New media users often like old look

Jon Wiley, the lead designer behind Google’s home page, is used to taking heat any time he fiddles with the search giant’s iconic stark-white design — no matter how small the change may be.

Early on in his tenure, in the fall of 2009, he came up with a simple tweak that he thought would have a major effect on user behaviour. He decided to make the search box wider. No big deal.

“It seemed like an obvious thing to me, this is the place where our users are having dialogue with Google. You don’t want to be interfacing through this very tiny window. So I made it bigger,” Wiley recalled in an interview.

The change was not apparent to all users immediately, but once tech bloggers noticed, the negative feedback, which Wiley has come to expect, even for the most trivial of tweaks, started hitting the web.

For web designers, particularly those working for large, popular sites that have legions of repeat visitors, it’s a major headache: It seems there’s no pleasing an audience of web surfers who are perfectly content with the status quo.

“I think any design change I’ve ever made there’s always someone, whether in Google or outside of Google, for which that change is controversial,” Wiley said.

“Every single time I make a change to Google’s search there’s probably a group of people larger than my hometown (Austin, Texas, population 790,000) who are grumpy about it. But conversely, t here’s a huge number, a much larger number of people, who are pleased by the change. (Although) maybe not initially.”

Perhaps no web entity has faced more design-related criticism than Facebook, which sees unrivalled user revolts just about every time it even hints at changes.

A few months back, when Facebook began rolling out its new Timeline design for users’ profiles, the reaction was predictably combative. Nearly 44,000 members supported the Timeline Sucks cause, 37,000 got behind I Hate Timeline and almost 31,000 others joined Undo Timeline.

Still, those are tame numbers compared to the backlash in 2006, when Facebook launched a controversial new feature: the now-familiar news feed of posts and updates from a user’s friends.

Back then, Facebook had less than 10 million users — it’s at about 850 million now — and a group called “Students Against Facebook News Feed” attracted more than 750,000 protesters.

Arun Vijayvergiya, one of the software engineers credited with creating the first version of Timeline, said he and colleagues learned from that user mutiny and are now accustomed to facing a wave of sometimes fierce opposition every time something on the social network changes.

“That’s kind of life at Facebook,” said Vijayvergiya, who noted that even his friends and family will occasionally grill him about a change they’d rather not have to accept.

You don’t want to be interfacing through this very tiny window JON WILEY, GOOGLE

DESIGNER