Why the hate?
September 16, 2008
I’ve noticed a lot of my Facebook friends joining groups with names like “1,000,000 AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT LOL OMG!!!1!”.
I, for one, welcome our New Facebook overlords.
Seriously, what’s wrong with the new layout? It cleans up a lot of the cruft that used to be in the sidebars, adds a lot of new options right up front, and makes the pages easier to read in general. OK, so I’m not sure I agree with the clearly-Windows-inspired “taskbar” on the bottom, but on the whole, this seems like a very nice design refresh to me.
Could someone please explain to me what this hate is all about?
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4 Comments
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I have no idea. I like it.
Users hate change, like woah. I think pretty much ever site I’ve ever been a part of that had a re-design resulted in mass hysteria for some reason. People can’t find things, stuff looks funny, they have to learn new paths to do the same things, it destabilizes their lives.
I think this is one reason people are reluctant to try Macs if they’ve only had PCs, and why new Mac users tend to hate them at first and then grow to love them (or any other big design difference). Even if the thing they’ve been working on is much worse than the “new” version, they initially think it’s harder to use because they need to re-learn how to do things. I think we read a paper on this for Alterman’s class, if you’re really interested…
Classic fear of the unknown….
A lot of it is just a dislike of change, sure. Unless something offers a marked improvement, many current users will just want everything to stay the same. For many people its simply not worth learning something new for the relatively minor cleanup something like this represents. It doesn’t matter if where the stuff is now is more logical if you already knew where the stuff was under the old system. Yeah, learning a new facebook layout is pretty minor, but so is clicking the join button of the “I hate the new facebook” group.
I do like the fact that all the annoying app boxes got pushed to their own page. But there are a few design decisions I wasn’t fond of:
- I think the layout looks generally less aesthetically pleasing, I liked it better centered.
-I dislike that they combined the wall posts with general updates on individual profile pages on the “wall” tab, as many of the updates are just app-generated garbage. It seems like taking the signal from its own dedicated section and just dumping it in with the noise.
- I dislike that the info section is not on the default tab when you click on someone’s profile.
-The tabs themselves aren’t very prominent and don’t catch the eye. I didn’t even see them at first.