Library Musings

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.