As someone who designs websites as a (big) part of his job, I don’t believe that, in most cases, a wholesale redesign of a live website is necessary. Many times, a gradual evolution in design and navigation is preferable, particularly if your site is highly trafficked and profitable. Not to mention a large part of their users’ lives. Look at Yahoo and Amazon, two sites that have seemingly changed very little over time; new features get added, new home page elements appear and are integrated without much disruption. In a presentation to a user group a few years ago I mentioned that people HATE full redesigns and compared it to arriving to work to find that someone moved their desk to another part of the office. I got a few nods of recognition from that.

And in interest of full disclosure, and if by chance one of my co-workers happen to stumble upon this, I am planning a full site redesign for the websites I manage at my current job. Sometimes a refresh isn’t enough and a comprehensive plan is needed in order to go forward.

The Facebook redesign does not fall into this category.

There have been criticisms that the redesign is meant to have better placement for advertising; maybe so but the larger point is that they have made some design decisions that are so baffling that you wonder what their user experience team was thinking.

Case in point; Can someone tell me what the difference is between the News Feed and the Live Feed? And is having both really necessary? They do pretty much the same thing. The only major difference to me seems to be that you have Log Mode and Full Mode in the Live Feed and not the News Feed. And the difference in functionality is different, too. For example, if you scroll over some (but not all – WTF?) entries in the News Feed, an options control appears (well away from where you are rolling your mouse), where you have the option to see more/less from this friend and to show more or less of the type of link it is (event, friend announcement, etc). I would assume that if the user had any interest in changing those features, they would want to do it whether they were in the Live or News Feed. And why can’t you delete messages in the Feeds? You could on the old Facebook.

I guess my main complaint is that the new design commits two critical errors: It hides content that was displayed in the old design and takes away much of the control users have over their profiles.

Here are a few examples of what I mean:

• коли под наемThe Tabs. Oh dear Lord, those tabs. Why, for example, did they hide the status updates under a tab. Well, you could argue, they are included in the mess that is the News Feed. In the Profile page it gets even worse (which I’ll get to in a minute). I would like to see them move toward a system that allows a user to create a page that makes sense for them. Facebook has the technology to make this happen, why they didn’t is beyond me. They would have hit a home run instead of created a backlash.
• The profile page defaults to the Wall. Except it’s not a Wall. It’s a News Feed. They have redefined what a Wall is, which forces a user to change how they use this basic functionality. One feature that particularly bugged me was that my own status updates were in larger type than other entries on the wall and when I used the options control to change this I was dismayed to find out that I could not make it a global setting for all my status updates that appeared on the wall. I would have to change them all individually.
• The tabs again. One feature I would like to see them implement is the ability for the user to decide which tab they want as their default. If a user can’t create their own page layout, then at least throw them this bone.

Having said all this, I am getting used to the new interface, but I must admit that this redesign was more irritating and more unnecessary than major ones in recent memory.