Let’s Face It, Facebook’s UI Was Lacking

I suppose hindsight really is 20/20. Aside from my gripes about managing Facebook Pages and my tendency to sometimes just Google an application to find it’s Facebook page rather than navigating to it, Facebook’s previous design seemed to me to be an adequate method for harnessing all of the tiny tid-bits of information that a person’s network can produce.

Maybe it’s that we are only now beginning to develop a sophistication when it comes to social networking user experiences. We put up with the early MySpace UI for all of those months, after all, because it let us interact with our friends in a way we hadn’t been able to do before. I’ve been experimenting with Polyvore and Houzz (both social utilities with a fairly narrow focus) for my personal blog in these last few weeks. I find their UI to be atrocious, but their functionality is pretty cool and novel so I put up with it.

But on their 6th anniversary and with 400 million users putting it to the test, Facebook has unveiled a redesign that makes their previous UI seem like it was from the dark ages. Here were my first impressions when I logged on this morning:

I think some people will miss the ability to access applications, games, and pages from deeper within the site – say, from a friend’s profile page. That was the genius of the drop-up from the lower left in the previous design. It will be interesting to see how Facebook responds to that if/when it becomes a gripe. But I think this redesign accomplishes something that Facebook sorely needed – an invitation to discover, beyond what is in your friend feed at that moment.

I predict it will increase the depth with which users explore the site, increase user page views per visit, and open up opportunities for marketer interaction and serving ads. I also predict that the next innovation will be real-time refreshes of the News Feed, very similar to Twitter. Real time information is what it’s all about, after all.

Whatever and whenever the next redesign comes, I wonder if it will leave me feeling the same way I do today – impressed by how far we’ve come.