Is It Time For A Facebook Redesign?

In a recent article, Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik calculated that people have spent more time looking at the Facebook home page since its creation in 2004, than they have looking at Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” in the 500 years since its painting. The Post then invited renowned firm Bruce Mau Design to conceptualize a Facebook facelift (pictured above) to re-imagine the functionality of the site. BMD came back not only with a much more aesthetically pleasing interface, but also one that attempts to augment the way that we use the site. Their “new look” placed a higher emphasis on images, fewer status updates to moderate “addiction,” and also provided users with more direct ways of getting in “real” contact with their friends through a section of the page devoted specifically to voice/SMS/or video chat.

The idea of a facebook redesign does beg the question of why the site that we spend so much time on is by all accounts incredibly bland and lo-fi? Is the function-over-form argument still valid for Facebook this far along in the site’s life-span?

Bruce Mau Design

The Washington Post: “Facebook’s popularity doesn’t seem to mesh with its bland design”