DreamGrow Social Media

Facebook Having A Redesign

GigaOm has released two new screenshots, depicting the forthcoming redesign that’s going to change the look of Facebook a bit. We don’t know when the changes are supposed to happen, but generally, changes tend to happen soon after pictures are released.

So, what has changed?

• The navigation bar has been reorganized, removing the doubled profile link we have seen so far.
• The search bar has been moved to the center, indicating Facebook’s desire to make search more relevant inside the site. If they would also work on it’s algorithm a bit, it may really grow to be a widely used search engine. At the moment, the Facebook search feature is really bad. Even if you know what you are looking for you may end up empty handed. SO, if this is only cosmetics then it won’t do much good as people will probably ignore it, if it gives consistently bad results.
• Facebook has combined some of the menus to an all-purpose “account” dropdown, making it look more logical than before, especially for the newcomers.
• The sidebar is scaled down, taking some design elements from Facebook Lite. Still the functionality of the sidebar is a bit rudimentary considering the amount of space that it takes on the screen. This could be remedied by
• the bookmarks that have been added to the sidebar – a (hopefully) nice way to have a quick access to your favorite applications or pages.

Survey of Online Consumer Behaviour

The 3rd annual survey of online consumer behaviour, by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Tealeaf, highlights the importance of online customer experience (GB Online Consumer Behaviour Study: 2009 Harris Interactive). Some of the fingings are:

53% of all British adults surveyed said that given the economic climate they are now conducting more transactions online than they did in the past year.

77% of adults that have conducted a transaction in the last year saying they have experienced problems. (89% in 2008 and 86% in 2007)

Website problems are having a dramatic effect on the bottom lines of online businesses with 46% of adults revealing they would abandon a transaction entirely after experiencing a problem on the website. 40% said they would abandon and then turn to a competitor, leading to potentially long-lasting loss of revenue.

13% of online adults who encountered issues said they shared those experiences on a social networking site.

About half (51%) of all online adults said social media has influenced online transactions, 52% of online adults saying they used a particular
vendor after reading good reviews.

The nex big thing? 48% of respondents said they had a web-enabled mobile device and of these, 31% have conducted online transactions using a mobile.

The presentation of the findings: