Ustrategy

Facebook Redesign Audited: 5 Key Flaws in the Recent Redesign

By all accounts, the past year must have been a wild ride for Facebook--a company who has been on an unstoppable growth spurt, adding 20 million US users since February alone and posting double-digit growth in Europe and South America.

Today, on ReadWriteWeb, I discuss Facebook’s greatest growth challenge: its ability to execute on its strategy.  This discussion was sparked by the latest redesign--a mix and match of features, cosmetic "enhancments," architectural changes, and attempts at monetization. Some have already been returned to the previous design--some are here to stay.  And whether you love or hate the redesign, there are some key issues with the User Experience (UX), User Interaction (UI), and Information Architecture (IA) of the site. These are basic enough that they should have never made it live.

So what’s exactly wrong with the redesign? Here are but a few basic experience "don'ts"…feel free to add your own:

1. Instead of simplifying, it complicates: It used to be easy to find information. Now there’s new secondary navigation below the main navigation, navigation on the right…navigation on the left…navigation here…navigation there…which makes it awfully hard to find anything. So to help users navigate through the many changes, Facebook now displays a How-To box at the top of pages. This concept worked when Facebook wanted to help users regain their email settings after the company erased them a few months back…but when it’s a redesign that comes with a manual, it may be time to rethink the design…not the users.

2. Elements are used inconsistently: Profile images are square but thumbnails are rounded…then again, if you click to enlarge the thumbnail, it’s square again. For a company battling to demonstrate ROI, it leaves one wondering how this little design endeavor was justified.

3. Navigation is redundant: Did you realize that when you click the Facebook link in the top navigation and the Home link in the top navigation you get exactly the same page…only with different ads? Take a look: On the left is what you see when you click the Facebook page, on the right is what you see when you click Home.

4. More and more (and more) disruptive ads: About 15% of the site real-estate is now ads.  Even on users’ profile pages, Facebook, it seems, wants to sabotage the very thing it built: a personal, relevant, community experience by forcing down its own idea of what users should be looking at.

5. Overloading users: Facebook has thankfully taken this feature off, but you’ll remember that up until a few days ago, each of your friends’ update was followed by your thumbnail and text entry space. On a given page, you could see your own image showing up 10, 12, 20 times. Much too much.

And this brings me also to the things Facebook is doing right. For example, it quickly fixes the features that aggravate users. It is also trying to fix previous re-design snafus which made finding requests, invitations, and events more difficult.

Growing a business is difficult enough: There are physical demands such as for space and resources, market demands, user demands, business model demands, financial targets to hit, etc. It's a never ending job that doesn't stop when Zuckerberg leaves the office at night. A customer-centric design should be the last thing that holds Facebook back…and yet, it does time and time again, making monetization more difficult, slowly eroding the sense of a user-owned community, and creating a perception of a company in trial-and-error mode.

User experience should always come first. A company who is focused on delighting its customers, works to develop strategies around this mission, and executes on these strategies, never goes wrong. Just take a look at Apple, your Moleskine notebook, Disney, and even Amazon.com at one point. Each had one guiding mission: to make users fall in love with its products. Can Facebook do the same?

Facebook Turns Down the Noise on Managing Friend Requests

Facebook released its friend request management feature this week, allowing users to assign new friends to lists at the request level rather than having to manage lists ad-hoc. This is extremely helpful to facebook users who receive friend requests from people they do not know or for those users who want to limit access to sensitive information such as riske photos and updates.

With Facebook's list management feature at the request management level, you can now put to use facebook's blocking features early in the process without having to spend too much time scanning through your friends' list. For Facebook, this will likely result in an even greater network event since users will now add more people, knowing they can manage exposure risk. I predict we'll see an additional 5%-15% network expansion on Facebook in the coming 2 months as a result.

 

Now what about that site redesign we've been hearing about? Looking forward to graduating out of the FrontPage look and to all the goodness resources and web2.0 can bring.

WaMu Still Doesn't Get Customers. (And Chase Doesn't Seem to Care?)

In September, Washington Mutual was seized by the federal regulators and later acquired by JPMorgan Chase (more accurately, Chase got WaMu’s $182 BILLION in customer deposits).

Fairly soon after, WaMu started wearing a new line of branding message delivered in a name-tag like look on which statements like a  “WaMu is now Chase” are scribbled.

To let customers know when a company is being acquired is a good thing. (You can read more about best customer experience practices during M&A’s here.) But in WaMu’s case, both strategy and implementation are seriously flawed. Here’s why:

1. Name tags are for large conferences where nobody knows anyone...or for AA meetings. Either way, instead of communicating trust, solid foundation, and dependability, the brand now communicates “alone,” “neediness,” and “I’m just one of many customers.” It’s uncomfortable, discouraging, silly. And who wants to bank with that?


2. Customers want to know their investments are secure and that they can continue business as usual. While WaMu did state early on everything stays as is, you know that once a big acquisition like this happens, things actually do not remain the same. Northwest airlines doesn't offer the same services as it did before it was acquired by Delta, and AOL is not the same as it was pre Time Warner's acquisition. In WaMu’s case, the pre-debacle poor customer experience may be an exception.


3. Especially at this time of economic crisis, this is a golden opportunity for Chase to retain existing customers acquire new ones. It can do so by injecting its own brand, sprucing up WaMu’s, or creating a whole new brand. Nonetheless, the giant company is taking a very long time to introduce positive change. At first, this showed caution and care having been caught off guard with the acquisition—but after a while, a state of no-change raises questions of Chase’s ability and credibility. Can WaMu/Chase really become the bank worth sticking with? Are customers going to be taken care of? Does Chase even care?

Unless Chase puts the WaMu experience at a high priority, puts a strategy behind it, and implements on its strategy to create a banking experience customers want, we may well see WaMu faltering and closing or, becoming “that forgotten bank” that used to be all about people but then fell behind.

And to start, can we please take down the name tags? It is like John Connolly's Book of Lost Things. And it’s really embarrassing. Or scary. Or both.

DEMO 09

I am in Palm Springs California, live blogging at DEMO09 for Ubergizmo- the third largest gadget blog in the US. For the up-to-the-minute coverage, visit http://live.ubergizmo.com/