Facebook has recently commenced its official layout with the intention to simplify the chunks of information on the previous one. But is that the case? From what many people have noticed, it has only minimized the usage of certain features on Facebook itself (Garrett 2003)
The application on the Facebook are now diverted to a section called box, users are still allowed to move the application to the profile section but the space is fairly limited while the image of the application shrink and not as fun as before.
Considering the fact that everyone is generally busy, users would only refer to the profiles and pictures section and not make the additional move to the fourth column. Developers are now shaking their head as the new layout only intensifies the competition that is already going on.
“Completely switching up the profiles on people will be like upgrading Windows (from XP) to Vista,” said Nick O’Neill, the blogger behind all Facebook (www.allfacebook.com). The trouble is, Facebook members will have to cope with the new layout whether they like it or not (McCarthy 2008).
Positively, the new layout adopts multimodality, which implies the combinations of different modes, making the site more personalized than the old layout (Walsh 2006).
But if certain applications are jeopardized, the usefulness of webpage is questionable (Shriver 1997). There is no doubt that some members of Facebook solely log in for the application and not the social capabilities of the site.
Garrett, J.J. 2003, Elements Of User Experience : User-centred Design For The Web, American Institute of Graphic Arts, New York.
McCarthy, C. 2008, Developers, critics sound off on Facebook’s profile redesign, cnet news, viewed 13 November 2008, <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-9949577-36.html>.
Schriver, A.K. 1997, Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Readers, Wiley Computer Pub., New York.
Walsh, M. 2006, ‘The ‘Textual Shift’: Examining the Reading Process with Print, Visual and Multimodal Texts’, Australian Journal of Language Literacy, vol. 29, no.1, pp. 24-37.
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