If it ain't broke don't fix it...

We all have changes we'd like to make to our favourite websites to improve our experience. And when sites do make a change 9 times out of 10 it is a good thing.

In my experience, Amazon is a great example of a site that makes improvements in increments. It's only when you think "ooh that was easy!" that you stop for a moment and realise they've made a change. This is a good way to update your site: visitors get the comfort and reassurance from a consistent user experience whilst you tweak problem areas. An additional benefit is that small, isolated changes can be more easily tracked to check that they really did make things better. You won't find a site owner that doesn't smile at proof of improved conversion rates or decreased exits.

The flipside of this seems to be the constant tinkering that Facebook just loves to do. They seem obsessed with their homepage and driven to change the layout every 5 minutes. They claim each version is "simpler", but is it really? I can always see that they've moved stuff around but I usually can't tell they've actually added anything or taken anything away. Their aim seems to be for me to be able to micromanage my content but is that really making it simple? Simple means most of us can use/understand something without lots of instruction. The general response to a Facebook homepage update is "why?" so whatever their is aim they don't appear to be succeeding.

One change that really riled me was when the main homepage listing had two options "Status" and "News Updates". I had no idea what the difference was. Even clicking on the two options showed different content but not different enough for me to see how they had been filtered. So what is the point?

This latest change has "top news" and "recent". Who is the importance of the news rated by and by what criteria? I'm not aware how I'm rating importance and it's supposed to be a list of information from my friends! So like the last change I'll stick to viewing the "most recent" and scrolling down until I find content I've read before. Add to this that they've moved the search box out of its natural home in the top right hand corner (which always gets me up on my soap box) and I'm driven to write a blog post in irritation and dismay!

So this is my plea to Facebook: by all means improve your site but back away from the homepage for a while and leave it be. How many "Change Facebook Back to Normal!" groups do you need before you realise the users think it works fine the way it is? Aren't we the ones all these changes are actually for?