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Facebook Events Are Awful – By Design

15 points by AHappyCamper ↗ HN
FB events has terrible UX, and their UI is an absolute disaster.

* FB events do not let you filter out online events, so your search results will be full of online events that you have no interest in going to if you're looking for something in-person.

* There is no way to simply browse all upcoming events situated in your local area. Instead, you must add a search term to run the search. What if you just want to see what's going on in town?

* You are unable to set time-based search criteria. E.g. "I would like to look for an event in my area that starts at 7pm and ends before 11pm."

* Results from nearby cities are often included in the search results, polluting the query to the point where it is simply useless.

* The UI is banal and ugly. By comparison, Airbnb's Events UI is thoughtful and user-friendly.

...and yet, FB events are often the only game in town.

When it comes to UI, FB know what they are doing. These are not mistakes. There is absolutely no damn way that they have messed this up so bad.

So the question becomes - why are FB sabotaging their own Events page? The only thing that comes to mind is that maybe FB hates in-person Events because if people are going to in-person Events, then they are not using FB during that time, i.e. lost revenue dollars.

What are your thoughts?

8 comments

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jamesmishra
I think you are overthinking the issue.

Facebook's events UI is heavily optimized for introducing you to events your friends will attend--or for letting your friends invite you to their own private events.

Facebook's events UI has some features for discovering new events where you wouldn't know any of the other attendees, but it's not something they have optimized yet.

AHappyCamper
If they put half an ounce of effort into improving Events, which they definitely have the money for, they would do a great service to their Users, make us happier, and they would definitely make serious money in the process. So why don't they do it?
fatjoe
I think Hanlon's razor applies here
AHappyCamper
Hanlon's Razor - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". I am willing to call Facebook many things. Stupid is unfortunately not one of them.
yhoneycomb
Facebook isn't sabotaging itself so much as it's simply incompetent. It's the same reason why Facebook messenger is so slow that its employees don't even use it to communicate with each other.
AHappyCamper
FB has an almost bottomless budget re time, designers, and coding power. They have UX experts combing over ever pixel on every page. I simply can't believe that they were incompetent re Events.
chrbarrol
I agree Facebook events could be a lot better, but have you considered the possibility that Facebook simply does not see any reason to put resources into improving the feature?

Instead of assuming some conspiratorial theory that Facebook is deliberately sabotaging their own product, I think the much simpler explanation is that Facebook events work "well enough" that Facebook does not see any reason to invest resources into improving it.

Facebook events are probably one of the oldest features on the site, and from my personal experience working in big product orgs, these old, "working" features are often left to rot until the org sees a reason to invest into them again. (Such as a competitor threatening to steal their marketshare) I assume the events team is quite "barebone" if it even exists and Facebook probably thinks their engineers/UX developers are better spent elsewhere.

AHappyCamper
There is every reason to invest in good UX and good UI. For one, FB could monetize Events in many ways. Secondly, I just don't believe that there is a good reason for bad UX.