Redesigning Facebook — What the Users Want
It’s clear that many facebookers are unhappy with the redesign of Facebook. This is a chance for us to come up with some ideas for making the design more user-friendly. And you’re not limited to 140 characters!
I’ve spent just a short while trying to find a web site with useful design tips that would apply in this specific situation, but haven’t had any luck. I hope some of you will do further research and add links in your comments.
My first thought about Facebook is that it has several different purposes that need to be kept in mind, and handled in different ways:
- Status Reports (”What’s on Your Mind”)
- Apps Postings (Easter Eggs, Quiz Results, etc.)
- Wall Postings
- Advertisements
- Friends Information (Including “People You May Know”)
- The Inbox
- Profiles
Since I only joined Facebook shortly before the new design was put in place, I am not all that familiar with how the old design worked. Hopefully some of you can address those issues in your comments.
Here are a few of my ideas for improving Facebook. I hope you’ll come up with some that are far better in your comments.
- Gather related items on one part of the page. The center column should be reserved for “What’s on Your Mind” and replies to those posts.
- Remove or increase the 140 character limit from “What’s On Your Mind”.
- To better utilize space, the “What’s On Your Mind” posts could stop at 140 characters (or less) and have a link to see more.
- Move all apps information to a location of its own–probably the right hand column.
- Gather all friends information in the left hand column. Lists of friends, links to add friends, people you may know, and the groups you have set up for friends should all be together.
- The Inbox feature needs to be more prominent if it is going to be the only private means of communication. The Inbox tab is too small to be readily noticed, and its name does not clearly reflect that you can compose personal messages there.
- Advertisements are important to Facebook having the financial means to continue providing their service. I don’t have a good idea of how to handle those or where to put them, but I know they have to be included.
- Wall postings seem to show up in more than one place. Sometimes I see them in the right hand column, sometimes in the center. This is another situation where I don’t have an improvement idea. Any ideas out there?
I hope that I’ll get a lot of comments here. With all the uproar over the re-design, I would think Facebook would be open to some user input.
Oh, also, feel free to disagree with my ideas. If I thought I knew the solution I wouldn’t be asking for help here!
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Speaking of bad design, the link to add comments to this post is in tiny, tiny print below the post.
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Just thought of a couple of more things that need to be improved. As far as I can see, there’s no way to find out what groups I have joined except to scroll through my messages. That should be on the main page with the Friends info.
Also, why do images have to be so tiny on Facebook? I have a Flair board, and you can’t even read what the buttons say. I can zoom in using my browser, but as the picture gets larger it gets so pixelated that you still can’t read the fine print on the buttons. Hello, Facebook–are you familiar with the use of thumbnail images that link to images that are large enough to be seen?
I like the groups icon in the facebook toolbar along the bottom of the page. Click that icon and you’re taken to your groups page. The right coulmn is groups you belong to, and the left column is groups you may be interested in, as they are similar to your groups. Personally, I’d preferr the columns the other way around – mine on the left, others on the right, but that’s just my opinion.
Regarding advertising, I agree that it is a necessary evil, but I think that ALL advertisers – and any appication that collects personal information – should be required to announce that fact in text the same size as the advertisement/ application main body in the “Click Here” banner. One example is RocketQuiz’s “IQ Challenge”. Urged to take the quiz by friend’s “scores”, the user doesn’t find out about the information gathering until after taking 10 pages of “IQ Questions”. Prior to seeing the results, the user MUST enter a valid cell phone #, e-mail and snail mail AND respond to BOTH an e-mail and cell tex “PIN Message”. To me this is misleading and should be stopped.
Thanks for pointing out the Groups Icon. That will be a big help to me. And I totally agree with you about those “quizzes” that end up demanding personal information before they show you any results. They also mislead by making it appear that your friends have already taken the quiz. That’s just flat out wrong!
I have to admit I keep finding things I like at Facebook now that I’m looking around more closely to find things I DON’T like. I hadn’t noticed the Hide button before. I used it to hide pillow fights since I’m not interested in them. But I would never hide Hatchlings/Easter Eggs.
My students really like the Uglies series by Westerfeld. I would consider adding that to your series list.
Thanks, Stefanie. I definitely need to add it.