Some Facebook users aren’t fond of website’s new face
SAN FRANCISCO ó Facebook’s new face is drawing frowns from some of its users.
They’re grousing about a spanking new redesign intended to unclutter their profiles on the social network. Several groups requesting a return to the old design have surfaced, including one with 1 million members.
Facebook has shifted millions of users to its new design in a bid to draw more members and advertisers to a cleaner interface. Facebook’s torrid growth ó it has added 90 million members the past two years ó has put it in a prime position to vie for an estimated $2 billion market for social-networking ads this year.
But the new look has rankled some. “It’s really difficult to read, and I don’t like the tabs that you have to go through to see the whole profile. I hate it,” says Jenny Smelyanets, 22, a public relations specialist in Palo Alto, Calif.
The facelift includes partitioning members’ personal profiles into different areas of the site and offering more tools to make it easier to share information and photos. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the changes, although for the better, might alienate some of the more than 100 million active users.
Facebook made the changes over several months and has left it up to individuals to decide when they want to switch over. So far, more than 80 million people have the new Facebook.
The process started in February, when Facebook launched a preview page to solicit user feedback. By late July, users had the ability to opt into the new design, says Mark Slee, a product manager at Facebook. The company began migrating everyone on Sept. 10 and will finish the task by the end of the month.
Despite some dissatisfaction, few users are expected to defect.
“Change is good, and change makes us angry,” says Ben Parr, a blogger who started a protest group about the site’s “news feed” feature two years ago but is fine with the new Facebook look.
Redesigns of tech hangouts typically elicit hand-wringing from loyal users. When Facebook introduced news feeds, critics called them an invasion of privacy. The feature ó which outlines profile changes, upcoming events and birthdays, for instance ó is now one of the most popular.
“There is backlash to change, simple as that,” says Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research. “There was to news feeds and Beacon (Facebook’s advertising system that sparked privacy concerns). This time, Facebook gave users an opt-out option. They handled it as well as they could have.”
A redesign at social network MySpace met with minimal criticism when it was unveiled in June. It enhanced functions of its home page, a video player and Profile Editor, which lets users customize their profiles. Since then, its number of unique users and the amount of time spent on the site are up. The site has 122 million members, up 2.7 million.
“Everything we did was shown to users six months to a year before they were finalized, and we were very sensitive to their input,” says Steve Pearman, MySpace’s senior vice president of product strategy.
Categories