SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2010
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Facebook’s deliberately nondescript design The case for a better Facebook
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films: “The best score is the score that you don’t notice, that complements the movie experience. When you start to no- tice the score, it’s distracting, and that’s a bad thing.” It’s the standard function-over-form argument, and it’s not without its mer- its. But it doesn’t have to lead to design that’s simply absent, or asleep. Classic modernist buildings — or Apple’s elec- tronics — can work well and look great at the same time. Their look actually helps us marvel at their functionality — a big difference from the drabness of Facebook. Every time an object or image gets produced, “artistic” choices unavoidably get made — and those choices should al- ways fall on the side of visual signifi- cance. Every object we see ought to rec- ognize its duty to make seeing a better, more important experience. Looking good is a crucial function of every man- made thing out there. No design is “just” about what it does, in terms of clicking or spinning or getting us from A to B. Ev- ery visible object is also, in its essence, something to be looked at — a work of art, at least in utero. Aspeedy lawnmower — or Web site —
that looks ugly is precisely half as func- tional, in the full terms of being an ob- ject in the world, as one that works equally well and is a joy to look at. Which leaves Facebook functioning less than half as well as it could. This matters, because the image Face- book presents isn’t tucked away, like that checkbook in your drawer or the hard drive inside your PC. We don’t glance at it to get elsewhere, as we do with Google. It is a virtual living room where we spend hour after hour with our “friends” — and it might as well be decorated with an “Employee of the Month” display from your local savings and loan.
Efficient ugliness?
“What we’re trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communi- cate, get information and share infor- mation. We always try to emphasize the utility component,” said Mark Zucker- berg, Facebook’s founder, in a Time magazine Q&A. Mosseri, his designer, also emphasiz- es the company’s favoring of function over look. “We’re a very small part of the team,” he says. “There are upwards of 600 engineers at Facebook, and there are 18 product designers. And we are the only representatives of the aesthetic.” (Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham is on the board of Facebook.) But in fact Facebook doesn’t feel
strictly undesigned and utilitarian, the way the Google home page does. Face- book has almost too many visual flour- ishes: Those nesting boxes in varied blues at the top of each page; all those hairlines, single and double, boxing-in data and fields; the little dingbats that stand for friends acquired, comments made, links posted and, of course, posts “liked.”
All this busywork functions as deco-
ration — but only in the way the paint job in a doctor’s office does. It is “visual thinking” — one definition of art and de- sign — but with a dunce cap on. Those dingbats look they’ve come straight out of clip art. The blues and grays are stan- dard corporate crud. (Mosseri says they may have derived, initially, from his boss’s colorblindness. The site has been blue since before Zuckerberg hired his first designer.) The trademark no-caps font of the “facebook” logo is so generic, so nearly characterless, that it could as easily say “instafund” or “pharmaweb.” Google’s home page — Facebook’s ob- vious competition for “most-viewed im- age” status — is also about function rul- ing form. But at least it makes function its true design principle, in classic mod- ernist style. The standard Google home page is basically a box to ask a question, a list of places to get it answered and a button to launch your search. On a white background. (The actual Google logo is hardly good typography, but all that white around it keeps it in its place.) The principle that less is more is a de- sign gesture in itself. It may be a bit stale, but it’s still workable. The Facebook page has neither ges- ture nor principle. It’s just there, like the buzz of your computer’s hard drive. Stephen Doyle, an industry leader who was presented with the National Design Award for communication de- sign at the White House last summer, is willing to cut the site some slack. Mak- ing the old function-over-form argu- ment, he said that “sometimes the job of design is just to get you safely across the road. . . . If [Facebook] had a real wowy design, I think we’d say, ‘Get out of here, Facebook.’ ” He referred to the site as “a kind of cellophane container” for all the homely stuff its users stick in it. “It’s hard to design when you have absolute- ly no control over the content.” But then, studying the site more closely with his design professor’s hat on, he finds that cellophane to be messy and covered in gunk. “All those little
icons through the text are pretty darn annoying, and you want to brush them away,” he says. He’s also not a fan of the boxes and lines that clutter the page: “It’s very noisy. It could be streamlined.” As for Facebook’s color choices, “the world’s favorite color is blue . . . to me that means that [good design] should be not-blue” — it should distinguish itself, rather than sooth us into a coma. If Facebook is really a vehicle for its users’ identities, Doyle wonders, “why does my Facebook page look the same as your Facebook page? Why doesn’t my Facebook have a fake-wood surround? . . . Your image choice is completely dif- ferent from mine, so why do we both have a blue box on our page?” Those blue boxes, and all the visual noise they bathe in, end up having an important effect, he says. “Which shoes you’re wearing always changes how you stand, and how you feel.” Facebook’s home page is wearing tennis shoes, Doyle says, “with Velcro. It’s probably time to change them.”
‘The purest form of evil’
Here’s a really spooky observation: No one seems to notice. The massive Design and Applied Arts
Index, which searches more than 500 magazines and journals, doesn’t yield a single article about Facebook’s design. When Doyle did his Facebook critique for us, you could feel that even he, one of the country’s top designers, had never really looked at the site that popped up every time he checked his feed. It’s almost as though, in the process of
using Facebook, our eyes and mind don’t even notice it’s there. “Social networking should be de- signed to help people connect without feeling that a layer of technology stands in the way,” writes Bill Moggridge, direc- tor of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt design museum, in a book called “De- signing Media” that was published last month. (See sidebar to read more of his defense of Facebook’s design.) Moggridge might be right, if we lived in some ideal, Vulcan-mind-meld world where true transparency could be achieved. If we really couldn’t see the Facebook page, an art critic could hardly complain about its looks. Down here on Earth, however, every time we “just” want to use an object, we also have no choice but to take in its visuals. With Facebook, the kind of “transparency” that Moggridge imagines seems just an- other word for corporate blandness. There is a complex visual interface in- volved with using Facebook, but the goal is to keep us from caring about it — and getting us to care is one feature of any decent work of art, or of any object that stops to consider its own place in the world.
Or maybe the point is that, if we don’t care too much about Facebook’s design, its content gets a free pass, too. You could say that Facebook’s mind-numb- ing design is meant to keep us numb to fussy distinctions such as those between “friends” and friends, or between “lik- ing” and liking. I wouldn’t be the first to feel that
there’s something chilling about Face- book’s ability to cloud our minds so we barely even see the screen we’re looking at. “I am absolutely convinced that Face- book is the purest form of a certain kind of evil that we have in our collective cul- ture right now,” says Paddy Harrington, design director of Bruce Mau Design, one of the world’s most prominent and forward-looking firms. (Culture-savvy clients have included Disney Hall in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as Zone Books.) Harrington says he’s been a heavy
Facebook user, and is trying to kick a habit he likens to drugs or nicotine. The site, he says, feeds you little doses of in- formation about your so-called “friends,” one at a time, until you can’t seem to do without those snippets of data. “[Facebook] is so much about an addictive behavior, you’re quickly sub- sumed into the experience, without see- ing the visual expression of the thing at all,” Harrington says. (You can read his attack at length in this article’s sidebar.) Facebook, he says, has “become less about my friends, and more about the experiences of my friends. . . . In some ways I don’t even care who they are or what they’re saying — I just need that small reward” — the reward of getting something, anything, out of those friends, one update at a time. You don’t go to Facebook, that is, for the quality of its content. You head there for its quan- tity and its never-ceasing supply, reli- ably delivered, almost like a morphine drip, by its generic design. Any really fine design — any image at
all worthy of the eyes of half a billion viewers — would aim for more than soporific neutrality. It would try to wake its viewers up to the thrills that can come with looking.
gopnikb@washpost.com
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM To add your opinion about Facebook’s design,
go to
washingtonpost.com/style.
“We actually spend time designing the lack of presence. Would we want people to say, ‘This is something beautiful,’ or
‘This is something well-executed’? — Adam Mosseri, Facebook design manager
Your real friends This grid provides images only of “the people you most want to keep in touch with and care most about,” Harrington says. The rest of the page is about contacting them.
Hunting for details The numbers by your friends’ pictures tell you how many updates they’ve posted since you last took a look. The color of those numbers might signal what form those updates take: videos, links, photos, etc. But you have to choose which friends you want to check in on, one by one. Their updates don’t all pour in automatically.
Keeping in touch This is the heart of the BMD redesign. It invites you to come into real (or at least virtual) contact with the people you care about. The picture would change to reflect what your friends are up to when you try to make a connection; some friends might even choose to make this a live feed from a webcam. Or it might be up to you to initiate the contact — by voice, video or text — by clicking on one of the buttons below. Then, if you’re turned down, at least you know who your real friends are.
Paddy Harrington is creative director of Bruce Mau Design. A longtime Facebook user, he voiced reservations about the site’s design in a phone call from his office in Toronto. This is a condensed version of what he had to say.
I’ve been a member [of Facebook] for a while. And I’m trying to figure out how to get away from it. I think it’s truly akin to trying to break an addiction. And I mean that in the most serious way. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the
neurotransmitter dopamine, and, for me, it’s sort of like the design of the [Face- book] page itself is purely driven by the act of trying to promote the act of seek- ing, and seeking is all about delivering small surprises, which trigger dopamine, which puts people into this happy, hazy place where they feel comfortable. But ul- timately, it’s really detrimental. It has the same kind of effect as cocaine and am- phetamines. So, for me, it’s almost like Facebook is an optimized dopamine trigger system. How do you get as many little surprises, and promote the act of seeking, in as high a concentration as possible, within 1280
by 720 pixels? I open up my Facebook page, and I see
this news stream, and I see people I know giving me little surprises that are com- pletely meaningless. I don’t really care that “chicken-noodle soup stinks.” But somehow it rewards me at some basic neurological level, because it’s a new piece of information that’s related to someone I know. So it triggers a reward, but it’s a completely empty reward. If you look at the development of Face- book pages, with each [redesign], they’re just compressing the number of new up- dates that are visible on one page. If you were to look at [a Facebook page]
strictly speaking as a graphic design exer- cise, then absolutely it’s [bad]. But it feels as though it’s impossible for me to read it that way, because the design has become invisible to the function of the site. [Face- book] is so much about an addictive be-
havior, you’re quickly subsumed into the experience, without seeing the visual ex- pression of the thing at all. It’s utilitarian, it’s functional, it has kind of given up on how it looks. It’s basi- cally a series of windows through which you can experience the content. It’s a Web site designed by engineers. People say that design is how it works, not how it looks. Well, I think that [Face- book] is that in the purest sense. The problem is, the “how-it-looks” part is a key delivery mechanism for any responsi- ble design practice. But what you’re finding here is an utter disregard for that. I think the motivation really is about
refining and distilling the act of seeking, which for me is what makes Facebook the most brilliant or the most evil graphic de- sign experience that exists today. It’s one, or the other.
Back to the drawing board
We invited Bruce Mau Design, a firm famous for its conceptual ambition, to reimagine what a Facebook page might be. To signal that they were aiming at more than a cosmetic redo, BMD’s design director Paddy Harrington and his team left many of Facebook’s graphic details intact. Instead, they took a stab at some new functionality, reflecting their ideal vision of a social networking site.
What’s up, doc? This is what you get when you click on the image of one of your friends. It’s the BMD version of the Facebook “wall,” more or less, but with more of an accent on photos than text. You see only a few “updates” at once, to fend off addiction.
What Facebook is doing right
Bill Moggridge is the newly appointed director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and a leading authority on interactive design. Moggridge spoke about the social networking site from his office in New York. Here is some of what he said.
The thing that matters [in Facebook] is
the way you navigate. The satisfaction that you get, in terms of the design of the interactive behavior, is in how it allows you to go back and forward, and get to the information you want, and not feel in- terrupted by the two-dimensional presen- tation. So I think the 2-D works best [on- line] when it’s actually a little laid-back and rather distinguished, perhaps — not too aggressive, and trying to focus on the things that you can do in a behavioral sense. Google fascinates people because of its
behavioral performance — the fact that you can put in your request, and you can go to what they recommend, and you’re usually satisfied with that. That’s an in- credible technical achievement, but I think it’s supported by a visual presenta-
tion that is extremely laid-back and mod- est, and not at all what you would think was visual for its own sake. And I think Facebook learned something from that. What I’m saying is that the design of the
interactive behavior needs to be the most important thing if the interactive behav- ior itself is the most important thing — which it clearly is with Facebook. Face- book, in order for it to deal with all that complexity of behavior, needs to be de- signed in a way that’s relatively subtle. And perhaps that’s a good excuse for it not being obviously visually full of personality. One of the big differences between art and design is that art is mostly about com- mentary — it’s making a statement that you’re expecting other people to con- template and be moved by, emotionally, or altered by, in terms of their perceptions.
Whereas design is really about solving a problem that makes something more pragmatic, and useful, and valuable or val- ued, and of course you can add qualities of aesthetics to that, that make it also a de- light. At the same time, if it fails on the functionality side, all is lost, whereas if it fails on the delight side, it might still fit into a lot of people’s lives in a satisfactory if not an exciting way. The visual quality may be something
that could be very modest, and still be en- tirely appropriate. You could even say that of Craigslist. Although it’s the most hor- ribly boring typographic exercise you’ve seen in your life, the fact that [Craig New- mark] wants to express that he’s just got a list, and that list is very useful to people, is something that has a design quality about it.
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