A New Look for Facebook
behance.net
behance.net
I also agree that it looks a lot nicer because of the high-end stock photos.
Edit: scrolling down further, there are some other UI refreshes that I do think improve the experience overall - the calendar and photo album views stood out to me. But I think it's important to use ugly people with weird names in your designs to gauge how it will actually look in production! The dark theme on pages, for example, looks very clean with Apple and Adobe as featured, but I imagine will look pretty dreary to stare at all day.
Came here to say this. "Eye candy" != easy to use.
The assumption is that because both designs share a common attribute they are both intended for the same purpose and therefore if one design is bad for a particular reason, the other design must also be bad for the exact same reason.
This isn't necessarily true with Pinterest, which has a different purpose to Facebook, and therefore likely requires a different UI.
Of course not. That's a highly efficient way to represent visual icons. Facebook has a much different focus: for one, it's a linear idea (in its current formulation), either by date or by how facebook decides to prioritize your stuff (grumble).
That said, I would probably much prefer to eschew all icons on android for a nice text list.
I think my 'timeline' should be representative of photos I've uploaded, posts I've made that I want to highlight and events I went to. My 'wall' should be a straight-forward top-to-bottom feed of stuff I've posted and stuff people are sharing with me.
I hate the timeline, as I can't track two columns, and probably wouldn't like a grid also for the same reason.
I logged in to Facebook a minute a go just out of curiousity, and struggle to actually find my homepage, first I get badgered by Facebook, I then accidentally stumble upon my Timeline (which I hate), I then click the Facebook logo to go to a homepage, which happens to be a feed - or rather what I deem my own homepage. Confused! And it happens every time.
I really only ever want that to be on most recent.
My other problem with Facebook interface is that I just don't know where to go to "do stuff" - eg: if I want to unlike a company page. There's a bunch of little icons in the top blue bar (10 clickable things in that bar), and then there is the list down the LHS, and the almost hidden follow / report this post button.
I do like the fact that it's being refined; I notice the occasional difference. And the new privacy announcements were clear enough.
I guess I don't use FB like most people use FB. I only have less than 50 friends and I don't like a bunch of products or companies.
As an archive it's great, you can exactly see what someone liked/posted in previous months, but it's not a feed, and that's what I would like someone's profile to be, a feed of his activity.
I .. I'm not sure if you're serious, but that is either smart, insulting or both. It's true that cleavage and nice smiles were there, but noting it as a non-production look, - that's a bit bleak.
The design looks great. I can't wait to hear my friends opinions as I don't use Facebook on regular basis.
likewise, if Facebook chooses to saturate their pages with images they know are generally poorly shot, you are allowed to question Facebook's ability to dress itself.
a. Facebook does not get to choose what photos get uploaded
b. Facebook knows the overwhelming majority of these photos are of poor quality
as such, it would be short sighted for Facebook to incorporate a design which relied so heavily on shitty user generated photos.
The point is, the new layout discussed here relies in some way on the pictures being not shitty. The discussion here is about a layout for content that is not under Facebook's control.
every photo on Facebook is user generated. an overwhelming majority of them are bad photos. Facebook is completely aware of this.
as such, it would be an irresponsible design choice for Facebook to create such a huge presence for those photos, like the design proposal does. likewise, it is irresponsible of the proposal author to only use high resolution stock photos of decent looking people for their design.
perhaps my original post was not crystal clear. in retrospect i maintain that it was a fine explanation, albeit terse- and out of context given my misinterpretation. regardless of my post's clarity, your response makes you sound like a dick.
I respectfully submit that had what you meant to say been so clear, or had you followed your own advice to "read both posts carefully", perhaps you wouldn't have made the mistake twice.
Well, 50% of the people on Facebook don't have cleavage. The other 50% are doing duck faces instead of smiling. You can't design around some abstract ideal.
Of course if you're making a website for models or photographers, then ignore that completely. The take-away here is to know your audience, and design accordingly. Facebook should be (and currently is) optimized for getting a quick pulse on what's happening in your social circles, and the designs presented here are a poor way to accomplish that.
[1] Long names cause weird word-wrapping and overflow issues in many designs. India seems to have a high density of (by my standards) unusually-long names, so if you expect to have a lot of Indian users that kind of thing is really important to consider.
In terms of graphic design, it's a huge improvement, not so for usability/ux. The timeline is chaotic. Small type. Navigation/content areas undefined, too much layering.
>> I also agree that it looks a lot nicer because of the high-end stock photos.
Exactly. This looks like a first-year design school project for these, and so many other reasons.
This design would fall apart without visually simple photography that tailor fits to the grid. The right way to approach a redesign would be to collect an aggregate of typical facebook photos, and use them as examples.
Here's an earlier (2006!) redesign by Information Architects (iA). I think this is a lot cleaner and solves the information overload problem better.
Both funny to read and true as well!
Came here to say it won't look as pretty when you replace all those photos with random images taken by random people from their phones but the parent beat me to it.
Oh and where are the ads?
Which no one would ever click.
Facebook seems to acknowledge this since now if you view a person's profile, it automatically scrolls past the cover photo so you don't even see most of it.
This is impossible to use.
This doesn't take into account the fact that not all photos are stock photos, not all monitors are good at rendering fine serif fonts on dark backgrounds, some users need affordances for buttons and interactors, and that the fluid grid with no spacing whatsoever between content areas makes some information nearly impossible to scan.
I know I hate them as much as you do, yet still buy them, but keep in mind that ad integration should be not only important with design but a must.
Just my $0.02 :)
And this redesign will probably work across tablets and phones too, as everything is "big" and "tablety".
But I would not want my Facebook profile to turn into a Metro UI-esque photo collage lacking detail or order.
They weren't thorough enough to really bother with much of the text anywhere, given the amount of lorem ipsum and many-gendered John Smiths.
Content wasn't really top of the list of priorities, it seems, which I think is a bit of a mistake if you're trying to 're-design' something driven entirely by content.
Despite that, this concept is pretty much all about an in-your-face layout of pretty pictures that looks incredibly difficult to make any real sense of, and might as well be a collage of 2013's cargo-cult trends-to-come.
This reminds me of all of the times where I enountered disappointment that the actual functional implementation "didn't look as good" as the flat mockups because the actual content had sections of varying sizes.
Content in the real world? It's messy and uneven. If you can't design for that, you're doing more harm than good.
http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles14/398559/projects/65046...
That kind of visual confusion is a bad thing. I understand the desire to move away from lines and boxes within boxes. But elegant lines should not blur functionality.
Also, how would this design look when trying to accomodate the many kinds of statuses that do not have banner-size-worthy photos? My guess is not very well.
So it used to be someone could say "Wow, wouldn't it be funny if Gillgan had a secret crush on Mary Anne and the skipper found out and used it against him?" and some writer for the show might say "Yeah, that would be funny, and maybe include a variation of that in the show."
Except there came a time where the show would air, that "someone" would show up, lawyers in tow, and demand compensation for using their idea. Which, after some pretty amazing litigation, the studios paid, and which resulted in pretty much any idea that was ever shared with a writer, or person associated with any show, was put on the list of 'things we can never do for fear of being sued.'
I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this already frankly.
https://new.myspace.com/play [Video]
1) It feels too dark. Dark is fine, but there doesn't seem to be enough contrast to even it out.
2) The news grid is too hard to follow. Not sure where a new story begins and ends.
3) You forgot about advertisements in these mockups. Ads can't be an afterthought. Especially for a public company.
I mean, Facebook isn't that revolutionary in terms of a site - there's a user with a login, there are comments, there are pictures. A demo site wouldn't need a scalable infrastructure to show off these ideas.
I'm just not so sure that some of the site controls would be possible in a browser. It's very tablet-y with controls that we are accustomed to in our phones and pads but not on a desktop. Also, it's very horizontal, which isn't typically very friendly on handhelds.
You can also get actual FB data via API.
I would like for things to go back to minimalist and simple. After all, the human brain can concentrate only on one thing at a time, so why show 20 different things on a page, when you could make the experience so much better with just what's essential for you in that very moment?
Facebook is a social network where you can view info about what your friends are doing. A good UX needs to do only that, and nothing more.
Are we done with this kind of stuff already? Do people think that Facebook just haphazardly through together their current UI without doing extensive user testing?
That would be an interesting business...create better/specialty interfaces for utility websites implemented by third parties via browser plugins. Maybe have a different and more convenient view and tools on Facebook depending on what you are trying to do on the site at the time (marketing view, developer view, time-killing view, etc).
The business angle being interesting is something I'd disagree with. Look at what happened to "better interfaces to Twitter."
Oh, a couple of reasons.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-bans-browser-plu...
http://www.fbpurity.com/news/important-news-facebooks-legal-...
I actually like this design though, it reminds me a lot of Microsoft's new aesthetic.
Also, the design seems to be missing a way to shove hundreds of ad impressions into my eyeballs with each click -- a definite thumbs down in the facebook world.
a. The dark theme is a bit weird for Facebook. Recently there was this good article posted here[1] about background colors and motivations. It says white backgrounds ("low arousal" themes, according to the author) are for utilitarian websites and dark backgrounds for hedonistic motivated designs. Facebook is both, but I think our moms wouldn't use it with a dark theme.
b. The use of the screen real state is great. Facebook is really bad at this. This design looks like it could adapt to different screen sizes really well. It's almost the equivalent of Smashing Magazine for social. Really good, although it'd have to avoid horizontal scrolling on desktops which get weird very fast.
c. All interactive targets are quite big yet they look good enough for a website to be displayed on a desktop machine. That's not easy to achieve.
Overall I think this is more of a concept for a Win8 app, mostly based on the video in which it seems like the home page is a "live tiles" sort of thing. It could be made into a great website that uses the full screen with a bit of work. And that's a direction that most websites are lacking nowadays.
[1] http://kaikkonendesign.fi/user-motivation-determines-the-bes...
Major problem is responsive design, its not scalable for content heavy sites. Same code scaling for different screens, makes sense in theory but is nightmare in practice. I've been part of couple of projects where-in we learnt the hard way. Hence, you don't see any big site use responsive design in major way. Almost all sites (Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart) go with a different sites for mobile & desktop.
Also the use of white text on dark background is extremely hard to read. Hence you see pretty much every content-rich site uses white or light background with dark/grey text. An exception might be Myspace which went with dark background approach and failed miserably in engagement.
When using any site, we like consistency. By incorporating panels which open up from both left and right side, it provides an inconsistent feel while using the site. My usage might be completely different from yours. It is important to keep the overall layout consistent with content personalized based on users needs.
I quite like the login screen. In the new "Twitter Bootstrap" era of web design I think this design is much more what users would expect/be used to. I just don't like two things: the login button, because that color is not Facebook-y; and the background, because it's obnoxious, basically says "look at all the cool people using Facebook, come join us!", and one thing I've always liked Facebook for not doing). Take away these two and it looks amazing (and functional).
All of this could happen without changing any aesthetically fundamental components.
I'm not sure why designers would think this would appeal. This is like throwing a pile of papers on the desk. And rearranging them each time a new sheet is added.
I always felt it is kind of wrong for designers to use stock photos that represent best-case uses instead of typical-case photos. Best case photos show models smiling. The typical-case pictures are poorly taken photos or random gifs or someone not very photogenenic.
I think all designs should use unfavourable photos so as not to influence the overall design... e.g - http://i.qkme.me/3sfkf8.jpg :-)
Otherwise it's a vast improvement over the current FB
Tile layouts have no place on pcs where pointing devices are used to interact with interfaces,however they seem to be a natural fit on tablets.
Nielsen wrote an article recently on major drawbacks of this trend.
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usab...
It's really pretty and nice to look at, but it's one of those nightmare designs that didn't get much development thought.
The one area I think he did fantastic in is of the displaying of individual pictures, events, finding friends, and company pages.
In all seriousness, I've seen this same style concept for more then a few redesigns as of late. I fear for the design industry sometimes. I guess it's better then rounded corners, reflections and drop shadows though.
It's a great work of art from a design perspective, but quite unfeasible to turn into the real thing.
There's a lot of work into how it looks, but very little into how it will actually work.
And "colloseum", really?
Pretty though.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Barbed_w...