Short of one million users unhappy with the changes

Mar 25, 2009 15:24 GMT  ·  By
Facebook will implement "changes" to satisfy the tastes of those who don't like the new features as well
   Facebook will implement "changes" to satisfy the tastes of those who don't like the new features as well

Despite the fact that Facebook has just recently introduced major layout changes to its service, the company may now find itself in a position of having to undo them, on account of the massive negative backlash it has gotten from its users. Approximately one million people said that the changes were not inspired, and that the old templates were far better than the new ones, so the site will now try to implement the old look all over again.

“Since we launched Facebook's home page design, we've received thousands of emails, Wall posts and comments from you along with direct feedback from all of our friends and family. (...) We're focusing on improvements immediately and over the next several weeks,” product director Christopher Cox told his readers in a blog post late on Tuesday.

The website has already pledged to reduce some of the clutter on its pages and to make the new interface more user-friendly and more similar to the previous one. The new changes introduced a more Twitter-like interface, which seems to have upset Facebook users.

“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,” Cox added in the blog entry.

Instead of refreshing the browser page in order to see new posts, users will receive “the ability to turn on auto updating in the near future so you no longer need to refresh the page.” The “Highlights” section of the website will also “update more frequently and will show you more content throughout the day to mirror more closely the content that the earlier news feed provided,” the announcement went on to say.

“Redesigns are generally hard to manage, in part because change is always hard and in part because we may miss improvements that any individual user may like to see. With the recent home page changes, we're trying to present the right balance between what's happening right now and what's interesting over a longer period of time,” Cox explained about Facebook's decision to change its interface.

The percentage of people that oppose the changes is fairly small, as less than one million of the website's 175 million users say that they are dissatisfied with them. Still, the number is, objectively speaking, massive, and the website did good to lend an ear to what people had to say.