1. Music pages need a prominent and centered Music Player. For all the fail of Myspace the one thing they got right is that a band’s page is about its music. The first thing front and center needs to be a Music Player. Instead we get a half-assed music player option which either has to sit quietly in the bottom left hand corner below the fold, or on the Boxes page (if you make Boxes page the default), but then your page looks fairly stupid, because the rest of the good content (Wall) is elsewhere. So – a very quick and dramatic improvement would be to place the Music Player box right at the top of the Wall tab, so that visitors can hear the music and read the news and talk with the band at the same time.
2. A Page’s administrators need a way to get a solid news stream from the page including all comments, likes, and etc. Without this feature it is difficult to communicate with fans. I run a page for my photography on facebook, but I find there is no good way to get all the comments. Instead I have to notice that someone commented, then find the photoset and look at the photoset’s comments to find the actual comment. There is no good way to know that someone’s written on the page’s wall either, unless you have the wall display in Page + Fans mode, and physically check back. A page can only be an effective tool if it enables the administrators to communicate with the people, but without a feed it’s nearly useless.
3. RSS. Come on facebook, it’s 2009! What is the excuse for not having an RSS feed for the page? What’s more, several places on the site have very carefully hidden RSS links (such as Notes), but they don’t even bother putting in the proper HTML LINK element to get it to show up in the browser’s url bar. Get with the program, please.

I don’t doubt that facebook’s engineers are busy cooking up the next redesign and improvement, but I think that if facebook wants Pages to be a successful tool for businesses, bands, and other commercial-ish entities that are starting to make facebook their home, then that area should be their next target for a redesign and rethink.

1. Fitts’s law. When I click to open a new tab, I previously had immediate visual feedback that this had occurred. Now I have to look past two additional rows of screen real estate (the shortcut bar, and the url bar) to spot the change. I have already had a few times where I command-clicked a link to open in a tab and had a bit of trouble spotting that the tab had actually opened. Not only does it affect the distance my gaze has to travel, but also my mouse, when going from page content to clicking between tabs I now have to pass two additional rows.
2. Inconsistency. Up to the release of Safari 4, all Mac applications had a uniform title bar. The top line of the window was reserved as a place to display the window title. Now the top line is taken up by tabs, making this application behave differently than every other. Not only is this visually inconsistent, but if you click the corner of a tab you can end up dragging the tab instead of the window. You can also (with admittedly small probability) land on the close tab icon when trying to drag the window, which will not enable you to drag at all. While both of these events have small target areas, and thus low probability of being hit, the fact that it’s possible makes it a worse choice for usability.

Why did they do it? I am guessing that eliminating the standard title bar and using that real estate for tabs enables us to gain about 25 pixels more vertical space for actual page content. But I don’t think 25 pixels of content is a fair tradeoff for the usability problems introduced by the change.

Update: Restore your sanity:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

I’m really happy to see that the Rails team and 37 Signals are making this move because it will force Lighthouse to become an even better application as it meets demands of many projects that are sure to follow Rails.

Too many teams put up with products that have terrible usability like Bugzilla because many programmers tend not to think about usability as an important factor. We are used to command line interfaces and white text on black backgrounds. But believe it or not, using something like Lighthouse over say, Bugzilla, boosts your productivity because it is well designed and lets you get to the information you need more quickly and with less frustration. That said, Trac is still many levels above Bugzilla in usability and design so if you’re using an in-house product, I don’t know of many better ones.