The new Facebook reverse engineered

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The new Facebook design was launched early last week to some positive and negative reviews. Facebook had been working on the new design for the last year. The analysis required to roll out such changes must have been extremely complex because the changes go far beyond the aesthetics. The user experience is drastically impacted.

A lot of people have been building their profiles just the way they want it (with the right applications, information, etc); such changes will obviously create resistance among Facebook’s user base. Let’s try to understand how the new design came to be.

New facebook design

How did the changes come about?

• One of Facebook’s biggest challenges seem to be avoiding the clutter of Myspace’s profile pages. For this reason, the default profile pages were standardized across users and the applications were put in their own section.
• Also to reduce the clutter, the layout was broadened from 800 to 1024 pixels and white space was added. This, in turn, gives the impression that the design is not as tight as it used to be.
• The use of tabs generally indicates a desire to shorten page length and information overload. Multiple levels of tabs were added to further segregate the information.
• The secondary navigation bar has become completely contextual. It is on the left on some pages and on the right on others. This probably reflects how people really use Facebook (eg. looking first at the main picture on a profile, looking first at the feed updates on the home page, etc).
• All photo interfaces were grouped to standardize the experience and avoid having elements of navigation all over the place.
• Ads seem to have been separated from the core content to reduce user confusion (unwanted clickthroughs) and possibly increase conversion rates.
• The terminology for “Profile” was changed to the actual name of the person to personalize the experience and reduce confusion.
• The search profile box was positionned at the top of the page for consistency and to reduce misunderstanding when multiple search boxes are displayed on the same page (eg. Friends or Inbox pages).
• The addition of a bookmarks section is a nice touch to help expert users navigate in a contextual manner.

Old Facebook design

The verdict

Like it or not, Facebook needed to re-focus its design. The task analysis, statistics, user research and user testing conducted were certainly reflected in the new design and will probably please the vast majority of users. After all, design is about decision.

For those of us who are not completely satisfied with our new “Home” on Facebook, the settings of this highly modular design can be tweaked to make it a little more comfortable. We’ll keep an eye out to see how it evolves over the next few months as more and more users switch to the new design.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Case Studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.