Facebook uproar forces redesign rethink

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 26 Mar 2009 at 15:51

Facebook has vowed to make "improvements" to the site after its latest redesign brought a torrent of complaints from users.

The fuss began after the site replaced the news feed with a real-time Twitter-like feed that often offers so much information it's difficult to find what you're looking for.

Speaking on its blog, Facebook admitted the change hadn't gone down well: "Since we launched Facebook's home page design, we've received thousands of emails, wall posts and comments from you along with direct feedback from all of our friends and family," says product director Christopher Cox in a blog post.

"We've heard feedback that there is a lot of application content appearing in the stream. We will be giving you tools to control and reduce application content that your friends share into your stream," he writes, adding that the changes will be rolled out over the next several weeks.

Among those changes the company will introduce a new "Highlights" section that will "update more frequently and will show you more content throughout the day to mirror more closely the content that the earlier news feed provided."

The confession represents a slight change of tack for Facebook, which usually introduces changes, waits a month for the uproar to die down and marches on as everybody forgets what it used to look like. Not this time though.

"Redesigns are generally hard to manage, in part because change is always hard and in part because we may miss improvements that any individual user may like to see," Cox admits.