It began with an image.
With a semi-regular cadency, my news feed gets filled with a round of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook redesigns. The designs are always rich with new interaction models and tons of cool features. They are individually good pieces; conversation starters for what these products could be. What has always frustrated me about these designs is that they’re untethered from the realities of business. Without these constraints, the designs remain purely conceptual.
If you’re going to put out a piece that “reimagines” one of these sites, don’t skimp on the hard parts.
I hate it. You hate it. It’s ugly. It takes away from the visual aesthetic. But those “skyscrapers” and “medium rectangles” (as the IAB calls them) are really important to a company’s financials. How important? As of this writing…
To put this in perspective, a Facebook redesign without advertising is the equivalent of removing the GDP of Iceland from the company’s bottom line. At today’s entry level talent rates, LinkedIn would exchange around 4,000 employees for a site devoid of advertising.
Failure to address advertising creates a very naïve and narrow view of the site. If you insist on forgoing advertising, explain why and don’t leave the ROI argument in someone else’s hands. Better yet, reimagine an advertising unit on the platform; sites like Facebook have enough demand that there is opportunity to bring in interesting and engaging experiences without sacrificing the design’s end goal.
With three distinct business lines and eight different applications right now in iTunes, there is more to LinkedIn than just the homepage, profile, and companies. Looking at LinkedIn redesigns, however, you’d think the entire site consisted of three views. The same can be said of Facebook, where every designer takes a crack at the Facebook profile and news feed, but few remember to include events and groups.
When only a portion of the product gets redesigned, this creates a “design purgatory”: parts of the product that remain in the old design alongside the new effort. I would like to see a redesign that talks about this design purgatory. On large sites, it is unrealistic to redesign everything at once. In a partial redesign, what does the partially modernized parts of the product look like? How will the design create a sense of consistency across both old and new features?
Need a great example? Take a shot at redesigning the emails the company sends. There’s no bigger instance of design purgatory than email.
Big images are awesome when every one of them comes from Getty. Unfortunately, the majority of users are not professional photographers. Unless you are Flickr, 500px, etc, you don’t have enough perfectly focused high resolution images to give away 2/3 of a desktop screen to a beautiful image. And yet, every redesign of a profile seems to emphasize these impossible photographs as the dominant element.
Take an example: the Fred Nerby redesign of Facebook from 2013. It’s visually engaging. The catch? Nothing in the design represents what a real user’s Facebook page might look like. It isn’t until halfway down, at the “Rome 2012” album, we encounter something that resembles real user content: 47 photos taken of a couple obsessively in front of a landmark along with awkwardly lit restaurant selfies.
Since most people are terrible content creators, take a moment and sub out the stock photography for everyday iPhone camera pictures.
The last thing you need to do if you’re going to redesign one of these big sites is answer “why”.
Why does the site need a redesign? Why does it need this redesign?
It sounds deceptively simple, but writing down the rationale for a redesign is hard. Design is a tool to fix a problem, and with no problem spelled out, the whole thing feels like a redesign for redesign’s sake.
A good redesign is tested. It reflects reality. It shows a holistic view. It has real content, ads, and knows it has rough spots. A good redesign also writes the thoughts and decisions down for the next generation of designers to follow in their wake.
So let’s all agree to put the hard parts in.