A few weeks ago, I strayed from the world of ExactTarget 3sixty to discuss my thoughts on Facebook's proposed redesign, and what that made me think about my own social networking world.
Unless you have been living under a rock (or not spending lots of time on Facebook - hey, I get it!), you have probably noticed that Facebook finally made the change that they had been talking about. And guess what - they are not getting very many "warm fuzzies."
Last night, Chris Cox (Dir. of Product for Facebook) posted a blog on their corporate site explaining the impact and reasons for this latest redesign. The company has been hit with tons of opinions relating to the redesign, many of them negative.
Here's Cox' reasoning:
- Live updating: One of the most common requests is the ability to see your stream update automatically. We will be adding the ability to turn on auto updating in the near future so you no longer need to refresh the page.
- Photo tags: In order to surface more photos you might like to see, we'll be adding photos tagged of your friends to the stream. This will happen in the coming weeks.
- More choices for applications: We've heard feedback that there is a lot of application content appearing in the stream. We will be giving you tools to control and reduce application content that your friends share into your stream.
- Moving requests to the top of the right column: Friend requests and event invites will be more prominent.
- Easier way to create a Friends List filter: From the filters on the left, you will be able to create a new list of friends with which to filter the stream.
I think that they have good intentions, but I think that they are missing the understanding of how their users actually function within Facebook. My previous blog mentioned the fact that Facebook was trying to be more like Twitter, but is that needed? Is that how Facebook got 175 million active users?
What do you think? It wasn't until I was knee-deep into this blog post that I realized the same information holds true for any type of marketing you are doing (social media, SMS marketing, email marketing). It all requires that you know your audience, and make changes accordingly. Yes, redesigns can be powerful and persuasive. But they still need to be attractive to your main audience, or they do absolutely no good.
Before I worked on ExactTarget 3sixty, I was in our services department. I walked hundreds of clients through template redesigns. And the number one thing I used to tell them - listen to your subscribers.
On that note, I leave you with two thoughts (which are sort of contradictory, but that's how my brain works!):
A) Facebook did a major redesign about 2 years ago that caused the same chaos over the new look. That is the design that people are now demanding back (interesting thoughts unsaid about people and change!)
B) If I were Facebook, I would consider taking my users into account a lot more before making such drastic changes! I know that the changes were probably months of work, but the users only got a week or two of exposure!
And you ExactTarget 3sixty users? No worries - you'll definitely get the inside track on any redesigns that we have in the future!
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