Facebook’s Facelift
July 21, 2008 – 6:16 pm by Griffin Hammond
Today The Facebook Blog announced their new user interface will be launched soon, and in the mean time, you can try it out by going to www.new.facebook.com.
Read on for my detailed look at the new Facebook, or, for those of you who will simply check it out yourselves, let me offer my abridged critique:
Pros: Slightly larger resolution, tabbed profiles, “add a new tab” function, apps are cordoned off in their own tab
Cons: Strange wall/mini-feed combination, missing borders make it seem less crisp, drop-down navigation scrapped, people will complain because it’s different
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Facebook has always been about clean, simple design, and this new look is intended to eliminate clutter. For one, the new layout gives you more space to work with. As I imagine their users are getting away from 800×600 pixel resolutions, Facebook has increased the horizontal width by about 20%. Strangely enough, they’ve eliminated some borders separating content from background, which looks less clean and controlled.
The main page looks roughly the same, with the emphasis still on your newsfeed, only with slightly different design elements. They’ve also added “Applications” to the top navigation bar. And for whatever reason, the drop-down menus from the top bar are gone. I miss being able to navigate directly to my “Sent Messages,” for instance. What’s really different, though, is your profile.
Borrowing an idea from their iPhone interface, they’ve incorporated a tabbed structure separating content into: “Wall,” “Info,” “Photos,” and “Boxes.” Wall is like the old wall and mini-feed mixed together. Your friends’ posts on your wall and actions you’ve taken appear side-by-side in a timeline format. Personally, I prefer them separated, and new Facebook offers a way to filter between them, but I’d still like to see mini-feed on top, wall on bottom. I suppose the assumption is that there might be an interesting interplay between things you do and things your friends say, so we should see them side-by-side. What’s nice though, is it allows the status update box and wall post box to become one in the same, depending on whose page you’re on.
Some important info, including your networks, relationship status, and birthday, has been moved under your profile photo, but the rest of your info lives in the “Info” tab. “View photos of ______” is still under your photo, but has been duplicated into another tab: “Photos,” with albums at the bottom. And for those friends of yours who have EVERY Facebook app ever created, they’ve been moved to the “Boxes” tab, so you don’t have to crash your computer when you load their profile, or scroll for days to find their wall. For those of you who DO have every app, you can create a new tab for many of your apps, so you can keep them prominent if you like.
All in all, not too radical of a change. Things have simply moved, but no important features are missing, and nothing revolutionary has been added. Still though, I feel like the design is a little too simplistic, like it’s not quite finished.
