Last Friday MediaPost published an article reporting that 94% of users that rated the new Facebook design didn’t like. A few months ago, our CTO Scott Brave published a white paper discussing the seven deadly consumer biases. One of those biases is “The Squeaky Wheel Bias”. Here is a brief excerpt describing this bias:

The most vocal and misleading group of contributors is what I like to call the “squeaky wheels”. This could be those people who simply like to complain. But it can also be any one of us when we have a negative experience. Negative experiences tend to stand out more than positive ones and also encourage us to take action.

After the last design, users reacted similarly. Despite this, the network grew pages viewed per visit by 50% and its user base to 175 million users to be the largest social network. Justin Smith of the Inside Facebook blog said “Even though there are a lot of negative votes in that voting app, I think it’s a pretty self-selecting group of people and not necessarily representative of the entire population.” Justin is spot on with his analysis. 850,000 people voted in this survey, which is roughly .5% of the Facebook population. This backs up the squeaky wheel bias theory which states that “At the end of the day, 99 percent of the population remains unspoken for.”

Personally, I think the new redesign is a great update(although I haven’t voted), so I am glad to hear that Facebook is taking the feedback with a grain of salt.