Facebook Has A New Look

Most of you that are members on Facebook — which is almost everyone I know — have realized by now that the popular social networking site has released a bunch of new changes to their look to make the site more visually appealing and easier to navigate. Judging from the overwhelming majority of status messages I saw yesterday, the shift to the new navigation wasn’t all too intuitive for a large portion of users.

That being said, I do think that the new look for Facebook is nice, and the new site architecture and navigation structure makes sense. People are just wary of change. In general, it sure looks like a whole lot of thought has been put into the development of the new look, and pretty much every change they’ve made that I can think of is relatively positive. Except for one.

My new beef with Facebook is in how they are managing the reply box for messages in your inbox. As you can see by the image below, after typing your message reply, you’re faced with three options: Send, Back to Inbox, or Delete this Thread.

Now, I know this may be a petty concern and doesn’t really matter to most people, but what I can’t understand is why “Back to Inbox” is getting the same primacy on the page as the “Send” button. If someone has gone through the effort of typing out a reply, they are most likely going to be looking for some kind of ‘submit’ button to send out that reply. They’ve done the right thing by making the ‘delete’ option small and unobtrusive, but I argue that by placing the ‘cancel’ option so close to the “Send” button, they are going to have a lot of angry people who will lose their long replies.

My suggestion: move it below the main interactive area, or above the text entry. Just anywhere away from the “Send” button. And my rant for the day ends there.