The Worst Thing About Facebook Redesign: It Does Require a Tour

Well, I think I can't keep my mouth shut about the redesigned Facebook now that I've spent half Monday clicking the refresh button on my home page and wishing for the new changes to arrive (and never getting them, unfortunately). Well, I mean I have received the new redesigned page and I do like the layout and the wider space I now have there. What I don't understand is why I only get some of the features that Techcrunch promises - I don't see any "combination of status updates, wall posts and news feed items into a single content stream". Which is disturbing because this is what I thought Facebook should have done months ago not to let us forget that we have bookmarklets to share items on Facebook (after all, if no one ever comments, what's the point in posting?). I still fail to see this exciting combination that Michael Arrington named "The Friendfeederization of Facebook" but I hope it is temporary as the new version is definitely far from stable - for example, it refused to allow me to access or edit my profile a few minutes ago so hopefully I still have to see the complete new version.

The continuous chase for updates today has been rather confusing to me - and I was aware of what I should expect and looked for the news with hunger. But imagine a user who is not all that deeply involved in day-to-day discussions of Facebook interface and just notices an article titled "Facebook gets a facelift to help users share" on Yahoo! News. I'm sure you will agree this is a pretty mainstream information source and this is how many average internet users get their news - not hunting for bits of information on blogs. Share? Sure, he wants to share, all his friends are on Facebook and he wants better sharing and more comments. So he notices the catchy title and instead of reading the entire post (really, he has no interest in reading lengthy articles describing interfaces of web services) he just rushes to Facebook website (probably bookmarked in his browser as well) just to see… no changes at all. So he heads back to the article to actually read it and see how exactly he gets to see the new interface. And again, nothing, because the article does not give the instructions to use http://www.new.facebook.com to be switched to the new layout. And I don't really believe the mainstream user will perform a search on Google to figure that out - most probably he will simply forget about it until forced to use it.

So my first concern: I don't understand why Facebook chose not to add a link somewhere in the old interface offering a user to try out a new design. Probably this is in the works and will be rolled out at a later stage but I do think it should be done not to confuse people and not to make them desperately search for more information if they don't get it from one source.

On to my personal impressions. In general, I like the new look and feel of the site with its cleaner interface. I think every blogger has mentioned the cleaner interface and it can not be argued that it is cleaner. Yes, Facebook apps developers are already unhappy about accessibility of apps which is obviously much worse now. On the other hand, average users must be happy since the applications are now called "boxes" which is exactly what they look like so why keep scaring them with the strange word. But at the same time the bad part is that they are so hard to find now that it has become very difficult for such a user to add new apps at all.

Yes, some of the things that have cluttered the homepage and user profiles have been removed. Yes, we now have tabs and we even can add tabs of our own to make them easier to reach. Sure, we have the menu that allows us to reach those same items in a very different way. But is it all good for users? I would not be so sure, really.

I think that the worst part about the redesign is that it clearly needs a tour or a walkthrough - I have spent quite a few minutes clicking various links to figure out where the items I expected to see were at all. The new design may be perfect from usability point of view but the problem with it is that it really is very different from the previous layout. And while there are people that always opt for something shiny and new, there are also people who get accustomed to clicking all the same links and they make it a daily habit. And if this habit is somehow damaged by making the user look for the right tab in the menu to be able to see the same items he expected to see, it may really be disturbing. I believe a few millions of people were absolutely happy about Facebook design - a proof is that they chose Facebook for their social networking activities and got used to it. Will they be happy about changing their Facebook patterns? I strongly doubt it. So maybe it would be a good idea to have the option to stick to the previous design for those unhappy users once the update is rolled out to everyone?