Users hate the new Facebook design. So what’s next?

March 13th started a fury of activity on my Facebook. Everybody who is vocal on my Facebook had something negative to say about its new design. I repeatedly questioned the reasoning behind it and looked for something… anything remotely positive about it.

A quick search resulted in some insights on the goals of the new design.

• Allowing advertisers to better promote their products and services. This article on CIO.com also suggests that the concept of social advertising was not well received by the Facebook users in the recent past. It would be worth watching and finding out if the new design helps overcome that.

• Reacting to the Twitter threat. I have used both Twitter and Facebook and honestly, Facebook grew on me instantly but Twitter never did. After reading this article I think I owe Twitter another chance.

• Making it easy to connect and share information. The Facebook blog has many posts explaining the new designs enhancements with images and examples. Unfortunately all those posts have thousands of user comments; more than 50% of them are negative. Ming Keong Kuan’s comment captures the statistics well. (See image below).

Ming Keong Kuan - "6065 people liked the new Facebook. Assuming that all 11809 comments are negative and posted only once, 66% disliked it. I'm fine with it."

While the chatter around the new design is cooling down my interest in its impact is only growing. I am wondering if this strong criticism from its huge user base is going to impact the future of Facebook. Any guesses?

Insight on user experience: Car rental experience

Last week, as I was driving out of the rental car garage at Minneapolis airport I realized that I did not like the car I had just rented. The windows were getting foggy, it was 36 F and I was still trying to figure out how the vent-control-knob worked. The knob that I found [image 1] was different from what I was used to [image 2]. It had icons on top, instead of around it. It could be pressed and rotated while I was used to only rotating it and it was split in between making me wonder if I needed to be press both sides of it. I tried different permutations and combinations but windows did not clear up. So I decided to roll them down a bit. This was not the interaction I had anticipated. Mentally I had Xed the check box for renting this car again.

Image 1 – Rental car		Image 2 – Current car

Switching between my user and experience-designer hats I realized that as a user, I did not know what my critical tasks were or should have been that day. I had walked out of the rental car office to stall #404, opened the door, secured my portable navigation system, adjusted the mirrors and was ready to go. Adjusting the air-conditioning did not occur as a critical task. Maybe traveling from a warmer climate had something to do with it.

This experience made me wonder if the issues I faced could have been uncovered during an interview prior to the incident especially since I did not know what I was getting into. I speculated if I would have retained the details of the incident and thus doubted the extent to which they could be uncovered during an interview after the incident. It solidified my conviction in using contextual inquires and observation to uncover key scenarios and consequently design better user experiences.