Good Visual Design without Good Interaction Design = Crummy Facebook Redesign
Updated: I wrote a comment over at MediaPost and realized that was really the heart of what I wanted to say here.
“Facebook keeps trying to redesign that shell as though IT were the value that users keep returning for. It’s not – users are returning for THEIR friends and photos and updates. You can’t test-drive a data-driven site with fake data. It’s a lot messier to put the real thing out there and let people play with it – but it’s the only hope of getting truly representative feedback.” (my comment on Listen Up, Marketers: The Focus Group is Dead)
Last week, I previewed the upcoming Facebook redesign, and my first impression was: it looks fine. Visually, the alignment looked clean – the preview image was easy to scan. I liked the concept of the invitations over on the left-hand side where they took up less space. I went so far as to think, good, they’re going to avoid the complaints and unhappiness that their last redesign caused… until I started using it. It just doesn’t “work”.
The Facebook redesign may have looked fine as a static mockup, but Facebook isn’t a brochure-ware site, it’s data-driven. Without a unique user’s data, it’s just an empty shell.
I’ve heard quite a few people complain that the new design is “ugly”. I know design is subjective, but respectfully, I say: you’re wrong.
The new Facebook isn’t a visual design problem. It’s an interaction design problem. You may not particularly like the bigger fonts or the rounded corners, but if the interaction still worked, you’d hardly notice them.
What does it mean for interaction design to “work”? It means that the things your website allows users to do aligns with the things your users want to do. It means that you’ve watched the way users work through a process and you’ve mirrored that process in your application. This mirroring is usually what people mean when they describe a site or application as “intuitive”.
“Intuitive” isn’t limited to applications, either:
“What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research.”-Neil Campbell, president, Tropicana, North America to The New York Times upon pulling its revamped packaging in February after consumer complaints.
I’m sure Tropicana showed the new branding to plenty of sample consumers. But did they do it within the interaction of actually buying orange juice?
I’m not a regular juice purchaser, but after reading that NYTimes article, I went to my Safeway and scanned for Tropicana on the shelf. It took me quite a few seconds to locate it, because the new branding looks like every other orange juice out there. Think of a distracted mom, with a kid in the cart, trying to quickly grab her family’s favorite orange juice. Do you want to put obstacles in the path of that task?
The previous Facebook design respected that there were two modes of using the site – quick scan and killing time. The two views of the News Feed supported these modes: a selective stream of news with a one-click ability to adjust how much/little news you got from an individual, and an unadultered stream of everything your friends were doing in real-time. The new redesign merged these into a combined page with neither selectivity nor real-time updates. Now neither group is happy.
It’s easy to dismiss people complaining about Facebook as college kids with too much time on their hands. Users DO hate change, and sometimes you may need to force it upon them. But you need to understand how change impacts their interaction with you and your product. I’ve heard several people say, “wow, I was so productive at work today because the new Facebook just doesn’t interest me anymore.” Good for their employers. Bad for Facebook.
-->
