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Facebook revamps homepage; redesign backlashed
by Jaspreet Virk - February 6, 2010 - comments
Facebook has tweaked the homepage to improve the users’ overall experience while accessing the social networking site, but like always, not all users have approved the changes.
New York, February 6 -- Facebook celebrated its sixth birthday Friday. To mark the occasion, the social networking site introduced changes to its home page.
Since the new design is still being rolled out, not all users have access to it currently.
Unlike previous updates that have focused on visual appeal, the latest redesign is aimed at improving navigation to help users easily find what they are looking for on Facebook.
In a blog post, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of Facebook, stated, “To celebrate six years of Facebook and the 400 million people on the service, we're doing what we like doing most—building and launching products for people.”
Revamped homepage
Among the changes rolled out, there is an updated top menu. The left side displays icons for friend requests, messages and notifications. A red bubble will appear in the left-hand corner near the search bar if there are new requests waiting for user’s attention.
The search bar has shifted to the middle from its former position at the top right hand corner. The right side now only displays links to home, profile and account setting. The new account option allows user to manage privacy settings.
Apart from the top menu, even the left menu has been revamped to enable users to access “messages and other core features all in one place, to the left of” news feed, stated Facebook engineer Jing Chen in a blog post.
The left menu provides links to messages, events, photos, friends, applications, games etc. Users can click on the photo link to browse photos of all friends. Likewise one can know about all the upcoming events by clicking on the event menu.
Even the chat option has been made prominent. A list of the some of the friends online has been added to the left menu. These include friends one communicates with frequently.
Users’ reactions
Facebook has tweaked the homepage to improve the users’ overall experience while accessing the social networking site, but like always, not all users have approved changes.
A user named Neha Sayeed commented on Facebook blog saying, “I love the new homepage but How can I get the new homepage? my friends have it! I want this new home page......”
But another user by the name Courtney Scholl stated, “This is AWFUL. COMPLETLY awful. It's not easier to navigate. It's not more user-friendly.”
“Whoever authorizes these constant changes to Facebook seriously needs to be stopped. Why can’t you just pick a layout and stick with it, instead of constantly changing it? I admit, some changes are acceptable, but now it’s getting ridiculous,” commented a user named Tom Klimczyk.