Normally I don’t post such negative commentary on Locus of Control, but I decided to make an exception this time. Regarding the recent homepage updates on Facebook, I would like to point out a few things that I think we can all learn from.
Lesson 1: Don’t lie to your users.
Facebook’s preview of the upcoming changes openly stated that the new homepage would show real-time updates.
The old homepage had a tabbed structure in which the primary tab showed the News Feed – a random sampling of friends’ activity that could be adjusted to show more or less of certain update types. This tab did not update in real-time; a refresh of the page was required to see more updates. However, the “Live Feed” tab on the old homepage did update in real time.
The new homepage definitely does not show real-time updates. I can leave the page up and come back hours later only to find nothing has changed. If this functionality existed in the “Live Feed” tab before, and they planned to include it, why is it missing?
Lesson 2: Don’t waste space with redundant content.
On the old homepage, redundancy and advertisements did not push useful information such as “people you may know” very far down the page. For me, this information was still above the fold.
In preparation for the update, Facebook claimed the new “Highlights” section would contain information “you don’t want to miss”.
The new “Highlights” section just wastes space…
…especially because it’s repeating stuff you’ve already seen in your news feed.
Lesson 3: Don’t take away perfectly good, useful, unobtrusive functionality.
In the old design, the place where you update your status had options to post other application content instead of a status update.
The preview of the new design implied that this functionality would remain, in its entirety. A drop-down icon is shown in the new design.
The new design doesn’t have the drop down and there seems to be no way to customize which application shortcuts are provided as options here. 
For another example of valuable functionality being removed, consider the following. I used “Facebook Beacon” to integrate my LiveJournal updates with my news feed. When ever I posted an entry on LiveJournal, my friends would see an update in their news feed with the title and permalink for that entry. Now, not only does the homepage news feed not include these updates (I had a friend check their feed for my updates – they weren’t there), but I noticed the icon changed from the LiveJournal favicon to the Facebook Beacon icon. Why was this functionality removed and why bother changing the icon to something less unique?
This problem also exists with the integration with this blog as well as that of my flickr, vimeo, and geni accounts. My updates on these other sites do not get posted in my friends’ news feeds, only to my profile – which is an unlikely place for anyone to constantly come back and check. This functionality reduction, for me, has been the most annoying of all the changes.
Another feature that’s been removed is the ability to edit the length of a news feed item. The old design had an edit menu on each update.
The new design only allows you to delete items from your profile news feed and/or remove a person’s updates from your homepage news feed, depending on where you are when you mouse over an update.
Were these features bothering anyone? Even if only a few people noticed them and used them, why throw away good code that someone worked hard to write?
Lesson 4: Don’t use misleading information design.
The assumption, when viewing the profile page, is that updates are in chronological order with the newest at the top. That’s how the homepage news feed is organized. That’s how the profile page used to be organized. But the new homepage changes have somehow caused the profile page to display updates out of order. Don’t ask me how updates to the homepage can affect the profile page, because I don’t know. Apparently Facebook’s definition of “homepage” includes more pages than my definition would.
The old profile page would display items in chronological order and only group them when they were directly adjacent to each other and nearly identical. The groupings in this case were actually collapsed areas where you could hide or unhide additional similar activities.
The new profile page groups together all updates except for status updates and incoming wall posts. The grouped updates are given a heading called “Recent Activity” and placed in the feed at the chronological point where the first update in the group should be. No date/time stamps are listed on the grouped items. Adjacent near-identical items within a grouping are only collapsed if there are more than 3 in a row. Things end up looking repetitive and strangely out of order.
Failing to preserve accurate chronology is misleading information design. If you can’t remember whether you replied to someone’s wall post already, now you’re forced to click the “wall-to-wall” link to check, rather than just viewing your profile’s timeline-style feed.
Lesson 5: Visual design can benefit from common sense.
The first point about the new visual design I’d like to make is with regard to the “Recent Activity” label I discussed above. Status updates and incoming wall posts are shown outside the bounds of this label, implying that they are in some way not recent activity. The whole wall is recent activity and everyone knows it, so don’t waste space with such an obvious label.
The borders separating each item in the news feed are making the design look more busy. Whitespace might look cleaner. The real problem though, is that there is no differentiation between wall posts, status updates, etc anymore. The old version had varied formatting based on the type of update.
The new version has all updates formatted almost exactly the same. This makes it harder to differentiate which type of update a certain post is.
One last point about design is that the filters on the left side of the homepage waste a lot of space because they force the main content to be narrower all the way down the page.
I was very much looking forward to the new homepage design when I saw the preview and it said “real-time” updates. Maybe I’m just being way too nitpicky, but I was very disappointed with the amount of good functionality that’s been removed for no apparent reason.
I’m sure other people feel strongly about this one way or another. What do you think? Do you like the new homepage? Hate it? Something in between? Have you noticed any other features they’ve taken away or any bugs with the new functionality? If you disagree with the things in this post or you just need to vent, feel free to leave a comment. 
17 Comments
Very thorough analysis — says what I’ve been saying for a few days only more articulately and with examples. I also liked the “old new” redesign, but this latest move has broken my Facebook addiction. I find it much harder to use, less informative, and lacking features that made the experience fun and unique.
Yeah, one thing I’m curious about is why would Facebook remove the ability to broadcast activity from other services through the news feed? That part was my favorite, and now it’s gone. Are they moving toward a “does not play well with others” mentality, did they just forget to add that back in, or what?
I also wonder if they have some kind of beta testing group I can join. I should look into that.
Thanks for the comment!
Wow… I knew I didn’t really care for the redesign but I had no idea how truly annoying it was until I read through your most awesome and thorough review.
Now I hate it. Thanks a lot
Yeah, I think a lot of people notice the design elements first, but those are really the least intrusive changes. Whether or not someone likes rounded corners on the profile images isn’t my concern. I’m just upset about the removal of all the things that were working fine, were very useful and weren’t in the way of people who didn’t feel like using them.
Go ahead and spread the discontentment around, if you feel so inclined…XD
The redesign has been bothering me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. It’s just not as user-friendly as the old site. You’ve done an excellent job of breaking it down and articulating why the redesign makes FB harder to use. It’s a lot of little things that brings down the overall experience.
But, as they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity and FB is getting plenty of publicity these days.
All that being said, FB is still 1000x easier to use than MySpace. That’s a design/usability train wreck.
Thanks for your comments. I agree about the publicity thing. Sometimes I think Facebook, like Microsoft, feels it can abuse customers because it has so many of them and they’re all so used to it that they won’t leave.
For anyone interested, here are some ways you might be able to have some small influence over future Facebook changes:
Be part of Facebook user research: http://www.facebook.com/research/
Join the Facebook advisory board: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=uex_ad_board
And here are some posts on the Facebook blog regarding changes to the site:
Creating the Best Experience on Facebook: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=57407012130
Improving Your Ability to Share and Connect: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=57822962130
Welcome to Your New Home Page: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=59195087130
Facebook did not completely remove the ability to broadcast from other services. For instance it will still import all of my Digg activity. However, it doesn’t import my blog. I am certain this is probably just an oversight.
I also want to address your questions about the what’s on your mind limiting what you can post, and the different types of updates all displaying the same. I think the general direction they are going for is a system where different types of updates don’t matter. It’s all just a part of the stream. Similar to how notes on pownce could be links or files, but were all still just a part of your stream.
Similarly I think they are trying to encourage people to participate directly in the stream, instead of mostly through the latest greatest application like most do now. I think this explains a lot of the changes on that front.
However the chronological stuff just perplexes me. It seems like they want to have all the benefits of twitter, but they aren’t willing to fully commit to it. They can’t just go half way.
It seems pointless to create just another Twitter/Pownce-like service, when Facebook was so popular for what it already was. But I agree, their blog entries seem to indicate that this is the direction they’re taking.
Well I think the other thing is that Facebook looks at it’s self as more of a platform than anything else. In their mind there’s no reason that they can’t dominate on both fronts equally. If you look at a lot of the changes they’ve made with applications, data sharing, it’s apparent that they feel they can dominate any social application. They may very well be right too. It’s just that right now their implementation isn’t up to par. In my mind they have failed to grasp what made twitter popular and effect. Not to mention that so far the facebook userbase seems to be absolutely clueless as to how it should be used.
You’re probably right about the platform thing. A good platform would allow multiple structures or styles of use to be built on top of it. The latest changes have made the platform less versatile in how a person can use it. They’ve actually deviated from the platform concept in favor of restricting users down a specific path.
For users who want just another twitter, Facebook should enable customizations that allow that – without removing features and forcing every user down a path that may not be useful for them.
Excellent evaluation of facebook!!!!! Obviously, they should hire you to be in charge of their UX dept!!!!
I’m sure after this they’d hate me too much to consider that lol.
I’ll have to basically agree with you on your points. I have even another example that my mother (not the most technological person I know) experienced, and was asking me to help her fix. Remember in the (old new) Facebook where you could take application boxes and add them to nearly any column you so chose on your profile page? You can’t do that any longer. You can only put them on the “boxes” tab (below the fold, effectively). She got this little app for showing pictures of our golden retriever to all her friends (that also have that app) and she wanted to put the little picture slideshow preview box on the left column (like you used to be able to do) of her profile and you just can’t do it. Pissed her off something fierce.
Yeah that tabbed structure really bothered me before, for pretty much the same reason. I’ve learned to deal with it though – by not using applications whose central purpose is to display things in boxes. I liked the customizable nature of the profiles before. I’m decently content with the new tabs, but my behavior has had to change to accommodate them.
Aah… now I know why some facebook users hate the new design (and they even created a group to protest it). I am not a facebook maniac myself, so I couldn’t see what’s wrong with the new design. I just accept it as what it is
Nice review you have here.
(btw, I wonder how did you get the screen shot of facebook old design to accompany this review. If I may know?)
Yeah, a lot of people don’t really notice the changes. It’s more the power-users who are trying to connect Facebook with other web activities that are the most annoyed by it. I’ve also noticed that since these homepage updates, they’ve made minor adjustments here and there, most of which are completely pointless additions.
As for how I got screen shots from both versions, Facebook released the homepage update in waves. Mine got the new view while my boyfriend’s account was still in the old style, so I simply took screen shots in both accounts. Eventually his account was brought into the new style too, so I knew I had to move quickly to get the examples I needed. I’m sure if I’d had more time to use them both in parallel, I’d have found even more annoying changes. >.<
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