The early premise for Facebook was a great idea—a great design, speaking of design in the broadest sense. But great design can often be the silent killer, as Bill Buxton writes: «Great design takes hold, gets traction, and takes on its own inertia—which makes it hard to replace. And replace it we must: Everything reaches its past-due date.»

Facebook’s design—really, the design of public and semi-private virtual interaction spaces on the web—is starting to feel like it’s reached its past-due date. And replacing it is going to take much more than flat UI, faster notifications, better animations, responsiveness, bigger and higher density screens, better web standards, native apps, and thousands of other things that we’ve already written about.

It’s going to require us to approach a far more elusive problem, and one that’s at the center of design: understanding humans better.

Nishant Kothary.