There's good news this week for Facebook users who've become confused by the frequently-changing homepage, privacy settings, and other interface changes: Facebook has given their help center a major overhaul for the coming year, and the new Facebook help center is imminently more usable than the previous one.

The news, which Facebook announced via their Facebook Blog yesterday, most likely won't get a huge amount of media attention, but it's significant nonetheless: it shows that Facebook is starting to realize that it needs to put itself in the shoes of the average Facebook user when designing every feature on the site, from registration all the way to account cancellation and everything in-between.

The newly-redesigned help center should be seen as a significant improvement over the old one. Here's a brief breakdown of how the new Facebook help center will work as compared to the old one:

• The new search feature will display help pages related to search queries, and, significantly, will match and display help content for other languages if there aren't any results in the user's default language.
• Filters on the left side of the screen to help users quickly navigate and filter through the various types of help content that Facebook provides: user-to-user support, FAQ's, and privacy and safety information.
• Revamped user-to-user support navigation that works different for those who just want to find answers and for those who want to provide answers to other Facebook users.
• Unique permalinks (URL's) for each page of the FAQ, for linking and sharing purposes.

The changes are significant, as we've mentioned, in the fact that they show that Facebook is doing a better job than they have in the past of putting themselves in the position of their users and trying to see the social network from a different perspective. Changes like the unique permalinks are largely systemic, but will allow users to share information much easier than before, when help topics couldn't be linked to and, therefore, couldn't be shared. Giving users the ability to share help information with other users lightens the burden for Facebook and makes it significantly easier for new users to get the help that they need.

Hopefully we'll see more changes from Facebook during the course of 2010 to make the site more friendly for users, who frequently complain about how often the homepage is redesigned and how difficult it can be to find meaningful information in the stream of updates shown on the home page. It'll be a challenge for the world's largest social network to keep things in perspective, as more and more international users join the site, with their own expectations and needs.

You can check out the new Facebook Help Center to see the changes.