Facebook redesign thread
Out of context: Reply #3
- Started
- Last post
- 7 Responses
- chrisRG0
So why did Facebook ditch the beautiful design for one that looks like it's from 2007?
Dustin Curtis, an entrepreneur who also writes a very popular blog, says he's heard from Facebook employees the reason is that the beautiful, big-picture design was so popular with users that they weren't using other parts of the site, and that this was driving ad impressions down.
In her own blog post, Facebook product designer Julie Zhuo says Curtis has it wrong.
She says the reason Facebook went with the older-looking design is that, unlike Facebook employees, Curtis, and the kinds of people who read blog posts about design, most Facebook users still have older computers with crappy monitors.
For these people, the older-looking design just works better than the photo-rich one Facebook showed off a year ago.
She writes:
It turns out, while I (and maybe you as well) have sharp, stunning super high-resolution 27-inch monitors, many more people in the world do not. Low-res, small screens are more common across the world than hi-res Apple or Dell monitors. And the old design we tested didn’t work very well on a 10-inch Netbook. A single story might not even fit on the viewport. Not to mention, many people who access the website every day only use Facebook through their PC—no mobile phones or tablets. Scrolling by clicking or dragging the browser scrollbar is still commonly done because not everyone has trackpads or scroll wheels. If more scrolling is required because every story is taller, or navigation requires greater mouse movement because it’s further away, then the site becomes harder to use. These people may not be early adopters or use the same hardware we do, but the quality of their experience matters just as much.- let's be honest here... facebook never had beautiful designmonospaced
- yeah let's not make an adaptive design, let's just pretend like one size fits all is the best approach.zarkonite
- That's why all print documents look exactly the same, brochure, novel, magazine, SAME!zarkonite