TechNayak

I have like two new interface changes in the recent past. One being the new Facebook interface and more recently (ie today) the del.icio.us page. Both these interfaces have one thing in common, putting the most essential information out where you would need them and more importantly break through the clutter.

 Lets take the example of facebook. The apps killed the facebook profile page. There were days when a single page would take 15 minutes to load thanks to the 50 odd apps that people had added to their profiles. Facebook’s new design rocks coz they have removed the clutter. Facebook’s usp, the newfeed, is what is shown as the profile , which is nice considering you get to see what the person you are seeing is upto recently. The apps have moved to a completely new page which means, no clutter Also the profile information, which people hardly change is gone into another page. Another cool addition I saw is the “What are you doing now ?” is highlighted and big. Given the run twitter is having with its fans, Im sure facebook realizes that micotexting about yourself is the rage right now and integrates that at the head of your homepage. Pretty ingenious if you think about it. Not all redesigns work , for ex , I hated the analytics redesign for the first few days and so was the redesign of wordpress but regular usage and some groking made me very comfortable with the interface. When you are redesigning interfaces especially for sites like flickr, facebook then it becomes essential that you get a value add and Facebook certainly nailed this one.

 Now lets go back to del.icio.us. Firstly the dots are off and you can access it as delicious.com, which saves me the trouble of explaining people the position of the dots in the url. I like the old del.icio.us and its UI. It was very basic, no frill, plain text based UI. The reason was probably the speed which it would work. But one thing that annoyed me was the clutter.The URL, Description, tags, other taggers, edit  and remove links etc were fit into a really small space; the new UI had to break this clutter.  The other problem was the tag cloud on the right. The older version would buch up tags and it would be difficult to spot the tags if you had more than say 200 which is common for most delicious uses. The new UI does a wonderful job of reducing the clutter. All the above mentioned items of the URL are still present in the same space and look darling. The tag cloud has also become more navigable and the social aspect of the site is utilized superbly if you see your networks page.

 I am now looking at some of the properties that I have built that can possibly be redesigned for better usage.

Tags: interfaces, redesign, facebook, delicious