Beginning at the end of last week, Facebook rolled out an interface change across its network. This change was ostensibly designed to improve Facebook's usability.
Unfortunately, I found this redesign to completely fail that mission. The new Facebook has increased the feeling of overload that its users must experience, it is visually cluttered beyond that, and it brushes off important usage conventions.
Header
Unlike every other system out there, Facebook has placed alerts on the left and menus on the right of its header. Now, I'm sure that the average user will quickly get used to this, but the problem is not that it would be harder to find the menu. The problem is that by switching these positions, Facebook increases the overload pressed upon its users because those pesky little notifications are now in the first place the user looks on loading the page.
This may have been a good thing if the average user expected maybe a dozen notifications per day, but that is far from the norm. With the near constant influx of alerts and requests, the new Facebook throws users into a reactive mode instead of an active mode. The first activity is not to do something but to respond to something, and this ultimately devalues the network. In earlier versions, the first thing that a user's eye would alight upon was the status update box. It was all about making things yourself. Now it's all about respond to the things others have made.
The final bit of strangeness about this new Facebook interface is the prominence of the search bar. It used to be located off to the right side of the page, out of the way. This was because it was rarely needed. Maybe you needed to search to find a friend for some reason, but usually it wasn't needed. Now it's got a nice central placement, but there's still no reason to search except to find a friend. Facebook is not Google. No matter how centrally placed the search bar is on the page, I will go to Google if I need to search for something that isn't one of my friends' profile pages.
Left Sidebar
Honestly, this part might actually be an improvement. It's certainly useful to be able to jump from category to category of pages and the left sidebar is as good a place as any to locate this information. The "Friends Online" feature is definitely an improvement, because it mitigates the need for incessant clicking on the chat panel. However, the compression of the list based on yet another Facebook prioritization algorithm makes it far less convenient than it could be.
Central Area
I still do not understand why Facebook thinks that its users want to see every single little thing that their "friends" do. What value could it possibly have to them? Honestly. What value?
And so, the inability to restrict the central feed to just "major" actions (statuses, wall posts, photo uploads, etc.) by itself was enough to drive me away from the Facebook interface as a whole. I had previously made do with restricting it solely to status updates, but with that functionality gone, the usefulness of the interface was pretty much obliterated.
Add to that the insult of the "Top News" functionality, which seems to have little effectiveness at determining what the individual user might actually care about, and is simply confusing because it doesn't believe in chronological order.
Right Sidebar
This part hasn't changed since the last update, so I have little to comment on here. It would be better if it had reverted to the previous behavior of aggregating the "little" actions that users took and keeping them out of the main feed, but that hope was a bit of a pipe dream anyway.
Summation
Perhaps the most telling part of this redesign is the fact that the rest of the site has not been changed to reflect it. The inconsistency here suggests that either Facebook is too lazy or cost-sensitive to update the site uniformly, or it honestly believe that the only part of its site that visitors see is the main page. The misalignment of columns and careless lack of polish really creates a tone of unprofessionalism about the site, which I'm sure is not what Facebook intends to project to its users.
Because of these problems with the site, I have finally made the jump to accessing the Facebook service (which I find myself regrettably tethered to as a means of communication) through a combination of Pidgin and Gwibber. Much has improved: Gwibber only displays the "major" actions that I care about, and Pidgin's conversation windows are much more convenient than the Facebook windows that were trapped inside a browser tab. There are also some bumps in the road, for Gwibber's interface to Facebook is not as effective as I would desire it to be. However, I have found the combination to be a better overall choice for interacting with the Facebook application than the web interface.
At the very least, I do not have to be wary of it radically changing in appearance.