Black Holes and Snowy Mountains

I do not pretend to have any sort of designers’ eye, but the new Facebook offends even my sensitivities. It seems like every new version keeps getting worse and worse, and while I have been tempted many times to remove my account I ultimately decide it’s not worth it since Facebook can’t be trusted to remove my information in the first place.

What follows is a list of things from a stylistic standpoint of the shortcomings of the new Facebook layout. I tried very hard to avoid attacking all of the useless new “features,” but in some cases I discuss them if they have relevance to the site’s design.

1. Inconsistent Rounded Corners- Upon login, the most noticeable element of the page are the pictures of your friends that accompany their items in the news feed. I actually like the rounded corners; if only because it’s a fresh look. My problem is that the application of these corners is wildly inconsistent.

Here’s a list of places where rounded corners have been implemented:

• Profile pictures in the main News Feed, Walls, the “Friends” box on the Profile page
• Highlighting the “News Feed” and networks links in the left side bar.
• The blue “Facebook” banner on the top of the page.
• The “Share” button.
• Selections on the Wall- “[User] + Friends” , “Just [user]“, “Just Friends”, and “Settings.”
• The rollover image that appears when you “Remove” items from the Wall or “Hide” items from the News feed.
• The “What’s on your mind?” and “Write something…” boxes.

There might be more, but those are the ones I notice fairly immediately. Now let’s look at where they’re not found.

• Profile pictures in the Inbox, your own picture on your Profile page, Search results.
• Images in the “Highlights” column.
• Images that appear in the News Feed (for example, when friends create Photo Albums).
• Tabs in your Account Settings. Buttons and “Network” boxes in Account Settings.
• Drop down/Pop up menus (Settings, Notifications, Chat, “Hiding” items from the News Feed, live Search results, Friends, Inbox).
• Tabs on the Profile Page (“Wall”, “Info”, etc.).
• The “Applications” menu at the bottom of the page.
• Comment boxes.
• “Delete” and “Cancel” buttons when removing an item from the Wall, “Poke” and “Cancel” buttons in the Poke pop-up.
• The Search entry field/icon.
• Text popups when you rollover “Notifications” and “Chat.”

Rounded corners may or may not be an integral part of Facebook’s “new look”- but unfortunately with the seemingly haphazard way they’re applied nobody can tell. Not only have they not been applied consistently from page to page, they haven’t even been applied consistently from element to element (i.e. Profile pictures).

2. Information overload- As with the previous version of Facebook, the information in the newsfeed is arranged in such a terrible manner that it is not meaningful. There’s just too much text and too many images in too small of a space, and looks more or less like a Twitter feed gone wrong.

3. Text is not a uniform size- Consider the News feed again. The first entry has a user comment in a small font next to an image. Contrast that with the much larger “What’s on your mind” posts next to each person’s name and profile picture. This wouldn’t be so visually unappealing if at least everything was the same size, but on every other page (besides your Wall) the smaller font size remains from the old incarnation of Facebook. The larger font manages to make the News Feed in particular even more confusing because now there isn’t as much contrast between the hyperlinked friend names and their status, err… “Shared” text.

4. Open sections in the left sidebar in Profile- I used to think this was because the page was designed to end at the edge of these sections, but that was because I had the window too small. I find this very distracting, although just a quick glance and your eye doesn’t notice that the right border is not mirrored on the left side.

5. Highlight Bar- Originally I had this under “Overly Complex”, but decided this deserved its own category. What is this thing, other than an abbreviated version of what I get in my News Feed? Why am I being given the same information twice, side by side? Is there even an option to get rid of this? I searched through the Settings but didn’t see an option to do so. In any case, this seems redundant and even more poorly implemented than the News Feed. It just serves as a distraction from what little the News Feed can offer.

6. Image borders- Profile pictures and images associated with events serve as links to whatever page they are representing and do not have borders. However, when someone posts pictures, a couple of them show up in the News Feed with a white space (sort of like a matte board you’d find in a real picture frame) and then a thin border which darkens on rollover. The borderless approach looks a lot better in my opinion, but would it be too much to ask for some consistency in the formatting of images that serve as links?

7. Check boxes in the Inbox- pretty much everything else in Facebook that you interact with has a fancy, styled button (like the “Hide” that appears when you hover over a News Feed entry). I guess the inbox was not deserving of such luxury treatment, as the system default checkboxes remain as a highly inconvenient way of mass-managing your messages.

8. The “Reply” option is gone from the Wall- Now you have to “See Wall-to-Wall” or actually load someone’s profile page to get to a reply box.

9. “Hide” vs. “Remove”- on your Profile page you can “Remove” an item from your Wall. In the News Feed, you “Hide” it. What’s the difference? Why can’t these be the same?

10. Rollover behavior for links- Partially related to the image border issue, rollover behavior for links is also very inconsistent. For some links, like a friend’s name, it’s underlined. For others, like items in the top banner, the background changes color. For still others, nothing happens, like when you hover over over something like “Settings” on your Wall.

11. “Write something about yourself” vs. “What’s on your mind?”- What’s the difference?

12. Nitpicky things- In the profile page, the horizontal line under “Edit My Profile” doesn’t line up with the line under the Wall view options. The comments underneath an individual’s item in the news feed leave a relatively large empty space to the immediate right, especially if there are a lot of comments. Speaking of comments, why are there 2 different comment icons (One can be found in the “Highlights” column, another in the “Notifications” popup menu) ? At least the application icons seem to be fairly uniform, but sometimes they’re links (in the bottom toolbar) and sometimes they’re not (in the “Highlights” column).

While these design shortcomings aren’t a reason to start huge protest groups, run to the media, or delete your account, the seemingly sloppy and piecemeal way in which Facebook implemented their latest revisions to their site layout is not what I want to see from a company that manages terabytes of personal information.

Facebook always seems to polarize the crowd into the “It’s great!” or “It’s creepy!” crowd. What do you think about the design? Are there things I missed?

Technorati Tags: Facebook, design, network, social network, media, friends, connect, CSS, rollover, rounded corners, style, profile picture, News feed, Twitter, Highlights, Applications, Wall, comments

Posted under: Lifestyle, Technology by HP at 04/4/09 9:55 AM