Wowza, Facebook just turned 6! That’s really old. It’s even older in the sense of social network years (whose ratio to calendar years must be something like 11:1). And, like any good cougar vying for young’uns, it celebrated the big day with a face lift to its homepage.

My account rolled over to the new homepage today; it’s all about navigation and accessibility this time around:

• The left column menu has been souped-up into what Facebook refers to as a ‘dashboard’ which makes it much easier for users to find and access content, applications, pages and groups. (You may recall that in the last iteration this was accessed via a menu hidden in the far left side of the bottom toolbar.)
• The global navigation puts a more prominent emphasis on notifications, new friend requests and messages. (But, you mightn’t notice this unless there’s something new for you to see, in which case the button is highlighted). The search input box is huge! …And sits front and centre.

The last redesign was all about the stream; as Facebook’s response to Twitter, it highlighted the latest content in real-time. However, there was major backlash (weird, that never happens) with the main gripes being clutter and lack of user-friendliness.

This latest layout seems to be more in line with traditional web design… could it be that 6 years of wisdom has taught Facebook to put more thought into good old fashioned usability than looking slick? A logical idea considering that baby boomers and seniors are Facebook’s fastest growing segments.

[...I guess that means I should probably take back the whole “vying for young’uns” part.]

Ham? Maybe.

Wine? Quite possibly.

Limited strenuous exercise? Almost certainly.

There are a number of reasons why my fingers might feel fatter in 2010, that’s “twenty ten”  people, not “two thousand and ten”. Stop wasting good syllables. A problem shared is a problem halved, so I decided to discuss my condition with a few close friends. Turns out a number of the folks I surveyed were also suffering from podgy digit disorder. After much contemplation we uncovered a common factor in the way we all behaved over the Christmas holidays.

We had all spent more time playing with our iPhones. From DoodleJump to Tweetie we’d all been tapping, swiping and pinching far more than your average working week and it was starting to have physical effects. Or so we thought. Why else would we be tapping a back link when we were trying to hit the search field?

Leave enough space between action taps - One of Bill's "8 Rules of Thumb" (source: How People really use the iPhone - Bill Westerman)

It wasn’t until I stumbled across Bill Westerman’s presentation – How People Really Use the iPhone that I started to think maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe it was my phone, or more specifically the application’s user interface design. Maybe all of my additional holiday usage was starting to uncover flaws in the way some iPhone apps were designed. Turns out Bill’s study uncovered a number of common usability issues experienced by people when trying to navigate a series of common apps.

These common issues have formed Bill’s “8 rules of thumb” a great checklist for iPhone application planners and developers.  Just as no serious web project would be undertaken without a strong planning, prototyping and testing cycle neither should the brave new world of phone based application development.