Facebook has posted more details about the upcoming redesign of user profiles, which were supposed to launch early April but are apparently now close at hand.
Profiles will be broken down into 5 main tabs: Feed, Wall, Info, Photos, and “Boxes”. The feed tab appears to contain the News Feed as we know it, except with three new size standards: one line, short, and full.
There’s also a bit of confusion between this Feed tab and the new Wall one. Apparently users will be able to post items to friends’ Feed tabs (and their own) using a new Publisher tool. This is described as meant to replace the old wall attachments feature, so it appears as though the Wall will revert to plain text posts and no longer allow for rich media. But it will also incorporate all mini-feed items somehow.
Some suggest that the new Publisher feature will allow for FriendFeed-like conversations through comments, but the official documentation doesn’t make any reference to such capabilities. Screen shots showing comments appear to be only wall-to-wall conversations.
The “Boxes” tab will be where all the current application profile boxes are quarantined, er, showcased. While 5 tabs will show by default, users will be able to add their own tabs that display canvas-like pages for their favorite apps. This appears to be a trade-off Facebook is imposing on developers: isolate their profile boxes in a “boxes” tab but compensate them by allowing for more prominent, full-view pages. That said, Facebook will also be allowing up to 5 app boxes to show up across all tabs in the left-hand column (but they’ll have a severe height restriction).
Unfortunately Facebook has yet to release any screenshots of the new design except for the rather uninformative one above.
More information at Inside Facebook.
It sounds good! Can’t wait to see that
!
But what if we Facebook users don’t WANT this? What if we’re perfectly happy with it as it is? Will this be voluntary and not mandatory?
All questions that concern me…
Facebook has ‘jumped the shark’…
Unfortunately, facebook is continuing to screw up their redesign by pandering to the lowest common denominator.
First, same people that hated the mini-feed are now complaining about their wall being integrated into their feed. (They’re the same people who now love the feed.) Except, it is a feed itself. It’s data accumulated over a period of time and displayed chronologically. Thus, it makes perfect sense to combine them. The feature that has always been missing but facebook hasn’t realized is that the FEED should be filterable. That is, it should be able to be filtered to display just the WALL posts or just RELATIONSHIPS. Anything that the feed is composed of should be able to be sorted to ONLY that type of data. Instead, we have this separate wall tab which is useless clutter.
Second, they have problems with their naming of tabs. There are two problems here. First, “Info” doesn’t describe anything very specifically. It should be “Profile” because it is, of course, a “Profile Redesign.” And the “Boxes” tab is tentative as they state, but why they called it that at all is beyond me. It describes how the content is laid out not what appears there. It’s like calling the profile tab “columns” because it appears in columns. It should be “Apps”. Plain and simple and it describes the CONTENT of the tab.
Third, this raises the question of personalization. Should the user be able to call whatever tab s/he wants? However, this has only one answer: no. Simply put, this is the beginning to a slippery slope to the user being able to customize the color, links, design, and ultimately you end up with a MySpace like portal of unreadability and putrid designs that make it what it is now. So, they should not allow naming.
However, naming is only one problem facing the tabs. The next is how many tabs can you have. Obviously, there has to be a limit or else way to siphon off excess tabs because otherwise it will devolve into something that contradicts their current goals with this redesign.
Further, the “Apps” could contain all applications. But then people wonder about applications they truly care about. Charity applications or something like this. Then people want them displayed prominently in a DIFFERENT tab. Chaos ensues.
So, they really need to stop pandering and go back to what they had originally. Keep the original tabbed interface, keep the wall and feed merged, add a filter for the feed, and put all applications on one tab.
The reason it’s taking so long is because there’s such a debate raging and because they keep pandering and taking more and more feedback. There comes a time when the feedback needs to be shut off.
Well I am all for it if it keeps the screen clean, reason 1 why I do not like my space (gives me a headache). Will be interesting to see. Thanks for update.
Thanks for the info on FB UIX changes coming soon. This is a welcome change in Profile design. Can’t wait… thanks! Let’s just hope the re-design preserves all of my FB “permissions” relating to Feeds, Apps, Walls, etc.
@smbeebe
They should start by making sure the site is up and running..
it’s been almost 2 hours since the messages worked well. I get timed out 4 out of 5 try!
It’ll still look like Windows 3.1, boxes. What do you expect from Harvard?
I don’t think such a dramatic redesign is needed.
I think people should be able to set a filters, which describes how they wish to view profiles.
You should be able to filter out applications, so that if a lot of my friends have a specific application, I can block that application, so that it doesn’t appear in my friends profile, when I look at their profile. There would also be a tab, to easily unfilter the profile temporarily.
There should also be a way to see which applications are “recently popular” with my friends. I’d want to know, which application was installed the most times over the last week, by my friends?
Can’t leave well enough alone. I choose FB over Myspace because of the cleaner feel and look of the profiles. I hope it stays that way or I will be looking to network in a new space.
There are plenty of other photos of the redesign. See http://www.face...;id=21073243776 for official-but-not-final takes on some other parts of it.
In addition to the integration points mentioned, apps can create tabs of their own for full-column content (just like how Photos has its own tab in the article picture). All these integration points are user-optional, of course.
I think the idea of this redesign is to architecturally cut the wind from the sails of a handful of apps. Facebook would prefer that platform apps be, frankly, useful, complete experiences deserving of full tabs, like Photos or Groups or Events are. Trivial apps (most poke or gift apps, e.g.) clutter profiles and dilute user attention. By relegating them to a non-main profile page, they’ll be less engaging to the people who choose to interact with them in the first place. Also, Facebook would like to exert dominance over the popular Wall replacements. SuperWall and FunWall are difficult to moderate, difficult to regulate, mostly annoying, and take engagement (and tracking and metrics!) away from Facebook’s Wall, which simply cannot be put in a better position in the current Profile (but it would be a universally bad move on Facebook’s part to shut those apps out).
ditto @2. sounds like top down hubris to me.
Sounds interesting… I hope it is a positive change for all!
M-
It sounds interesting, but facebook users wank these changes?
Facebook looks good. They don’t need a redesign.
Keep it simple
Bottom line here is that there are new challenges for apps on facebook. These challenges are going to be a double edged sword. The world continues to evolve and this is the first major change that we have seen from a design perspective.
This just means it’s time to go back to the drawing board for many apps to leverage what is coming with new iterations.
The mini-feed changes are one of the most interesting changes as rights are changing.
I have said it before and I will say it again. “for better or worse, the only constant on facebook is change”.
http://facerevi...hanges-detailed
until Facebook stops accusing me of being a cybersquatter, they suck: http://u.phoreo.com/zg.pdf
I like the term “quarantined” used in the article. Thats definitely the right word for this situation.
Facebook!!! It’s the Web 2.0 that wants to be Web 1.0. Facebook needs to share pictures and that’s it. This is a hunk a junk.
Well, if you were a UI designer at Facebook, wouldn’t you want YOUR design to be used on Facebook? They can’t sit just around all day. Change happens because people have jobs. Deal with it.
So you grow up on Myspace apps, use Facebook apps in college, then you grow up and register a domain and install Wordpress, then you die blogging.