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a man peeks over a desk, holding up a sign that says 'help' The Facebook redesign: The company promises changes, but is it too little too late? iStockphoto.com
 

by Linda Holmes

It's always a bad idea to draw too many conclusions about the redesign of a web site until users have lived with it for a couple of weeks. Redesigns are almost always unpopular -- in part because they often aren't well thought out, but in part because people hate change.

But the new layout and functionality (or dysfunctionality) of Facebook (gradually introduced a couple of weeks ago) aren't getting any more popular with age.

[Here's an anecdote: I went to investigate the current landscape in new-design-hating Facebook groups so I could tell you about it, and I...could not find Facebook groups. I had to post a plea for help. I kick around sites of all kinds all day long, and I cannot remember the last time a redesign hid something that significant from me. I eventually found them in a little bar at the bottom that doesn't even look like part of the page. Bottom line: resistance to change aside, it is a very, very bad redesign.]

Facebook has now -- by utter necessity -- gone into damage control mode, vowing to make some of the changes to the new layout that are being most loudly demanded, but apparently taking a sort of "horse is out of the barn" approach to the fact that almost every aspect of the redesign is universally loathed. They're going to fiddle with it, but they're not going to just undo it, as they should.

There is nothing that can be tweaked that will get the company one-tenth of the goodwill they would get from, right this minute, announcing that they're rolling back to the old design. Despite the money they sunk into the changes, despite the long meetings they undoubtedly all suffered through, it's a failure. It's New Coke. And now there are peasants, and pitchforks, and it's only going to get uglier.

categories: Internet

1:48 - March 27, 2009

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