What Facebook’s redesign says about Facebook
Two weeks later, almost everybody still hates Facebook’s redesign, which tossed aside algorithmic relevance in favor of immediacy. Even Facebook employees reportedly don’t like it. Many of my Facebook contacts have said or implied they’re visiting less.
Relax, says Slate’s Farhad Manjoo. Users hate every site redesign. And then they get used to it. And then they forget how the site used to look.
That’s usually true. But sometimes sites redesign themselves out of relevance. (See UrbanBaby for a recent example.)
I don’t think Facebook’s redesign has doomed them. It’s still a fun and useful utility with impressive network effects, and high switching costs (the prospect of re-setting your network on another service). To their credit, they’ve demonstrated nimble action on user revulsion towards past initiatives (Beacon, or their recent ToS changes). And they’re demonstrating again that they’re going to restore some of what this last redesign destroyed.
But what’s most galling about this Facebook redesign – as well as the Beacon and ToS fiascos – is what it says about the immaturity of Facebook the company. In spite of 175 million users, it acts like a trailer-based startup. It doesn’t understand that its every move has consequences, and recreating its primary product is serious business.
Did they do any bucket testing? Did they get feedback from their power users? Did they revise, re-test, try to make sense of how their changes would impact user behavior? Or did they just feel some Twitter heat and decide they want to be like that?
At this point, the evidence strongly favors the last conclusion above. CEO Zuckerburg now famously told his employees that “disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers,” which is such a wildly false assertion that his board (he has a board, right?) should give him a little ass kicking.
For the record, I don’t hate the new Twitterish look of Facebook, although I find it less useful than the version that preceded it. And Twitter feels clunky and faddish. Nobody should be in a rush to copy it; they should be in a rush to improve it radically. (Wouldn’t be hard.)
Mostly, I’m just shocked how Facebook treats its product like it’s still in alpha, and its customers like they just need to shut up and go along for the ride. This is how you kill the goose before it even goes golden.