Visually pretty, but the grid is completely non-functional. I don't know where to start looking to get at the information I go to Facebook to find. The other pages look better, but still seem to be a summation of current design trends rather than any sort of innovative new way to display the information (which is fine, but not interesting to me).
I also agree that it looks a lot nicer because of the high-end stock photos.
Edit: scrolling down further, there are some other UI refreshes that I do think improve the experience overall - the calendar and photo album views stood out to me. But I think it's important to use ugly people with weird names in your designs to gauge how it will actually look in production! The dark theme on pages, for example, looks very clean with Apple and Adobe as featured, but I imagine will look pretty dreary to stare at all day.
>But I think it's important to use ugly people with weird names in your designs to gauge how it will actually look in production!
I .. I'm not sure if you're serious, but that is either smart, insulting or both. It's true that cleavage and nice smiles were there, but noting it as a non-production look, - that's a bit bleak.
The design looks great. I can't wait to hear my friends opinions as I don't use Facebook on regular basis.
>> but still seem to be a summation of current design trends rather than any sort of innovative new way to display the information
>> I also agree that it looks a lot nicer because of the high-end stock photos.
Exactly. This looks like a first-year design school project for these, and so many other reasons.
This design would fall apart without visually simple photography that tailor fits to the grid. The right way to approach a redesign would be to collect an aggregate of typical facebook photos, and use them as examples.
Exactly my thoughts. It's funny it ends with "lets focus on a functional and engaging user experience" - that's exactly what Facebook does right now.
In terms of graphic design, it's a huge improvement, not so for usability/ux. The timeline is chaotic. Small type. Navigation/content areas undefined, too much layering.
Perhaps I'm in the minority here but I never go to facebook to find specific information, it's more of just a perusal of crap to waste time. In the regard I believe a grid would be an adequate design to move to as it's more apt to visually scanning items which is typically what I do now. The only caveat I can see is that items in a straight line lend the eye to snapping back to the original position. Not sure if a staggered setup would fix that issue or if slight archs would help.
This navigation and grid layout looks ironically similar to the new and redesigned MySpace. When screenshots of the new MySpace were first revealed, there was lots of hype and praise for the new and aesthetically sharp designs. But now that users are able to access and use the product, haven't heard much more besides the usability being poor and product being an example of feature overkill. I would predict a similar result if Facebook were to implement this
totally agree, this has nothing to do with the function of facebook. The designers should follow more Dieter Rams 10 principle and less Design trends :)
This seems like a pretty common mistake among designers. As a matter of fact, Facebook made this same mistake themselves not too long ago. When they release the "cover photo" feature, they showed off how great it looked when applied to a bunch of professional designers' profiles. When normal people started uploading low-res, vertically oriented images, it was instantly clear how silly of an idea the cover photo is.
Facebook seems to acknowledge this since now if you view a person's profile, it automatically scrolls past the cover photo so you don't even see most of it.
I just uploaded a version with some crap instead [1], and it still works fine. These Metro styled tiles looks great whatever content you put in, the problem is the space wasted to achieve this look.
I won't speak for anyone else, but better friends would certainly improve my Facebook experience. Unfortunately, I would be unlikely to improve theirs similarly.
The main problem I have with the stock photos is that they were all picked to match the color scheme. How is it going to look with random photos and clashing colors?
This doesn't take into account the fact that not all photos are stock photos, not all monitors are good at rendering fine serif fonts on dark backgrounds, some users need affordances for buttons and interactors, and that the fluid grid with no spacing whatsoever between content areas makes some information nearly impossible to scan.
For years, before Behance redesigned their layout (which I think was sometime last year), the way that it sorted projects when you stumbled across the site was by popularity, so the popular ones just kept getting more popular. A project called the "Facebook Facelift" from 2009 (http://www.behance.net/gallery/Facebook-Facelift/314489) was (is?) the most popular project on the site, and is equally thorough with a video to boot. I'm going to take a guess that the designer here was looking to piggyback on the success that project had, rather than create an honestly useable/consistent design (not that this is a justification of how poor some of the concepts are, but rather a reason why someone would spend so much time working on something as tedious as this despite the UX issues it creates).
Aside from the obvious "this looks like the new myspace and windows 8 mashed together", I would be curious to see how this concept would fare with what people ACTUALLY post to Facebook. People with no concept of image quality or resolution. People I call my friends :)
They weren't thorough enough to really bother with much of the text anywhere, given the amount of lorem ipsum and many-gendered John Smiths.
Content wasn't really top of the list of priorities, it seems, which I think is a bit of a mistake if you're trying to 're-design' something driven entirely by content.
Despite that, this concept is pretty much all about an in-your-face layout of pretty pictures that looks incredibly difficult to make any real sense of, and might as well be a collage of 2013's cargo-cult trends-to-come.
I scrolled up and down for about 15 seconds trying to figure out if this screenshot was supposed to be a concatenation of multiple Walls or if it was one long wall view (I think it's the latter):
That kind of visual confusion is a bad thing. I understand the desire to move away from lines and boxes within boxes. But elegant lines should not blur functionality.
Also, how would this design look when trying to accomodate the many kinds of statuses that do not have banner-size-worthy photos? My guess is not very well.
Your last point is a huge problem with the Google+ Android app. I like the normal g+ website, but on the mobile app it assumes that every single post is just a pretty picture. That app is a usability nightmare because they failed to grasp how people actually use social networks (which is strange since the design on the normal website seems to understand this just fine).
So on a somewhat random note, I wonder when it will become true that this sort of thing will ensure the design never gets used. My reasoning here is based on watching the evolution of the entertainment industry, and industry lawyers.
So it used to be someone could say "Wow, wouldn't it be funny if Gillgan had a secret crush on Mary Anne and the skipper found out and used it against him?" and some writer for the show might say "Yeah, that would be funny, and maybe include a variation of that in the show."
Except there came a time where the show would air, that "someone" would show up, lawyers in tow, and demand compensation for using their idea. Which, after some pretty amazing litigation, the studios paid, and which resulted in pretty much any idea that was ever shared with a writer, or person associated with any show, was put on the list of 'things we can never do for fear of being sued.'
I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this already frankly.
I mean, Facebook isn't that revolutionary in terms of a site - there's a user with a login, there are comments, there are pictures. A demo site wouldn't need a scalable infrastructure to show off these ideas.
I'm just not so sure that some of the site controls would be possible in a browser. It's very tablet-y with controls that we are accustomed to in our phones and pads but not on a desktop. Also, it's very horizontal, which isn't typically very friendly on handhelds.
"nice" to look at, absolutely terrible to scan. I don't know where to begin and the 'noise levels' on every element is pretty much the same, making me feel very lost. Imagine a layman using this.
This is all very nice from a design point of view. But from a User Experience point of view, it's horrible. Each screen is totally different, there's absolutely no consistency between views.
I would like for things to go back to minimalist and simple. After all, the human brain can concentrate only on one thing at a time, so why show 20 different things on a page, when you could make the experience so much better with just what's essential for you in that very moment?
Facebook is a social network where you can view info about what your friends are doing. A good UX needs to do only that, and nothing more.
I cant understand how this design type is liked so much. I find the whole "flat" thing confusing and counter intuitive, and these days not exactly new. Given the title, I was hoping for something original.
Notice how there are no ads in the layout.
The ads are often what make a layout tricky, as is providing a reliable degradation for low-end browsers and computers.
[+] [-] Firehed|13 years ago|reply
I also agree that it looks a lot nicer because of the high-end stock photos.
Edit: scrolling down further, there are some other UI refreshes that I do think improve the experience overall - the calendar and photo album views stood out to me. But I think it's important to use ugly people with weird names in your designs to gauge how it will actually look in production! The dark theme on pages, for example, looks very clean with Apple and Adobe as featured, but I imagine will look pretty dreary to stare at all day.
[+] [-] risratorn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianfryer|13 years ago|reply
Came here to say this. "Eye candy" != easy to use.
[+] [-] wildmXranat|13 years ago|reply
I .. I'm not sure if you're serious, but that is either smart, insulting or both. It's true that cleavage and nice smiles were there, but noting it as a non-production look, - that's a bit bleak.
The design looks great. I can't wait to hear my friends opinions as I don't use Facebook on regular basis.
[+] [-] huskyr|13 years ago|reply
Here's an earlier (2006!) redesign by Information Architects (iA). I think this is a lot cleaner and solves the information overload problem better.
[+] [-] feverishaaron|13 years ago|reply
>> I also agree that it looks a lot nicer because of the high-end stock photos.
Exactly. This looks like a first-year design school project for these, and so many other reasons.
This design would fall apart without visually simple photography that tailor fits to the grid. The right way to approach a redesign would be to collect an aggregate of typical facebook photos, and use them as examples.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|13 years ago|reply
In terms of graphic design, it's a huge improvement, not so for usability/ux. The timeline is chaotic. Small type. Navigation/content areas undefined, too much layering.
[+] [-] methodin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deusebio|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davecyen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnny_reilly|13 years ago|reply
Both funny to read and true as well!
[+] [-] mromanuk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lominming|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] functionspace|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JungleGymSam|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnriot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_bear|13 years ago|reply
Facebook seems to acknowledge this since now if you view a person's profile, it automatically scrolls past the cover photo so you don't even see most of it.
[+] [-] tangue|13 years ago|reply
http://imgur.com/H9Tri
[+] [-] aeflash|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeformed|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prteja11|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ladon86|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaliblack|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TommyDANGerous|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jblock|13 years ago|reply
This is impossible to use.
This doesn't take into account the fact that not all photos are stock photos, not all monitors are good at rendering fine serif fonts on dark backgrounds, some users need affordances for buttons and interactors, and that the fluid grid with no spacing whatsoever between content areas makes some information nearly impossible to scan.
[+] [-] mnicole|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnmurch|13 years ago|reply
I know I hate them as much as you do, yet still buy them, but keep in mind that ad integration should be not only important with design but a must.
Just my $0.02 :)
[+] [-] mediacrisis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unreal37|13 years ago|reply
And this redesign will probably work across tablets and phones too, as everything is "big" and "tablety".
But I would not want my Facebook profile to turn into a Metro UI-esque photo collage lacking detail or order.
[+] [-] FuzzyDunlop|13 years ago|reply
They weren't thorough enough to really bother with much of the text anywhere, given the amount of lorem ipsum and many-gendered John Smiths.
Content wasn't really top of the list of priorities, it seems, which I think is a bit of a mistake if you're trying to 're-design' something driven entirely by content.
Despite that, this concept is pretty much all about an in-your-face layout of pretty pictures that looks incredibly difficult to make any real sense of, and might as well be a collage of 2013's cargo-cult trends-to-come.
[+] [-] danso|13 years ago|reply
http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles14/398559/projects/65046...
That kind of visual confusion is a bad thing. I understand the desire to move away from lines and boxes within boxes. But elegant lines should not blur functionality.
Also, how would this design look when trying to accomodate the many kinds of statuses that do not have banner-size-worthy photos? My guess is not very well.
[+] [-] the_bear|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
So it used to be someone could say "Wow, wouldn't it be funny if Gillgan had a secret crush on Mary Anne and the skipper found out and used it against him?" and some writer for the show might say "Yeah, that would be funny, and maybe include a variation of that in the show."
Except there came a time where the show would air, that "someone" would show up, lawyers in tow, and demand compensation for using their idea. Which, after some pretty amazing litigation, the studios paid, and which resulted in pretty much any idea that was ever shared with a writer, or person associated with any show, was put on the list of 'things we can never do for fear of being sued.'
I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this already frankly.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|13 years ago|reply
https://new.myspace.com/play [Video]
[+] [-] xpose2000|13 years ago|reply
1) It feels too dark. Dark is fine, but there doesn't seem to be enough contrast to even it out.
2) The news grid is too hard to follow. Not sure where a new story begins and ends.
3) You forgot about advertisements in these mockups. Ads can't be an afterthought. Especially for a public company.
[+] [-] timme|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdonelli|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zimahl|13 years ago|reply
I mean, Facebook isn't that revolutionary in terms of a site - there's a user with a login, there are comments, there are pictures. A demo site wouldn't need a scalable infrastructure to show off these ideas.
I'm just not so sure that some of the site controls would be possible in a browser. It's very tablet-y with controls that we are accustomed to in our phones and pads but not on a desktop. Also, it's very horizontal, which isn't typically very friendly on handhelds.
[+] [-] sergiotapia|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sktrdie|13 years ago|reply
I would like for things to go back to minimalist and simple. After all, the human brain can concentrate only on one thing at a time, so why show 20 different things on a page, when you could make the experience so much better with just what's essential for you in that very moment?
Facebook is a social network where you can view info about what your friends are doing. A good UX needs to do only that, and nothing more.
[+] [-] alan_cx|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spauka|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benguild|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanbrown|13 years ago|reply