Month: February 2010

Why the new facebook layout is crap

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Facebook - at least the logo's not changed

A large number of people received the new facebook layout yesterday. I gather this was facebook’s “6th birthday present” to its users. Some had had it since earlier in the year and others still haven’t got it – but will.

There are a lot of ways of looking at the design, but the single biggest flaw is that things have changed. It’s not so much what they have changed into, but the fact that things people have become used to have been moved or tweeked for no discernible reason.

This might not sound like a big deal to a lot of people, but I know of one user who’s dyslexic. For him to get used to finding something that’s moved from one corner to another is a big deal – he uses interfaces by memorising the location of things, not by visually recognising them. He has to relearn the interface from scratch – and for what purpose? None that I can ascertain.

I don’t use facebook to any great depth, so what I’ve spotted is likely to be fairly superficial. However, none of it makes any sense to me. First up is shifting the bottom bar around. The chat area is still at the bottom of the screen while the rest of the bar has been removed. Notifications are now in the top left instead of the bottom right.

This does give an extra line of screen real estate. I think. Or is the top now a little larger? However, it’s this particular move that’s caused problems for my dyslexic friend (and I’m sure many like him).

My particular bugbear is that I can’t be bothered with the news feed. It’s a mess and I really couldn’t care two hoots who is giving stupid virtual gifts to who, or who’s just got a highscore on some crappy game. I just want status updates.

In the previous version, I went to the correct area and dragged “Status” to the top of the list. Henceforth when I visited my “Home” area, I received status updates. This is no longer possible. “Home” now takes me to News Feed. It won’t even default to “Most Recent” so I have a completely useless splatter of informational crap that is of no use whatsoever.

I now have to go into “Friends” in the leftmost column. This in itself is badly-designed as there’s no indication whatsoever that “Friends” opens up sub-menus. There is a reason we have design standards, such as little boxes with “+” in them, or arrows with move from right-pointing to down-pointing. It’s simple design practise which facebook have chosen to ignore.

Once there, I’m stuck in the default Friends page and I then click on the newly-appeared “Status Updates” menu item to get what I used to find by simply clicking “Home” in the past. As far as I can tell, there is no way to set this as my default view.

Given that the press release from facebook read as follows:

A simplified home page to provide easier access to what you’re looking for on Facebook. You can now quickly navigate to commonly-used areas of the site from the top and left hand menus. From the Top Menu, you can now easily find new messages, requests, and notifications using the icons in the top, left hand corner. The left hand menu is now where you can find all of your applications, previously located in the bottom dock.

I would take issue with the use of “easily find”. Something that’s easily found should be immediately apparent, not located by means of a random search. I would also be tempted to say that the left hand columns isn’t a menu – it’s a list. Until you click on it and realise it just looks like a list.

Sure, it’s functional. There’s no denying the new look is tidier and reduces redundancy (there were so many ways on one screen to do the same thing before). But it’s very poor design. For a brand new user it lacks indication of the functionality of certain areas and for experienced users it’s moved things too far from where they were before with no obvious indication of where to look to find them.

As an aside, I think it’s badly programmed as well. This may just be coincidence, but when I left my browser (Chrome) on the Status Update page for about 11 hours yesterday when I was out, I came home to find that it was using stupid amounts of memory and froze. I never had this issue with the old design.

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National Van Hire – resolution

A couple of weeks ago I sent a 6-page letter of complaint to National Van Hire (a.k.a. EuropCar) regarding a huge mess they made of a rental on January 9th. After giving up on getting a reply, I rang them today. It seems they “received” (i.e. logged) the letter on January 27th, fully 8 days after I posted it. The chap I spoke to said someone would call me back this afternoon.

Several hours later and someone did. They admitted that it had all been a complete mess and that what happened simply should not have happened. The booking that we’d been told had been cancelled hadn’t been, or at least there was no indication on the system that this was the case.

The van sat outside which we were told was “too big” should have been rented to us. Standard practice if a rental can’t be fulfilled due to vehicle shortage is to upgrade. Although not ideal, it would have meant getting a van while there was still daylight and over three hours before we were actually supplied with one.

Methinks the Dundee manager may be in for a bit of a roasting. However, Jonathan from Stirling will receive the praise he deserves. I was assured of both.

In addition, the entire cost of the rental was refunded (the incorrect cost as they overcharged), plus £30 to cover costs plus £40 in vouchers in the hope we’d use them so that they could prove they weren’t always a shower of useless halfwits.

I think I’ll pass the vouchers on to someone else…

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44 Inch Chest

It’s not very often I leave the cinema thinking “I could have been doing anything else, but watching that”. 44 Inch Chest made me feel that way.

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Man (Ray Winstone) finds out wife is being unfaithful, kidnaps the guy who she was with, threatens him a bit along with his mates and then goes mad. Or something. I’m not sure.

I had some time to kill on the way home today (by flipping bus, but that’s another story) and this was the only film on at a convenient time. Given that it’s by the same writers as Sexy Beast I was looking forward to it. However, the only things it has in common with that masterpiece are Ray Winstone and a ton of swearing.

The premise is very simple. The settings are simple. The acting is fantastic (John Hurt is wonderful, and Ian McShane as the dodgy poof is perfect). Overall, though, it’s ultimately empty. Around halfway through it just goes a little over the edge and the ending is simply awful. I sat for about two minutes of the credits convinced it was a “false” ending and that there had to be more coming up.

Wrong.

I left the cinema feeling bewildered and somewhat cheated. There is nothing in this chest worth seeing.

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Common sense prevails

The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker

I don’t normally pay much attention to awards ceremonies as those nominated often aren’t the ones who deserve to be so, and the winners are usually selected for commercial reasons. Like Forrest Gump winning all those Oscars when The Shawshank Redemption came out the same year.

However, I was really pleased to see that Kathryn Bigelow has just won the Directors Guild of America‘s award for feature film this year for the superb The Hurt Locker.

It was up against some real competition (worthwhile, such as Jason Reitman‘s Up In the Air and commercial, such as Avatar – Inglorious Basterds and Precious made up the numbers) but it was without a doubt the best film on the shortlist.

With the exception of Precious, it’s also the cheapest with a budget of around $11m, and a small gross (as of November 2009) of around $16m. Compare that to Avatar with a budget in excess of $230m (maybe as high as $480m including marketting) and a gross pushing $2b!

It just goes to show that you don’t need a stupid budget, a script ripped from Pocahantas and a bunch of stretched Smurfs to win an award. I seriously hope she goes on to get the related Oscar when those awards come up – or at least someone else as deserving.

[UPDATE: I just spotted that a week earlier, The Hurt Locker also won the equivalent award from the Producers Guild of America. Superb.]

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