I have no opinion on the Facebook designs but I'm so tickled to see this post. What a blast from the past! I thought "the new Facebook design sucks" posts died out ten years ago :-D
They haven't added any fundamental innovations that Facebook hasn't already implemented.
This is an example of the worst kind of design, where the designer has gone through a self-absorbed process of moving around and resizing elements that Facebook created through years of experience with real users.
You mean like AOL? I haven't seen your vitriol since the last big FB redesign that even my aunt complained about, which was like what, 5 years ago? I even posted something to FB in the last few years, once it was apparent that FB had not done further obvious redesigns, "remember back when we all hated FB and were going to never use it again?" Nobody replied or liked it.
FB is the Great Mall of the Internet, people don't really care if it sucks because it's just a place where people are. Many don't even have a concept of websites sucking.
Facebook is sitting on tons of cash. If they cannot attract talented designers then they are in trouble.
Design is very important IMO. You think the majority of fb users will say 'oh look at those nice features'? I bet you not, they'll say I like Facebook or I don't like Facebook because that's how they feel. Design highly influences the user's feelings.
The one thing you're forgetting is that this happens _every_ time there's a new website redesign for Facebook. Its actually very typical for this to happen in general. People despise change will complain about a new design even if the design is much better. In a couple of weeks no one will even notice or think much of it.
Facebook isn't designed to look good or even be usable. It's designed to make money.
I have some faith that Facebook's redesign isn't losing them a ton of money, or they would've reverted it. It's probably increasing the KPIs they're trying to target.
I'm very surprised that people haven't noticed that Facebook really screwed up certain aspects to the redesign and instead keep trotting out the "users don't like change" excuse. There's "disruptive" and then there's "poor design decisions".
I wouldn't say Facebook as good UX so much as so many other websites have downright trash UX. Being the best turd in a toilet isn't much to brag about.
Wow! Talk about Grand Delusions!. Facebook has over a 2 Billion users. You can bet they can find far superior designers than you in that sliver of A/B test population.
totally agree, this has nothing to do with the function of facebook. The designers should follow more Dieter Rams 10 principle and less Design trends :)
I've been reading Design for Real Life (https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-real-life), and its introduction is a fairly similar mirror of this kind of snafu -- using Facebook's "Your Year in Moments" feature as a stand-in.
When Facebook first launched it, they positioned it as a "look at all the awesome things that happened this year!" sort of feature, with lots of smiling faces and positive, upbeat language. However, the reality often didn't match up -- Facebook would add sad or otherwise unideal photos/statuses to the collage, such as houses burning down, depictions of illness, etc. etc. Lots of users complained, and as a result they shifted the tone of the feature to be more neutral. ("We thought you might like to take a look back at the past year")
Put another way: edge cases (or as the book refers to them, stress cases) exist not just in code paths but in your user's expectations and emotions. Just as a good architecture can handle these appropriately, a good design and UX accounts for the entire spectrum of users.
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