round up your friends' recently added photos, notes, and status updates and compile them into a neat summary on your front page. But due to increased competition from Twitter, Facebook too decided to hop onto the live updates bandwagon.

The result is a constantly updated "stream" of info that shows every little thing that someone in your network does.

I don’t understand why that’s a negative, especially since the real time aspect of Twitter is what people love most about it.

As for the complaint that there’s too much noise, you can actually control what goes into your newsfeed although I have to say how you actually do that is not that intuitive. But you can be sure Facebook will offer more and more controls in the coming weeks and months as they fine-tune the design.

Gossip blog, Gawker, reported that Mark Zuckerberg had sent an internal memo saying that “the most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers.” It sounds like something Steve Jobs would say but the true visionaries usually do buck the general viewpoint and press ahead with what they believe in. Zuckerberg has been right in the past and I think he made the right decision with the new design.

I’m confident that in time, say in about three months or so, all the naysayers will, if not love the new design, at least grow used to it.

When Maybank redesigned Maybank2u in September last year, I instinctively disliked the new site. I yearned for the old one. But by the end of the year, I was so used to the new site that I could barely remember what the old one was like.

Comments

[edmund ngo]

i don't mind the new design, although the increasing number of feeds needs a bit of time to get used to.