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Facebook’s Change is a Lesson in Interface Design

by Kevin on February 28th, 2008

There are a couple of things I wanted to tackle this week, one was Facebook’s upcoming change to tabs and I wanted to continue talking about interface design and what I have been learning in my class. Thankfully they kind of intersected and allowed me to look at them together.

In case you haven’t heard Facebook this week showed off a tabbed design profile that will help keep the ever expanding and out of control design of the pages in check. With all the applications it was becoming impossible to navigate people’s profiles. Facebook, which has been lauded for having a very clean look to it as compared to MySpace, began to take a beating by social media watchers and users. In a blog post on their developer blog Facebook admitted that they had a problem:

Lately, Facebook profiles have become slower, more cluttered, and somewhat difficult to parse. Over the next few weeks, we’ll roll out a number of improvements to the Facebook profile that are going to make the profile simpler, more relevant, and provide users with a greater degree of control.

Facebook is going to be adding these tabs and essentially making the profiles have two types of interface designs, a global navigation feel for the entire site and a clear entry point setup for the profile. Instead of having a profile that is cluttered users will have these tabs which provide limited options, don’t overwhelm the user, and allow people to explore the point past that. This is the goal of a clear entry point system, which is what google has on their main page.

I applaud Facebook for making this shift, in thinking about the design, use, and navigation of their site they are improving upon the user experience.

Now take a second and evaluate your blog, how is your navigation structure setup?

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