Social site and friends hub Facebook is facing the standard round of complaints after rolling its new design out across the whole site. Aesthetically, it is not too bad. It has a softer, more open feel and a busier, more dynamic interface. The problem is that when people get used to a design, many of them like to stick with it.
It is like a comfortable leather baseball glove or a favourite jacket. After years of use you develop a special relationship with it, and it just fits. If someone suddenly forced you to break in a new one, you would grumble and perhaps declare war. Not that extreme, maybe, but you would complain and threaten some sort of retaliation.
My poor comparison aside (it is hard to browse Facebook, answer instant messages, check email and write an article while I am supposed to be filling out reports at work), quite a few Facebook users do not like the new design. They are declaring protests and potential boycotts, citing privacy concerns and complaining that they were forced into a layout nobody asked them about. Groups set up to fight the change have reportedly signed up more than a million members.
This time around I have to ask: why so serious? Granted, the new design is a little annoying, but it is not that bad. For the ten or so ten-second breaks I take to look at my home page, check for new messages and see who has added a picture, it really is fine.
Still, we like to leave everything up to the reader, so judge for yourself.
Looking back
Editor's note, 2026: Facebook has been redesigned many times since this was written, and nearly every change has followed the same script: an angry group with a huge member count, a few weeks of headlines, then everybody quietly gets used to it. The groups rarely changed anything, but they were an early sign of how loudly users would come to treat a free website as their own living room.
