Facebook: The Other White Meat

As soon as I read the prompt for this week’s blog post, I realized that the website I, and probably most of us, check the most every day would be perfect. It’s addictive, it’s interactive, and, unfortunately, sometimes it’s a key to my social life. Yes, of course, I am talking about Facebook.

The overall design of Facebook is VITAL to the way it is used and the way its users interact with the myriad of content available on it. In fact, the design of Facebook has been a hot topic over the past year or so, when the executives made the decision to permanently switch to what was known as “the new Facebook” in September. In changing the design of Facebook, the creators wanted to give its users “a new, cleaner, and simpler design,” according to an article from newsfactor.com.

Perhaps you can recall what the original Facebook looked like when they first allowed high schoolers?

Then, they added the “mini-feed,” which allowed users to see what a person had been doing, who they had been talking to, and what they had commented on.


Facebook adopted the “News Feed” soon after, which made some users feel like too much content was being displayed. Everything anyone did on Facebook was thrown into the News Feed in a seemingly haphazardly way, although it was very organized.


With the addition of first high schoolers and then everyone in the world being able to join a network on Facebook, there became a need for more organization. A lot (and I mean A LOT) of people complained, protested, and made Facebook groups to stop the change from “old Facebook” to “new Facebook,” but the switch was made anyway. People complained about the Wall that used to display only wall posts to your profile being combined with picture comments and status updates, along with the sporadic yet annoying application notifications. There were gripes about the tabs on the top of the home page, about the ads, and so many other things that people don’t like that I just don’t feel like talking about here.

Personally, I like the “new Facebook” design. Maybe it’s because it isn’t really “new” anymore, and I’ve become accustomed to looking at it so often every day. However, I can see the different types of principles that we are learning about in class being applied every day. As Ellen Lupton says on page 76 of Thinking with Type,

“The dissolution of writing is most extreme in the realm of the Web, where distracted readers safeguard their time and prize function over form. This debt of restlessness is owed not to the essential nature of computer monitors, but to the new behaviors engendered by the Internet, a place of searching and finding, scanning and mining. The reader, having toppled the author’s seat of power during the twentieth century, now ails and lags, replaced by the dominant subject of our own era: the user, a figure whose scant attention is our most coveted commodity.”

Graphic designers today are constantly forced to trade in elaborate, intricate designs that work so well on paper when they are using the Internet. There is a need for an understandable visual hierarchy when navigating on the web because, as we’ve heard time and time again, the designer’s job is to make it so the reader does not have to work to find what they need. I feel that Facebook succeeded in doing this when they switched to their current layout. The information that you want is listed in tabs on the top, which allows the user to go straight to “photos” or “status updates” if that is what they care about (see image above). On the user’s profile, they have the “wall,” which is the default, then the “info” and “boxes” tabs (see image above). The latter provides a cleanliness that the older Facebook was lacking by confining all the (sometimes useful but mostly stupid) applications onto one page. Users can alter their settings to show or hide as much information as they want and also to alter their profiles and homepages to show what they want to see the most in the most conspicuous spots. The engineers of Facebook have created a design that looks modern (with the uniform sans serif font) and creates a strong hierarchy while directing users to what they want the most with ease.

However, that is just my opinion. I probably would not have said the same things last summer as the switch was occurring, before I began this class. What do you think about the structure and hierarchy of Facebook? It’s all logical, yes, but are there problems with the design?

BONUS:

"The impatience of the digital reader arises from culture, not from the essential character of display technologies."

I feel that this quote has been said over and over again in a thousand different ways, but the meaning isn’t any less true no matter how many times you hear it. Our culture today is obsessed with now and no one wants to waste time to, god forbid, actually search for something on the Internet. Google is the most popular search engine because of the way the developers search the billions of pages on the Internet to find what they software sees as the most helpful choice. Normally, that database is right. I agree with the quote from Lupton that I quoted up above when she claims it is not the fact that we are looking at a monitor that makes us more anxious, it is the culture. Because there is so much to find on the Internet, and so many resources are at our fingertips when we are on the web, we don’t want to sit around and look for one thing at a time. I have four or five tabs open on Firefox at any given moment so while I stop one search I can start another—that’s just the way I operate on the Internet.

This trend of being constantly active while on the Internet is not slowing down; it is only speeding up. Web designers will need to listen to feedback from the user to learn where they have glitches and then make edits. Users are the most important resource because they are the consumer the designer wants to please.