Facebook users have recently suffered their once coherent Facebook layout being bastardised beyond comprehension. If this is a “facelift”, then you can expect it to appear soon on “When Surgery Goes Wrong”.
Have you ever heard the time honoured maxim, “don’t fix what ain’t broke”? Here is a classic example. There was nothing wrong with the way Facebook was, having just been improved upon recently anyway. Sometimes, things are just right the way they are – no more engineering is required, just minor tweaks here and there as new technology becomes available. Examples of this might include: the car (4 wheels, an engine and seats – it works); the computer mouse (no, it will not be replaced by gestural systems and touch screens), and; that timeless classic – the wheel.
You can almost imagine the thumb twiddling and finger tapping going on in the Facebook design office as hapless designers and developers struggle to deal with the overwhelming possibility that they’ve already peaked. “Surely there must be something else we can do”, they say. Well, yes. You could bugger it all up completely. You could take all the nice functionality and then just roll it all up into one messy blob and call it the new home page. It’s like the plasticene that you used to play with at school. It came out of the packet in beautiful pristine coloured strips, then the fat kid with the snotty nose and the shorts that don’t quite fit properly, just mindlessly splodges it all together into a green/brown mush. Of course you don’t want to play with it after that, because everything you make will just look like a turd. And that’s how Facebook is now. A turd.
I have a mish mash of different types of information all appearing in one place. Status comments, photos, videos, wall posts, groups et al, all appear in the same confusing list, along with application posts from all manner of ridiculous apps, quizzes, games, virtual gifts and other completely useless crap. I can no longer hide other people’s application posts, I can only hide ALL updates from the person.
Everything has become much less private and much more in your face. In the past, I could see whether one friend had written on another friend’s wall, and if I so desired I could click to read the message. Now, the message is broadcast on my “news feed” which appears to have replaced everything else. However, messages sent to me are nowhere to be seen. I know that someone has written on my wall, because the notifications widget tells me so, but when I click the link, it just takes me to my feed and leaves me then to fend for myself, and I invariably cannot find the message.
In actual fact, if I click on my own name in the navigation, I get something more sensible with a Wall that I can actually navigate, but mysteriously, this feature rarely works properly. Most times, the page doesn’t load, or it just shows the news feed instead. Are Facebook still working on this? Have they forced an untested Beta onto everybody?
I imagine if the Facebook designers were actually tasked with improving the wheel, some bright spark would pipe up: “why not make it octagonal, that way it would be simpler?”, and all around the room wise designers would nod sagely and make it so.
I agree totally, what an absolute mess..