The designers at Facebook clearly skipped the section on interface stability in their User Interface Design textbook. This last interface change has been a mess, accompanied by all sorts of glitches. They’ve provided A Guide to Facebook’s Home Page, but I thought I could make a more accurate one for my readers. The low resolution picture below provides another link to the full size version.
Libra Fitness
OK, this is hilarious. I do like the notifications on top. This way, you can always see the latest, just maybe not some of the older ones, plus you can access the “see all” easily. When it went bottom up, sometimes it would go off screen, and I couldn’t get to the see all button or last notification.
I don’t mind the notifications there, and I can see how it might help mobile users to have it there. Upper menu bars are more common anyway.
I can adapt to most of this; I was mainly set off by the constant dropping of posts from the Most Recent list. I’m guessing that was a side effect of switching people to the new interface gradually; people’s posts would disappear while they were in transition perhaps. They seem to have gotten that straightened out now. They just made a tweet to that effect recently.
You got me curious, so I looked around. I’m not sure there is formal training in user interface design. I looked at the Computer Science course catalog at UT (which I can’t link because it requires a UT EID to see, and let’s not even get into the usability issues with that), and they didn’t have anything of the sort. I think it explains a lot.
It does explain a lot, though I’m surprised to hear that. Both programmers and web developers really need to learn the basics at least. It’s not new; I’ve been reading about user interface design principles online for over a decade.
While there are many issues, one principle is: stability. Keep changes to the interface minimal, and perform major overhauls very rarely. Changing the interface confuses users, offsetting the value of any gains made by small improvements. I’ve been on Facebook for just over a year, and they’ve had four non-trivial interface changes in that time. Some of them I considered mild improvements, though it wasn’t clear they were worth the price in time and effort for them or their users. And this last change has been a mess, as I said.