Facebook is at it again.  Last week was a busy one as they rolled out a multitude of new updates and announced plans for even more changes during their F8 Conference.  The updates accounted for major changes to the interface of the site and in typical fashion caught most users off guard. This of course led to many frustrated users and heated opinions on the usefulness of the changes.  Being part of the Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant program our team had no shortage of opinions as our dev team has spent a lot of time interacting with the Facebook platform, both personally and professionally.

As we take a look at these changes let’s consider that in the simplest terms it is Facebook’s goal to have people want to use the site continually for as long as possible, while getting as many page views as possible. Facebook wants to avoid users leaving because of too much information or noise flying at them, which was what started to happen with the mass of content being produced by users. With the new updates, Facebook has made a concerted effort to alleviate this problem by categorizing content and cleaning up clutter.

So what are all these changes? Probably the biggest and most visual change Facebook made is the addition of the Newsfeed Ticker. The Ticker is a real time visual of what your contacts are doing on Facebook right now. It contains activity stories (friends commenting on posts, liking pages, RSVPs, etc.), which have been removed from the recent stories area cleaning up the amount of content in your Newsfeed. It also gives users more control to decide what type of updates they want to receive from their friends. Basically the Ticker was added to give users a real time update of their friends activity, while removing the clutter and providing users more control over the content they receive.

With the addition of the Ticker the Newsfeed has been updated in an attempt to better organize the content, giving users more control and making it easier to view what is relevant to them.  Now Top Stories and Recent Stories are in the same spot with Top Stories being based on user’s previous interaction on Facebook. The benefit of this is that users can actually “train” Facebook on what to display in their Newsfeed by customizing the content they want to view and what they do not. The question is, if users actually understand how the customization works or if the Top Stories new functionality is still too opaque?

On top of better organizing the content on your Newsfeed, Facebook is also hoping to improve the user experience with the introduction of Smart Lists which builds upon their past Friends List feature. Now Facebook automatically generates multiple lists (Close Friends, Acquaintances, Work, School, Family, Your City) and organizes your friends based on previous interactions similar to the automatically managed Google+ Circle feature. The user is given total control (besides the ability to delete the lists), and have the ability to target different lists with specific posts. This could be a great feature to bring added value to users as long as they take the time to organize their lists.

Facebook has also added a new way for users to interact with the addition of the Subscribe button, which allows for asymmetrical relationships between users. You can now allow other users to subscribe to your public updates or vice-versa without having to be “Friends.”  This feature looks to be directly targeted at celebrities (bringing a little bit of “Twitterness” to Facebook) or public figures who want the ability to connect with their fans, while still being able to personally interact with their close friends on Facebook. Or hey maybe it will just be a way for the self-involved to feel even more important.

Now this brings us to the biggest change that was announced at the F8 Conference; the user profile page will now be called the Timeline. Although this has yet to be rolled out it appears the added features will provide users a more customizable profile, while giving them a central hub organizing all personal content and past interactions on Facebook. The new features will give users a lot more control over the look and feel of their profile and the content they wish to display. Andrea Vahl does a great job of explaining these changes and how to use them in her article, "Five Facebook Changes and What You Need to Now."

So why is it that so many people have had such negative reaction if it seems these changes offer an improvement to the overall user experience with the addition of some much needed functionality and control?  This elicited a lot discussion around the studio, and we think it’s because of how changes on Facebook are generally rolled-out. Facebook makes changes in a very Agile Model by making changes rapidly--quickly iterating and testing, iterating and testing.   Releasing significant functionality and UX changes in this way created a jarring change to the UI which led to a lot of negative and very public reactions.   Many people interact with Facebook on a daily basis and have become very invested in their Facebook community so when changes are made that they do not understand, they feel as though they have lost control of their own Facebook experience.

From Facebook’s perspective it is difficult to guess what will magically make everyone happy.  We believe that if Facebook were to be more transparent and gave users a better understanding for the reasons behind the changes, users would become more comfortable with the changes and feel more in control.

Facebook is inherently used by brands as a platform to have conversations with their customers, so why doesn’t Facebook do this them selves? Facebook should give users the feeling they have insight and influence over changes by informing them about future updates prior to roll-out then elicit feedback to prepare users and lead to a quicker adoption of the changes.

So what reaction did you have to the newest Facebook changes? Are they an improvement to the overall experience on the site? How you would like to be informed about future changes?