Facebook’s October 2009 Changes
// February 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Facebook, Social Media
This criticism of Facebook’s October 2009 changes was left in a draft status for several months, but we share it here to bring up our criticisms of Facebook design changes.
Last Friday Facebook rolled out significant changes to the functionality of their popular website. This is the biggest overhaul they’ve made to their site since earlier in 2009. It’s not surprising that the latest round of changes have pissed off many Facebook users. It’s not easy to please over 300 million users, but this round of changes could have been implemented better and pleased most of their users if Facebook had spent more time listening to users and web designers instead of the idiots in their marketing department. If you are doing something right–you run one of the most popular sites around–then it stands to reason that you’d be careful making changes. And it just doesn’t make sense to ape what your competitors are doing, especially the over hyped Twitter.
The biggest change Facebook made is to the functionality of the Live Feed, which is the page that most people use when they use Facebook. The Live Feed is typically accessed by clicking the “Home” link or Facebook icon at the top of any Facebook page. The Live Feed is where a user finds status updates of friends, links, posted media, and the annoying flood of application and quiz updates. The Facebook update to the Live/Status feed earlier this year added more pictures. information and user profile icons, but took away updates that shared which events people were attending, which friends and pages they were adding, and more. It’s a welcome development that Facebook brought back these updates in the new Live Feed, but they implemented the functionality poorly. More on this later in this article.
Facebook also added a “News Feed” which evidently takes the place of the “Highlights” box that was in the right column. The “Highlights” box always seemed to be Facebook’s concession to users who were upset about the main feed changes in early 2009. The ironic thing about the new Facebook look is that the Highlights box should have been kept simply because users need a concise overview of friend updates. The new “News Feed” is supposed to be an enhanced version of the Highlights box, but it provides too much information that duplicates what is in the Live Feed. One of the problems with the old Highlights box was that the formula for picking which friend updates was downright mystical. This problem could have been addressed by giving users options, but one of the problems with the Facebook update is that they won’t give users options.
Facebook explains the reasoning behind these changes:
“Facebook is simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams. Now, when users log on to Facebook for the first time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. From there, users can navigate to the real-time stream and toggle between both views throughout their sessions. In addition to making it easier for users to view content that is most relevant to them, this change also speeds up the time it takes for the home page to load and makes birthday reminders more prominent.
Ultimately, Facebook believes these changes will increase engagement on the home page by surfacing more relevant stories to users.”
One of the things that should be obvious when one reads between the lines of the marketing department prose is the assumption that Facebook is assuming that there is only one kind user experience. What is Facebook thinking when it says “for the first time in a while”? The typical Facebook user is somebody who logs in once a day or more. It sounds like Facebook has created the News Feed for users who log in every few days or just weekly. Daily users aren’t going to care about what their friends posted yesterday. If they want to catch up with all the updates since their last session, the Live Feed should be designed in such a way to accommodate this. The News Feed is pretty worthless to power users who use Facebook frequently throughout the day.
Let’s look at some of the Facebook changes, both good and bad, and look at how Facebook could have implemented these changes without pissing off most of their users.
The Live Feed vs. the News Feed
Facebook did the right thing by adding events, friend updates, page additions and more, to the Live Feed. This is what many folks complained about after the early 2009 changes. For a social networking site, Facebook’s decision to remove these elements from the live feed was downright bizarre. When these updates are part of the live feed, users can see which events their friends are attending and they can learn about new pages and discover old (or new) friends. Since these updates were taken out, I’ve long wondered how much Facebook’s decision impacted people who were organizing events. The beauty of the old live feed is that you could see events that friends were attending and then you could RSVP to the events (and attend them). After the early 2009 change, Facebook took away this organic way of finding out about events. You still could learn about events when people posted them to their profiles or when you were inivted, but the removal of events from the live feed was pretty stupid.
While Facebook did the right thing by adding these things back to the live feed, they failed the implementation in several ways. They failed to give users better, more visible options, to control what types of updates appear in their Live Feed. The presentation of the information in the feed lends itself to information overload. This information overload will piss off typical users and even power users who refresh the live feed throughout the day. This will prompt some users to hide more friend updates, which clashes with Facebook’s goal of getting people to interact more. At worse, many more users will simply give up on Facebook.
Let’s get into the nitty gritty of what Facebook gets wrong with the new update and let’s look at some possible improvements.
One of the worst problems with the new Live Feed is that some types of updates take up more screen real estate than is necessary. The early 2009 version of the Live Feed had simple one line updates. When the updates take up too much screen space, they give users the impression that they’ll have to scroll through multiple pages of updates to catch up with updates.
