Small changes are expected, but I’ve always gone by the motto…”If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”

And what is the deal with hiding the info of people behind a tab? The PURPOSE of the profile page is to quickly learn about people. I’ll probably click that tab on someone one or two times in a millennium… but having that info out in the open and readable like on the old design I probably read most of that info on all my friends when going to their profiles. Nobody is going to click on those tabs on a regular basis… but they do read readily available info regularly.

The FB team is anticipating resistance to this, and they’ve done too much work to change much. So I don’t expect them to do a whole lot unless they see a marked decline in general FB activity across the board. I doubt it will happen, and they’ll feel like this design is a good one based on that. In reality, it’ll really be because people have to use FB because it has become too important to them not to use.

Ryan

Did you perform user testing or any other UCD methodologies to achieve this design?

If you practiced this kind of methods, could you explain a little bit how the experience was?

Next step after that is to have your social context follow you around the Web through the browser itself rather than via contrived Friend Connect magic.

JK. I love the “back to simplicity” idea behind it. We’ll know about the execution soon enough.