Facebook leaves the caves
The outcry at Facebook “imposing” its new design on usershas surprised me. After all I thought people using the system might be pleased to see improvements. It would seem however that the usual fear of change you see in the general populous is pretty virulent in the Facebook community too. There are Facebook groups against the new layout and even online petitions.
Lets assume this is just a visual redesign - I’d still take Facebook’s side it’s their website to do as they wish. Why should they keep the overhead of running two designs that can mean maintenance and upgrades are more difficult?
But deep down the new layout isn’t just about visual appeal (although I much prefer the cleaner look) it’s all about usability and they’ve done a good job. Everything is still easy to be found but the tabbed interface stops everything growing out of control.
Applications and application spam for me and many others has been the bane of Facebook but they’ve handled it well. I can block applications permanently and even all application requests from certain people who I know are a bit free and easy will adding anything and everything to their profile (and sending it to all their friends at the same time) – you know who you are!
Now the new interface means the applications are moved to a separate tab so I no longer need to go onto friends pages and wait for the hundreds of applications to load or scroll for approximately 900 miles down the page to find their wall!
So what are the downsides of the new design? Oh yeah you might have to spend 5 minutes looking around to find where everything is. Five minutes is an exaggeration to be honest as everything is in a very logical position.
If these people got their way we’d still be living in caves.
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