The New Facebook Layout (for Users)
- Details
- Author: Bennett Wetch
- Thursday, December 08, 2011
For the first time in awhile, Facebook’s redesign is going to dramatically alter user behavior on the social network. As the site has grown, the News Feeds has become more and more populated, which, to a lesser extent than Twitter, has led to overwhelming noise.
The increased saturation of the news feed accounted for every little action a person took, from liking a status to interacting with an app, which decreased the amount of interaction occurring over the big events in people’s lives.
If one were to escape the busy-ness of their news feed and instead click through to view a friend’s profile, they were greeted with much more meaningful content. However, the personal details of this person’s life were still being viewed in the same layout as the news feed.
The new design has changed the core user experience for the first time. Now, when leaving the news feed to view a person’s profile, the user is greeted with an experience that much more accurately reflects their friend’s life at any given moment (obviously dependent on how much they share on Facebook).
The new experience is very much a scrapbook of your life. By highlighting key milestones, such as a friend’s wedding, and presenting them in a visually pleasing format, the person’s profile becomes a much more intimate look into their life.
Additionally, it is the first time Facebook has enabled users to retroactively add to their profile. Did you forget to post in 2006 about your new job? You can go back and do it now. You can add status updates, photos, check-ins, relationship statuses, and more.
Not only can you go back and add content to your profile, you can also choose which posts you want to highlight. Want to highlight your friend’s beach wedding?
Until you ‘feature’ the post, it displays in your news feed just like any other post. But when you ‘feature’ it, the post spans the entire width of the timeline (which is much wider than the current Facebook profiles). This enables you to highlight the events that meant the most to you.
While users will inevitably balk at these changes initially (and they already have), Facebook takes a similar approach that Steve Jobs did: "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.” So while this new interface will make people scratch their heads as to why Facebook would ‘try to fix something that isn’t broken,’ Facebook knows that this new interface will not only be something that users learn to love, but also something marketers will learn to adore.
If Timeline has not yet been activated on your profile, you can activate it here.
And be sure to read Part 2, The New Facebook Layout for Marketers.
