New facebook interface fails usability test

Over the weekend I was re-organizing my home office and came across Steve Krug’s book entitled “don’t make me think” – a common sense approach to web usability.

The usability team (assuming there is one) at facebook should make this mandatory reading before implementing their next interface update.

The basic premise of the book is that websites that are the most usable are the ones where the user’s natural intuition is sufficient to navigate through a site and find what they are looking for. Overly designed or function driven interfaces generally fail basic usability tests.

The facebook team has been so concerned about the rising popularity of twitter that they’ve updated your home page to mimic the flow and constant update feed that twitter has.  They’ve even changed the status bar to say “What’s on your mind” and changed the publish button to say “share.”

I like the core idea of making your facebook homepage a “lifestream” of all your friends activities that is updated live. Facebook’s “social graph” means there is inherently richer & deeper content to stream and given they already have critical mass the move was a smart one given twitter’s rising popularity.

What i don’t like is that there is no focus on the landing page.

Facebook recently updated their social ad system (the little ads on the right pane) to incorporate events and other friend activity – including friend suggestions. By sandwiching social ads with relevant updates from your social graph, they hoped to increase clickthrough rates of their ads as they are still among the poorest performing in the industry.  They now call this section “Highlights.”

Highlights on their own and in the context of the previous homepage design was a neat idea – but in the context of the current site design, all we get is clutter, a loss of focus and a loss of visual hierarchy.

Although it’s neat that I can now self-select other feeds to add to my facebook live stream (like flickr, youtube, delicious,digg etc…), it would have been more user friendly to incorporate these personalization options in the left navigation pane on the home page instead of hiding them on my personal page under settings.

Interested in interface design and usability? Here are a few other books I’ve dusted off this weekend that are worth a read:

• Web reDesign 2.0 – Workflow that works by Kelly Goto & Emily Cotler
• Information Architecture for the web – Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville
• Designing Interfaces – Jenifer Tidwell
• TOG on Interface – Tognazzini (an oldie & but still relevant one from my interface design days at Cornell)