Facebook Motors

I'm guessing a lot of you use Facebook, and if so you probably notice how they change the design and layout of the site about every six months or so. Now, I love Facebook and I use it constantly as a break from drawing since I sit at my computer all day, and I always end up finding my way around their changes pretty quickly, but the changes themselves are usually very puzzling to me. They aimlessly move icons from one side of the layout to the other, make several ways to access the same feature for no reason other than cluttering up the interface and adding confusion, and then bury other features into specific pages where they don't seem to belong. I'll admit, when they first started this trend it bugged me simply because I was used to the original layout, and most people don't like it when you mess with something they're already fond of. But at this point it's not so much annoying as it is confusing. They seem to have no real aim with the changes they make other than being bored with how it looks.

To an extent I understand this, because I know there are times when I look at this site and think "Should I change something? Would it be easier to use if I did it like this? Why did I ever think that looked good?" It just comes from being in charge of a site and looking at it so much that you start to doubt yourself. I realized after a while that you can drive yourself crazy doing this, as it is easy to become overzealous when really you should just leave things alone. The people who run Facebook don't seem to have figured this out yet.

I was trying to explain these points to a friend the other day and I told them that it would be like if somebody changed all the controls around in your car every six months with no added functionality. That put this image in my head, so of course I had to waste some time making it in Photoshop. Click the image for a bigger view!