I disagree with your analysis that it is an easily navigable site when compared to the previous incarnation with respect to three common tasks that users perform on this page.
1) Task: Navigate to Groups/Events Cause: Lack of persistent navigation features In the incarnation before this one there was a set of buttons in the lower left of the window (modifiable) that were always present regardless of the screen you were on within fb. So no matter where you were, a single click would take you to your Events/Groups/Happy Aquarium/whatever. It had a nice form factor and didn't clutter the screen. What a person now has to do is navigate back to your home page by clicking a link at the very top of the page (and heaven forbid you are scrolled to the bottom of a screen), and then click on the appropriate item on the left. 2) Task: View updates Cause: Position and temporariness (sic) of the Notifications item This is really very similar to the first item, but I enjoyed the permanence of the Notification area in the bottom right. It was out of the way enough that I could open it and then click through each of the items, read all of the status notification update items (for instance, see that a number of my friends replied to a certain status and read those replies), and then once I was at the bottom of that string click on the next item from the update window. Two things happen now to make that more difficult. First, once you click the Status link to see how a person has commented on the status, the Notification window disappears. So immediately I need to re-open that window after reading through one thread of items. This task is then made more difficult by the fact that the Notification window is not a permanent feature on the page. So after I have scrolled down through each reply to a status I have to scroll to the top again, re-open the Notification window area, and then choose the next item. 3) Task: Logout Cause: Logout is not a main page item now This one gets my goat the most. Not only is it an inconvenience issue, but the inconvenience of it gives rise to potential security issues. In the version before this one you could Logout from any page with a single click. You can still Logout from any page, but it requires that you open a menu item and then choose to do so. Because of the added step, users will probably be more likely to just close the browser tab/window. There is nothing to say they weren't doing this before, but in using Gmail and banking websites I had come to think that Logout is a common function (that is typically the conclusion of any session) that should always be available. My gf suggested that this was because facebook relies on advertising, and so they want to discourage users from logging out - which to me seems absurd enough that I hope that is not the case. Conclusion: These tasks seem like very common tasks, and are staples of every facebook session that I personally engage in. Insofar as a redesign should at least consider the tasks that users engage in and seek to simplify those I feel that this redesign has failed in the above three regards. Matthew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=49195 ________________________________________________________________ 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
