Comment by eggbrain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eggbrain | Hacker News Reader

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I think Facebook timeline differs in a fundamental way from, lets say, newspapers.

Newspapers work well with multiple columns because there's no inherent connecting features. Sure a page from the sports section will all have sports related items, but in general all the columns stand by themselves.

Facebook timeline is united by time. As in, what I say at the top of my timeline might be directly related to what I said before, and that might be directly related to what i said before that, and so on. So as humans, we want to read objects in the way they were chronologically presented. But on the new timeline, in order to do this, we have to zig zag from left to right, to left again. This isn't engaging the user just as making me do jumping jacks while I read isn't engaging -- yes it is spicing up my reading experience, but that just forces me to relearn something that is harder than what I was doing originally.

If the timeline was broken up into pieces, I could deal with that. Wall posts on the left, images and polls on the right, etc. Give my eyes some logical way to focus on only a part of my screen. But the exact middle of the screen on Facebook is a dividing line between left and right that presents almost identical information, and I have to form a structure from that.

Taking another example, in movies, it makes sense that the movie makers try to confuse and sex up a movie -- our brains want to be stimulated. But there's a difference between spicing the content of entertainment and spicing up the delivery method that content is offered -- imagine going to the movie and having two videos on the screen at once -- both showing different things. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy.

imagine going to the movie and having two videos on the screen at once -- both showing different things. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy.

But some TV shows (Burn Notice, for one) do this frequently. It works pretty well.

What do you mean? Burn Notice typically has two plots running at once (the plot that advances the overall story arc, and then the per-episode plot where they help someone), and they like to switch back and forth between the plots frequently, but they never show them at the same time.

Lately they've used split-screen to show simultaneous actions by different people. It works rather well, because while the videos show different actions, they both fit into the same coordinated plan.

Also, 24 used split screens (4 sections) quite frequently.

For a few seconds at a time, during transitions between scenes or in the lead up to advert breaks. Synchronicity of relevant actions is minimum - ie a car driving, while someone sits in a room. the other two may be 2 sides of the same phone call.

There's not really ever 2 concurrent plots happening simultaneously.

That's not the same thing. Burn Notice (and more notably, 24) use that technique for very short periods of time to change things up. And during that time there is never anything important going on in any of the 2 scenes--no one is going to risk half the viewers missing a relevant plot point just because they happened to be focusing on the wrong half of the screen at that moment.

Try going to Fry's and finding a spot where they have 2 TVs next to each other that are showing different channels. Try just watching one of them: It's maddening. To me it's equivalent to animated ads on web pages--it just makes it impossible to concentrate.

But with Burn Notice, they don't expect you to concentrate on just one of the scenes... instead, you look at both or all of them at once, and you get a pretty good idea about what's going on in all of them. This is possible because meaning-wise, video is usually very sparse; lots of people "watch" shows while doing other things, and still have a sense of continuity about the story the show is telling. I also find this a bit distracting, but many people I know seem to use this as the default paradigm of watching TV.

However, the thing I find interesting is other people in the comments here have mentioned that they just look at the center and take in what's going on on both sides, which is exactly the same technique, and Facebook timelines are sparse in the same way that video is. It's easy to get a sense of what your Facebook friends are doing with a quick skim, without fully concentrating on any particular post. During this skim, your attention might be drawn to a specific post, but if it's not, you've absorbed a high-level overview and moved on, without having to read each post individually.

It's confusing when you focus on the columns. Focus on the line in the middle and read the branches. It becomes just as easy to read as before, and with greater information density.

That does seem to help, but I still feel it breaks two common usability notions:

1) Lines are used to divide content and guide our eyes to what is important. In this case, we have to travel "across the line" to see the next piece of content which may be related, which breaks common notions.

2) Our mind usually focuses on the largest items on a page and then goes to the smaller details afterwards (Like how magazine article titles are always bigger than the text below it). In this case, after the top photo, my eyes move towards the bigger content boxes than the thin line in the middle.

EDIT: A third one!

3) If we focus on the line, the content to the left of the line becomes slower to read than the content to the right of the line. When we look to the left of the line, our eyes have to travel across the entire box to get to the start of the status. When our eyes travel to the right, the status starts a lot closer (due to text being written from left to right)

Here's an example:

Its a great day to be a programmer | I can't believe I got this job!

If you read this left to right, its fairly to read. But if you start in the middle at the line and want to read the left comment, your eyes have to go all the way to the left to get to the beginning, then come all the way back to where they were in the middle at the line. When you read the comment to the right, the text starts immediately.

You do realize that reading in general you have to move you eyes 'all the way to the left' constantly.

Yes, but you don't read a book by looking at the spine first, then reading the left page, back to the spine, and then the right. We read everything to the left of the spine (the dividing line, if you will), then read all the content to the right of the spine.

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