Our solution to Facebook’s UI problems: custom layouts
It seems like every few months, some new UI designer at Facebook tries their hand at redoing the site’s user interface (UI). Some people are ambivalent to it, but many people truly dislike it. Rather than mess around with the UI time after time, Facebook should take a page from the Google playbook and allow people to redo their UI the way they want it to be.
If you haven’t checked, Google allows you to have your own landing page, complete with news, weather, Gmail, and other little widgets inside your page. You can customize the widgets anyway you like, move them around, change their settings, and even the theme. Note below how I can pull the date and time widget out of its position so I can move it wherever I want it to go.
With AJAX, you can create powerful dynamic layouts that will allow any user to make their Facebook experience more enjoyable. In fact, there’s a tutorial on how to create your own iGoogle layout here. If Facebook continues to change their layout every few months, it’s going to cause confusion among its users, and eventually people will be pushed away. Keeping control of the UI in the hands of the users could help solve that problem.
Category: Social Media
