the tindog coffeehouse

Facebook is rolling out some pretty significant design changes to its profile pages beginning in June, breaking the single-page 2-column profile down into multiple tabs.

Per CNET:

The redesign, a preview of which was released Tuesday night, slots member information under five new tabs: personal news feeds; profile information; photos; applications; and a customizable page.

As part of the redesign, Facebook is dramatically playing up the role of its News Feed, which will be the anchor, or first tab, of the new member home page.

(More coverage here and here [with more screenshots].)

Having done a little web design over the years, I can appreciate the desire of developers to both clean up the often chaotic nature of many people’s profiles as well as allow for greater scalability. You want to give users the ability to clutter it up as much as they’d like while still making it usable. But I also know that people can be very resistant to change, and I think this redesign is a big enough change to really tick some people off.

That said, while it is a really big change in the functionality of the site, it seems like it would be pretty easy to get used to it. And actually, from the screenshots I’ve seen, I think it’s a huge improvement over the current design.

My only gripe is that I don’t think it goes far enough in giving users more flexibility to customize it to their liking. What about reordering the tabs? What about adding or deleting tabs? What if you want to stick with the old design? It would be nice to give users more options. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.