March 25, 2009
SOUND OFF: Facebook Flinches on Redesign
So Facebook has flinched and is tweaking its new redesign.
Why did everyone see this coming? And more importantly, why did Facebook do it?
When we last checked in on Facebook's changes a few weeks back, I was only half-joking that predictable outrage and uproar would follow.
But then it did. According to one poll on Facebook, of the more than 800,000 respondents, about 5 percent gave the changes a thumbs up.
Last night Chris Cox, Facebook's director of product, announced on the company's blog that they were "responding to feedback" and would be making some changes...to the changes. That includes reducing the noise from applications in streams, enabling auto updating, adding photo tags to the news stream and generally giving people more control over their news stream on their homepage.
This all started because Facebook wanted to make those changes to the stream (some said in order to fight back Twitter). So why did they make the quarter-about face? Here's Cox:
"With the recent home page changes, we're trying to present the right balance between what's happening right now and what's interesting over a longer period of time. We realize that both are important and getting them both right is crucial for the product to work."
So Facebook's just trying to be a responsive company, give the people what they want, which is good. But what about what Facebook The Company wants? They obviously made the changes for some reason, and from their previous experience with changes, they knew there was bound to be some backlash.
Facebook seems to have what is becoming a familiar issue with online communities - where is the line between what the people want, and what the creators want? In building any social network there's a point where the creators have to give it over to the members and see where the wisdom of the crowd takes them (something that was discussed at SXSW Interactive last week.). That's not just a good business strategy but a formula for creating a robust community. The only problem is that for the creators (or owners) of that community, that often means there is no way of knowing "where these people are taking my baby."
Still, anyone who has spent time on sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube or Metafilter, knows there are community standards and terms of service, which means creators know there are some times they need to put their foot down.
So the question really is - where and how do you draw the line between controlling the destiny of a product/community/website and letting the people dictate it for you?
Consider some of the links below and SOUND OFF
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Posted by at 01:02 PM
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Far be it from me to critique a company valued at several billion-OK-million dollars, but their overall business strategy does seem to be a bit ass backwards. They roll out a redesign, everyone complains, they change it; they roll out a new terms of service, everyone complains, they change it; they roll out another redesign ... . Why not cut out all the crap and just ask for user feedback from the beginning?
It's not like there's any real reason to implement that kind of change (right now), but eventually there will be a true revolt at the same time some Facebook knock off is starting to get big. If that happens, Facebook's perceived monopoly will be over real quick.
Posted by
Paul BalcerakMarch 25, 2009 03:38 PM
here here, Paul! The other online community that I love so much, Catster.com, works so well b/c it asks for feedback BEFORE they implement it. What FB execs need to remember is that not everyone who use it are computer literate and can handle so many serious changes at once!
Posted by
StephanieMarch 25, 2009 05:12 PM
One of the the big changes I don't like is that I can't control the size of my posted items/notes or for that, anything else. As a blogger, I loved being able to expand the size of my imported note so people could read the entire article right from my profile. Now that Facebook is trying to do the "Twitter thang", I probably don't get as much traffic. One click can make a difference.
Posted by
Dylan MartinMarch 25, 2009 05:33 PM
A web designer can't ask for user feedback, I mean you can, but 99% of the time users don't know what they want, and if you ask any two for an opinion they'll give you contradictory opinions; so there's no point asking users.
Facebook is a fad, like MySpace was a fad, like all of the fads that preceded it. The strategy should be to come up with the next fad, in the form of a new site, and then -invite- all of the Facebook users to use it and migrate their accounts and info over. If they don't like it, they can go back to the old site.
It still won't satisfy everyone, but there's never any chance that that will happen anyway.
Posted by A. Reader
March 26, 2009 08:35 AM
A. Reader - I disagree that a web designer can't ask for user feedback. There's a lot of research you can do in the pre-design stage, and more importantly a lot of good information can be gathered by user experience testing before releasing a site.
Yes you shouldn't be polling the public on every little color change - things that are completely subjective...but for major feature updates and usability changes its hard to believe such a well funded company doesn't have labs to pre-test those roll outs.
I do however agree completely that Facebook is just a fad (I never joined knowing full well it would be and I could just wait for the new big thing) and you are totally correct that the company better have an R&D department working on the newest greatest website or they'll be scratching their heads and wondering where the advertisers went when another company launches it.
Posted by ac
March 26, 2009 09:14 AM
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