Here’s a snippet from What Was Facebook’s Best Redesign, Anyway? [Technologizer]
I had fun looking back at the fruitless nature of Facebook redesign backlash. No one is surprised anymore when a redesigned Facebook home page–such as the one that rolled out today–causes an outrage.
But that made me wonder: what design, exactly, do people want? Was there ever a single home page layout to which Facebook users, given the choice, would happily revert? In other words, have we cooked up in our minds some ideal vision of an “old Facebook” that never really existed?
I’d like to declare this as a National Week of Umbrage. Between Netflix and Facebook, it’s been a strange few days. And still, we have our share of “It’s just a [blank], get over it!” and (as in that post) “What do people WANT?” Sadly, most of it misses the point. While there are definitely features that suck (wait, I’ve got to manage two queues? wait, you’ve reordered stories from the friends I just recategorized according to what scheme again?) and of course features that are improved, this is really about how you manage change. This isn’t, ultimately, about features. Facebook is the social OS for many many people. Netflix is the entertainment OS for many many people. We invest countless hours in using the thing, including setting it up just the way we want. That’s our choice, in fact, it’s almost an imperative. I can organize my fridge and my sock drawer in a way that I find appealing, satisfying, efficient, or whatever. And no, I don’t have to be on the autism spectrum to do that and to find reward from doing that.
When things change, without warning, without rationale, without a clear sense of how things are different – and better – for me, without an easy way to adjust to the changes, then we’ve got a problem. Google Docs redesigned something or other the other day. Today I previewed the changes. They are vaguely dramatic, aesthetically. But my workflow hasn’t changed, and I will adjust. I didn’t find myself unable to find my docs, or having to do more work instead. I’d hardly hold up Google as some ideal user-centered culture, but they seem, in general, to roll out redesigns, and even business changes, without a lot of teeth-gnashing on our part.
The intimate relationships we have with these services are indeed emotional ones. When change is foisted surprisingly on you, it’s unsettling.
Change is inevitable, necessary, good. But I’d love to see some less-hamfisted rollouts, and I’d love to see these companies understand – at the very fiber of their being – how much we are connected to their products and how their brutish ways make us feel. It’s not the medium, it’s the lack of message.
Tags: change, customer, design, experience, facebook, manage, netflix, user
Matthew Creamer of Ad Age’s Best Media Writing of the Week, which I enjoy every Friday, had some choice words on the topic also. “Some things are lost with each one of these Facebook changes, but they are not only matters of usability, navigation, privacy and other factors in our part-time but ever-more-involving jobs working as ad impressions for a rich company in Palo Alto, Calif. The stuff that inconveniences you in the short-term may make you rage with a hotness that, if spotted by an alien scout, would either send the visitor whimpering back to Zebulon or alarm him onto war footing, but it’s only so important. You will adapt. Or you will leave. What’s lost in the larger sense, not only in the Facebook project but in the general trend of surrendering our memories to algorithms, is different and doesn’t lend itself to a readily tweetable social-media know-how story. It has to do with our jobs as human beings and how the descriptions are being rewritten.”
Comment by Julie Norvaisas 09.23.11 @ 3:42 pmThat’s nicely put but I’d suggest the “change” issue fits into what he’s saying pretty well. If we are negotiating new mediatiated ways to relate to each other; establishing new norms as part of it, etc. then what does that mean to us when the mediating layer can be yanked out, refabricated or whatever..we must continue to amend our evolving job descriptions.
Comment by Steve Portigal 09.23.11 @ 4:02 pmNice!
Hope product teams continue to see these changes as less functional and more conversational.
rgds,
Comment by Daniel Szuc 09.25.11 @ 12:33 amDan
[...] Steve’s recent related post on Facebook changes, in which the above Matthew Creamer quote is cited as a [...]
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