Septje.com

I have been reading user comments for the last few hours on Facebook regarding the changes that are happening to the User Interface (UI), and from the statistically insignificant sample I have taken, I feel re-enforced when I say, the new Facebook UI…. SUCKS! Now I am sure there are some of you out there that find pleasure in using the new UI, but I am here to let you know that you are very much in the minority. Now before I go into detail about the changes in the UI and why they don’t work, let me just qualify my opinion by saying, ‘Yes, I understand that it’s new, so theres going to be some inherent resistance to this new UI, however when I see different, I am not usually one to hold off from exploring’. These changes however, even after extensive plays, lead me to exclaim… “Where the F*** is all my information”. 

First of all, let me go over some of the changes with you so you know what everyone is on about, this is of course you either aren’t a Facebook user, in which case… GTFO… or you haven’t had your profile migrated yet. I am told by the Facebook Support team, that this is a process that will take over a week to complete. A mean feat unto itself, considering the number of users they have to migrate, which made me think… How much research and development went into this new addition to warrant this change taking place? If you are rolling out something this significant, requiring mammoth project planning and resource management, you would want to make sure the end result is going to be a plus to the end user, in terms of functionality and usability… Right???

Right here we go, the changes are as follows….

•  The brand new ‘Stream’ view: This view shows a concise, consolidated view of what was once displayed in your news feed view in the old UI. Now, instead of seeing a nested
  

  The new-look Facebook UI, complete with 'Stream' and 'Highlights' panes.

   breakdown of your friends’ activity, you see a flat, image enhanced, considerably bloated view of friend information, minus a lot of the information you would normally find in this view. Now for the editorial; While this view is somewhat easier on the eye, it’s by no means more comprehensive, or even as comprehensive as before. I find myself having to deviate a lot from the feed page just to find the information I once had at a finger’s touch. Oh and incidentally, does this now just look like a complete and blatant rip of the entire concept behind twitter? Without the niffy context-sensitive functions? Now to be fair, I have not extensively played with the configurations of this UI yet, so there may be ways of changing this, but it ponders the question… If it can be tweaked to replicate the old view in content, why not implement that to begin with? Food for thought, Facebook UI Development team. A lot of the feed, but my no means all of the content that was once in the feed, is now in the Highlights section.

•  The Highlights section: a view to the right of the stream feed, gives you a breakdown of the updates you would have found the in news feed previously. Information such as profile pic changes, tags, group status, etc. Now when I first saw this, I thought it was a cool concept to separate these items into individual elements, but upon closer inspection, I found this change to be frustrating at best, and downright useless at worst. I sometimes don’t check my Facebook for anywhere up to three days, and when  I come back to it, I liked being able to, grouped by time and friend, easily distinguish the updates that interested me at the time. Now, with the separated, and un-timestamped deployment, find this process to be downright impossible. This was the killer for me personally, and from the feedback I’ve been getting, a gripe of almost everyone that’s used it.
• The ‘What’s on your mind’ change to the status update tool, which in my opinion, was what made Facebook what it is, was a very subtle and cosmetic change in some respects, but with just a change in simple wording, has the potential to change the social dynamic in the Facebook universe. What’s on your mind? Really?? Maybe it should be simply <username> blah blah blah… Now the status updates from users appear to lose that personal touch. I liked having my name there hard-coded. It made you think, “right, the sentence is started.. Here we go..” And, for myself at least, it worked well
• There are a few other changes, including a content filter to sort and display friends and information based on location, and interests etc, and I think this is a valued addition, to be fair, however its siblings still mitigate the benefits of this useful tool.

I was reading an article in news.com.au about this, and I’ve referenced it, that at the time of writing, over 30,000 complaints had been recieved by Facebook regarding this new UI. That has to make the development team take notice… Even though it is early days, and the roll out isn’t even completed, surely a backlash of that extent is worthy of consideration. I predict 100,000-250,000 official complaints to Facebook regarding the new UI within the next 2 weeks, and this begs the question… “Why wasn’t the obvious implemeneted.” Why didn’t the Facebook developers give users the option of trialling the new UI, and if they didn’t like it, let them revert to the old one. There is nothing in the back-end different that would prohibit the two running in parallel that I could distinguish, maybe I am wrong… Surely this would have been an amicable compromise.

I remember when I beta’d the interface I thought to myself, this really is diffeernt. It’s not going to mesh well with veteran users. New users are going to look at it and try to find out what the heck is different between this and Twitter. It’s a clear attempt by Facebook to try and steal some of twitters thunder.. and you know what.. BAAAAHP! Nope. No bingo! It just failed dismally.

The potential for improvement here over the old interface, which.. to be fair was beginning to show its age, was high and they just let everyone down. This, is the Vista of the blogosphere. Give it a few weeks… I am willing to bet that Facebook will provide users the option to go back to the old interface. The backlash will be large, it will be loud, and it will be proliphic. But it will be for the best, as it will push the developers to come up with the Windows 7 of the blogosphere. In the meantime… I wait patiently, and wade through the mess that exists for now.

Peace out.