About Facebook
I didn’t bother with Facebook (or facebook, as it is properly named) until grad school, at the urging of my classmates. Since then I’ve had on-and-off periods. But for the past month, I haven’t spent more than five minutes there. Why? The redesign is horrible.
When facebook did the first major redesign, I was pleased. That put me in an initial minority. Others complained until they finally accepted it, and life went on. This time around, though, I am definitely in the majority. My objections started in the previous version, wherein “applications” multiplied exponentially. The clean interface was increasingly marred with requests for apps ranging from vampires to sports waves. My notification area gathered so many requests, one day I simply wiped them all out without even looking to see what they were about.
Why the hard feelings against apps? Personally, I find them counter-intuitive. Having seen friends’ MySpace pages, I appreciated facebook’s almost minimalist approach. Applications came along and began the slow morphing of facebooks’ clean interface into the visual hell that is MySpace. The core facebook features seemed to get less and less attention (and screen real estate) as the applications multiplied.
This most recent redesign has put the applications to the forefront and hidden more of the basic functions. Did the developers consult any usability experts in this process? Petitions have gone up, groups have been formed, and all the developers did was throw a bone (in the form of new preferences) to the users. This, from a “service” that would have us believe that the end users and our online experience are dearly important. If you believe that, I’m sure you still think that those posted photos of you drunk and half-naked in the front lawn of a frat house are private.
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