Facebook Effectively Rolls out Experience Redesign

http://www.montparnas.com/articles/facebook-effectively-rolls-out-experience-redesign/

I remember the transition this summer and I remember the reaction most of the people on it had. This summer facebook changed its interface towards the best, the way the transition occurred was they added an option to keep the old interface or try the new one. This got a lot of people confused when suddenly after two months they were thrown to the new facebook and they didn’t have a clue what was going on. This got people angry and I remember almost a 70 % of my friends changing their status to protest how much they hated the new interface and a lot of people joined groups titled “I hate the new facebook “ or “Bring the old facebook back”. The question is why did people hate the new facebook interface although its designed to improve the user experience.

I think it’s simply because users had become fixated with the old interface, they had become used to it and they knew where to find everything without even thinking about it. Now suddenly they are confused and lost in the new design resulting in hating it, because users are inpatient and won’t give the time to research for the changes. Their eyes don’t read what’s on the page they simply scan it in result they skip all the details and see only what seams important. Although facebook designed it to be cleaner people had difficulties to find the features they wanted on the page because they could not get over there old habits.

The mistake in my opinion that the people at facebook did was that they did not consider the users when they redesigned the site but they saw the new facebook with the eyes of an interface designer instead of the stuck to the old design user. I think they could avoid this if instead of giving people the option to use the old facebook or new facebook to periodically change features one by one making the transition more friendly and unnoticeable to the user. As I have observed after the grand redesigned they probably figured the same thing and they have changed a few things without anybody really noticing them. The also added the very clever notes on some of the new features in order to let people know there there, and help people know what they do in order to become more familiar to them.

Despite the radical changes and the complains of the users they eventually got used to the new interface and overcame their difficulties and facebook remains one of the top if not the top social networking website in the planet. Because of its simplicity and clarity combined with the clever new features.