The Importance of the Facebook Redesign

I don't think it matters at all what the vocal minority of users think about the redesign. Sure they made a big stink about the last design, just as they did with newsfeed, and when Facebook opened to non-college-students. However vocal they were, the numbers of users that actually quit Facebook over those issues paled in comparison to the amount of growth they saw—much of it as a result of the changes. The proof is in the numbers.

Users complain every time, and they tend to always feel nostalgia for a year and a half ago. You can follow the Facebook redesigns from the various groups Facebook set up, and it tends to be that they miss the one that's two editions old.

Right now Facebook's in a position where they don't have to change in order to stay up top. Their design is pretty tight - tighter than any other site - and they've got enough of a monopoly that people don't feel the need to switch over. Their real competition comes from mobile sites like Loopt, and those are still a pretty slim set of the market right now.

Part of me thinks they're innovating just to appeal to product sales. Another part of me thinks that some of the people up top at Facebook are innovating because they really think they're breaking ground. I'd bet it's a mix of the two.

Absolutely! I think the problem that they're running into is that it's tricky to make something like that without cluttering.

The best solution I've seen is what the Vanilla forum system does (http://getvanilla.com). They provide a bunch of options to give you slices into information. What are the last 5 threads you visited? Which are new? Which were the last 5 you replied to? The idea of thinly slicing information is excellent and works very well if you're a focused web site. (It inspired a lot of my startup's front page design.)

The problem is that Facebook is all about the aggregation. They can't dedicate that many resources to one application. For them, it's all about that little notification window, and that means that you can probably only really give users one little notification for any particular update. So, unless their users click into the Groups application, there's nothing they can do.

It would be interesting to see if, now that Facebook's increasing their level of aggregation, they begin increasing the amounts of information an application can pipe to users. That might let Groups gain prominence again, at the risk of increasing the level of spam existent on the site.

The only thing I can think of is they'll move towards mobile: taking advantage of GPS and making a more localized service for finding people.

Facebook's one of the few sites I've never predicted correctly. That last change was unexpected - I didn't expect they'd decentralize the profile pages that much. A part of me still hopes they'll tie Pages into the user's profile page more - "Books" taking you to communities created for each specific book - and I think that would be a good method for them to bring more content holders into the fray, but for whatever reason, I doubt that will actually happen.

The process tends to be that a site will unify its design, then break it up more. Facebook is unifying everything right now. The next step would be to find new niches to break the site down into, so they can bring a new fresh feel to the site. Considering they've all-but-abandoned the "base it on colleges" design, and now they're moving towards more commercial things, I'm wondering if they'll begin shifting it back again with a new emphasis on networks. I wouldn't bet either way, though: my track record is pretty bad for Facebook guesses.

When was the last time Facebook released a feature* that wasn't picked up by the majority of its users within 6 months? The newsfeed, pages, and video all become huge fast, because Facebook keeps things intuitive.

It's not about features. Facebook added nothing. They just reorganized what they had already, and in doing so changed their focus.

*Not counting Facebook Marketplace, which was reliant on money to work.

So? Most people don't want constant out access from the information they have there. The one important asset, photos, already can be easily extracted.

If you choose to use Facebook, you choose to play by their rules. Nobody forces you to pick them over anybody else.

Walls are irrelevant if you have the whole world inside them. Facebook doesn't need to cooperate with other elements because it is a behemoth. There will always be a minority which wants to see more outside access, and Facebook can appease them, but they don't need to go in that direction for growth. The way out for them is reorganizing and adding more features to tie people further to the service.