Facebook COO on redesign: Still figuring it out
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, says the company's still not sure why the recent redesign process irked so many of the Web site's users.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)"In terms of what went wrong with the redesign, we don't know yet," Sandberg said during a Q&A session at the Global Technology Symposium held Thursday at Stanford. But she added that the percentage of users giving the redesign a thumbs down was smaller than previous changes to the site.
"As a percentage of our users, this one is much less than before," she said.
She also offered a backhanded compliment to Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook considered buying last year.
"What's interesting about Twitter is that they are a very good company doing one thing very well, which is real-time update," she said. "We are, by far, the largest photo-sharing site on the Web...Similarly, we are larger at doing what Twitter does. We think what they're doing is good. Our redesign is not in reference to them--nor was our redesign in reference to Flickr."
Separately, Sandberg said that the economy has not reduced advertising revenue. "We are growing our revenue. We are growing our advertising," she said, without getting into the specifics.
Update: Following the publication of this post Thursday afternoon, Sandberg subsequently sent me the following note, which I am including with her permission:
I appreciate your story and want to clarify what I said at the Stanford conference. Our recollection is that an audience member suggested in a question that Facebook had a flawed redesign process, and I responded that it was too early to tell if it [the new home page] was flawed at all. Consistent with how we have been speaking about the new home page, I absolutely did acknowledge that some of our users are upset and we are listening to them. And as announced on Wednesday, we've made changes in response. Facebook is always iterating on the site and we regularly launch new features and make changes along the way, often incorporating suggestions from users. In fact, we don't regard the process as a flaw at all. We believe the level of engagement of our users and the feedback loop we've created gives Facebook a unique competitive advantage.
Charles Cooper has covered technology and business for more than 25 years. Before joining CNET News, he worked at the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet. E-mail Charlie. 
Your argument only makes sense if you assume that everyone who didn't vote like the new design. But where would you be getting that sort of data?
They're obviously scared of what's going on. They went from "we don't care" to "we don't know why this is happening" in less than a week.
Maybe you should stop crying about what other people do and get outside. It'd sure make a lot of other people marginally happier.
My family is spread out over 6 states. California at one end, and Florida at the other. In between we have folks in the midwest, the mountain region, and the south. I am not sure that our use of facebook to keep in touch with the whole family, daily if we wish, has anything to do with how active we are. Nor are we a group known for esteem issues. Many of us even have tans! Facebook has connected everyone from teen-aged cousins to parents/aunts/uncles pushing 60 - and has increased our interactions considerably. So far, all still leave their houses regularly to live normal productive and active lives. I don't expect this will change because of Facebook.
Don't worry Voice - we still like to see each other face-to-face as well, but find that the thousands of miles between us make that problematic.
Can't you really tell what's going on? Why fix it when ain't broken?
Gee! The last redesign was already not very useful as the original, the new one is even worst... takes forever to load a page or to refresh a page...
Don't tell me I need even higher internet speed, since I'm already with Comcast 12Mbps or something....
the problem is that they've outsource the coding to who knows where, and the coding quality is just freaking low....
I remember my days as system administrator, webmaster, web developer, no matter how fancy you're website is, you have always calculate and consider the end-user internet connection, you can't expect everybody has the latest speed, so, the challenge was to write good codes, that'll perform pretty fast and reliable...
There are so many methods that I wonder how come Facebook hasn't figure it out yet....
Stupid.... and consider these guys (founders of Facebook) went to Ivy League....
If facebook can't figure out why this redesign irked their users, they aren't paying attention to their users OR their product. The redesign disabled or suppressed several well-liked and often-used features, including: suppressing thumbnails when posting a link, choosing the size of the story posted to your wall, prioritizing content from specific friends. And it introduced usability issues by posting application stories separately rather than grouping multiple entries into a single story, hiding the "post a link, photo, video, etc." dialogue, hiding the "import a feed from another source" dialogue, removing the ability to edit your status by clicking on it. And they added an arbitrary, Twitter-like character limit to status updates / post comments.
If this redesign has truly received less negative feedback than previous redesign efforts, then why is facebook taking such quick action to make changes? Historically, they've waited several weeks to make changes, if any were made at all, to give users a cooling-off period to adjust to the changes.
Given that facebook has already reversed some of the changes - specifically the character limit on status updates and the ability to suppress the thumbnails on posted stories - among others, I suspect that facebook knows EXACTLY what they did wrong, and what they need to do to address it.
And that bit about not being a response to Twitter is total BS.
I wish facebook would hurry up and outgrow this teeny-bopper identity crisis and figure out a sound business strategy that isn't founded on knee-jerk reactions. Maybe then they can figure out how to monetize this member base of 175 million users instead of having to scramble to borrow their way out of debt.
Dr. Tantillo, who has a <a href="http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv" target="_blank"> marketing blog</a>, pointed out that Facebook could have at least done test runs of the product to get feedback..or take the advantage of free and voluntary labor by allowing users to contribute under a wiki sort of setup. Here's a <a href="http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/2009/03/22/brand-winners-and-losers-obama-and-facebook.aspx" target="_blank">link to his full post.</a>
Give the people what they want, and change it back, PLEASE :-)
Number one rule: you do not fix something that is not broke. Ask anyone.
Number 2: Everyone loved it as it was for the most part. We all knew what we were doing and how to operate the system.
Number 3: I am a lot of the folks I talked with say that it would have been nice to spruce our pages up like myspace.
The way it is now I am almost ready to leave.
Hope you take this in the way it is intended.
Nelson E Bardal
- by Len Bullard April 2, 2009 7:37 AM PDT
- The first real body shock to the Facebook users or any social network user comes when they try to move to another service and lose the connections as well as the posts. Welcome to the Change of Gig.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(28 Comments)Others keep up multiple accounts which is not a good hedge but if using the social network for personal branding and releases (say artist), stereo over mono.