Joe: The news-feed screen was a real challenge because there are a lot of different actions the user can take. It's also the first screen that comes up when you launch the app and there's some risk that people won't explore much beyond that screen. So I wanted to make sure that the top actions were accessible without cluttering up the interface. I went through many versions of that screen; it was definitely the biggest challenge.
Figure 7-25. The news feed's evolution for Facebook 3.0, from left to right. Early versions included extra interface chrome for filtering news feeds. The final design (right) tucked the filters behind a button at the right side of the navigation bar, freeing space to anchor the status and picture controls in a toolbar at the top of the screen.
You can filter the news screen to show updates from different sublists, and I had to figure out a way to squeeze that in there. In the second generation of the app, the filters were much more prominent. I got the sense that filters weren't being used very much, so I decided to tuck them away behind a button in the navigation bar. That let me get rid of the bottom toolbar and fix a toolbar to the top of the screen for updating your status or uploading a photo. I've seen a lot of apps that have too many rows of fixed navigation, and the part of the app that's actually content is uncomfortably small. You shouldn't have more than one row of controls on the top and a row on the bottom. Otherwise, it's too much chrome. There are just way too many apps that I use that drive me nuts with that.