KWPro.net

Seems like Facebook has now finally rolled out the new interface to everyone.  The problem is that it feels incomplete and that they missed a lot.  The news feed, first of all, seems truncated.  For instance, I don't see page updates coming through.  I used one of my test accounts to check this as well.  When I hit the landing page, I saw the page update in my "Top News" feed section.  However, I clicked on the "Recent News" tab and the page update disappeared.  When I attempted to switch back to "Top News" the page update no longer was there.  That's pretty poor design work on the backend to have this inconsistency.

Second, you cannot directly access feeds from your groups nor pages easily.  I believe previously Facebook had an easily accessible link on the left hand side for checking out feeds from items other than just friends.  Instead, that link disappeared.  Worse yet, they added a "Who's Online Now", which seems redundant when you can simply click on the chat section on the lower right hand side.  And when you click on the "See All" link, it acts as a secondary and equally redundant toggle for the chat link.

The worst part about Facebook's new interface that's sorely lacking is the "friends" link that used to be at the top in the menu bar.  One common thing I would do to find friends is click on "All Friends", then navigate one of my list to find a particular friend (or just browse through my entire list).  Instead, to get to the equivalent menu, you have to go to the "Edit Friends" link, found in the "Account" top right drop down menu.  From there, you're allowed to navigate back to your friends lists if you want to check out a particular friend that does not appear frequently in your news feed.  This is incredibly non-intuitive because I'm not really attempting to "edit" anyone; I simply want to access a friend quickly through drilling down in my lists.  I don't know who thought of this interface part, but he should go back to school and take a few lessons in common sense.

However, my theory of this design is that rather than drilling down through links, Facebook wants you to locate pages, friends, groups, etc. through their search.  Certainly, they do the whole auto complete thing, but if you can't remember how to spell your friend's name (and God knows there's many of us like that), or simply forget who exactly is in your friends list, then this is a horrible way of accessing information.  Rather than clicking through (because I'm lazy) and drilling down to my friends with my mouse, I now need to type in my friends, pages, etc. to find them directly.  If that's not the point of this interface redesign, then someone in Facebook really cannot convey messages with their user interface knowledge.

Everyone and their mom knows I can't design pages if it meant me getting the opportunity to unquestionably marry Norika Fujiwara.  However, I do know just enough user interface and experience to understand when something sucks.  Facebook has been dropping the ball a lot on their redesigns as many users are constantly unhappy.  This redesign just made no sense.  Certainly, there's a few elements that improved like the little icons on the top left hand corner.  But these elements I mentioned should've been included.  I can't fathom how Facebook missed these things.