The new Facebook design looks like one of the busiest interfaces I've seen in a while. It immediately reminded me of the Yahoo! homepage back when... well, when it was too busy. Yet somehow, the Facebook homepage makes sense, doesn't feel too overwhelming and is easily navigable and parse-able.
I think there are two things going on here; one is that they did a fairly good job following basic Gestalt principles of perception to clearly chunk out the layout and establish hierarchy. Two, I think our brains are becoming more accustomed to processing much more visual information. It's been suggested by new neurological research that the way the brain understands complex concepts is through established neurological frameworks, meaning the brain forms neural circuits which define a specific conceptual framework. For example if I say "Mystery novel" your brain already has an established idea/preconception of the structure of that concept. When you read the actual novel, you'll be fitting the content into that framework, through a process called neural binding. My theory is that we now have a neurological framework of such interfaces -- we know the navigation will be on the left, we know the content will be in the middle, we know there might be threading of conversations, we know there might be a chat roster on the lower left, we know a chat window might popup on the lower right, we know there will be a searchbox at the top, etc. In fact, if you look at the Yahoo! design, the page that it initially reminded me of, it has a very similar structure. Because we already have this framework in our brain, we don't need too much of a cognitive process to understand the page, all we need to do is process the content. I believe even though the page looks crazy busy to our design-trained eye, we now have the proper neural structure to be able to parse and comprehend it with relative ease. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
