Well I made the mistake today of typing in new.facebook.com and it logged me in to the new improved (*cough *cough) facebook layout. For starters this new look has even more wasted space than the previous version. The what are you doing right now is HUGE and takes up as much space as some header images I have seen on other sites.
The home page where you receive your news feed is completely amateurish in design and layout with the newsfeed having entirely too much white space. I see no real point to the change it is really not adding any value to the look and feel of the application. A company like Facebook with the amount of money they are worth could at least produce a better design than this for their “NEW” launch. At least when Myspace changed the look and functionality they made a vertical move and improved the site.
While in the profile view I noticed that there is now a tabbed browsing menu for navigating through the option such as applications. This AJAX style loading system is great when implemented properly. Not so in this case. The loading icon is lame and it seems to take a while to switch views when navigating through the sections. The upper navigation is a nice feature with the drop down selections applications etc. I have noticed that there is some odd padding(spacing) issues on the site which is not appealing to the eye. Main example is down the left side of the screen the edge of the Facebook logo does not line up with the edge of the content creating a weird indented look on the content.
The only redeeming quality I have seen with this new layout is that it is now optimized for 1024X768 instead of 800X600. About time I say considering for a few years now 1024X768 and above resolutions have been dominating the internet.
Facebook.com and new.facebook.com need to hire some new designers and stop letting the programmers design the look of the website. We will see how it progresses in the near future, for now I am giving it a 🙁 and will be switching back to the old one now that I have found the link to go back.
Yeah, it has a couple redeeming features in that I don’t have to scroll all the way to the bottom of my profile to see my wall posts now, and some of my applications are easier to get to…but other than that? It sucks. I remember when I first clicked over to it wondering how you would like it as a designer. It really isn’t designed very well and I don’t see the changes going over very well. I’m just thankful we can still get into the OLD facebook.