Facebook Does Care What You Think About the Redesign....Sort Of

By Nick Summers

It's become the internet's most predictable phenomenon: whenever Facebook redesigns its site, users revolt by the millions. Each major upgrade, from the 2006 introduction of its news feed to its 2009 redesign, has been a seismic event. Once, in Paris, they even took to the streets with picket signs, angry at feeling forced to relearn how to navigate the site.

Sure, the site keeps growing like mad. Facebook now has 400 million members—more people than live in any country, save China and India. But no company wants a reputation for being deaf to complaints, so as Facebook put the final touches on its current design update—which it began rolling out to select users in recent weeks—the company invited me into the user-­testing space at its new Palo Alto, California, headquarters. Its goal: to show that it really does care what users think.

The user lab occupies two narrow side-by-side rooms. Every week engineers in one room observe as users demo new features in the adjacent room. You'd expect there to be a two-way mirror, but that's so last century. "We have this," says Peter Deng, who works on the Facebook home page, pointing to a large display at the front of the room. The screen shows live video from next door, plus an exact duplication of the user's monitor. A red dot zigzags in every direction: data from an eye-tracking camera that tracks pupil movement down to the pixel.

This morning's tester, a 24-year-old Occidental College student named Mark, is using the new Facebook for the first time. Most tasks go smoothly, but when he tries to upload a photo, it gets ugly. "This is brutal," one team member groans. "We gotta change this." They cheer when Mark finds the logout button, now hidden in a drop-down menu, without a hitch.

Feedback from the testers can have a big impact. An example from the current redesign: moving the notifications menu—where users can see who has commented on their content—to the top left of the page brings a 10 percent increase in clicks. With the average Facebooker now spending more than 55 minutes per day on the site—and its revenue tied to user engagement via advertising—every tweak counts.

There is a limit, however, to how closely Facebook listens to customer feedback. Although the site may feel like a democracy, it's decidedly not one. As compared to oligarchic Digg.com and mob-ruled Twitter, Facebook has always been an authoritarian state. Facebook initially limited access to specific college campuses, which won its first wave of diehard users. Individual Facebook users are still allowed a maximum of 5,000 friends, even though Twitter has shown the value of letting Ashton Kutcher have 4.5 million followers. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has a vision of Facebook as the single, immaculately organized register for all of society's interactions. He thinks this is an essential good; he's even said that Facebook can help deter terrorism by enabling Middle Eastern youths to make connections with the Western world.

So as Facebook continues its ascent to 1 billion members, Zuckerberg is not going to let users miffed about design decisions stand in his way. Tactically, he's operating from a position of strength. Social networks are far stickier than, say, news sites; if users don't like a redesign at CNN.com, they can always switch to MSNBC, but they're less likely to ditch Facebook after cultivating a circle of friends there. Even if users dislike the new-and-improved Facebook, they'll keep clicking.