Of course, because money is the only criteria that is important to any business. There couldn't possibly be anything else, like a sense of mission or purpose, that could inform decisions.
Once you take outside money, you have to give up the sense of purpose if it conflicts with collecting money.
This is more an issue of optimization versus long term vision. Some firms can act like Apple, ignore feedback, and invent the future. That's very rare. The rest must react to feedback.
This is interesting in respect to @harrf's comment above.
He says, "Given an existing user base, on average 30% will hate any given change to their user experience, independent of whether the that experience is actually worse or better."
I wonder how @harrf's number would play out over time as users adjust, get used to, and accept changes the way many Apple users do. I'm not convinced that designers always know what's best for users, but I do think it sometimes takes a little while for users to catch on to the long-term benefits designers are designing for.
There is only one core product that Facebook has. It's not a platform for anything other than that. Any new features must pass that test, and the implementation of this one didn't.
Zuck is brilliant at many things. But when someone says he's great at product, I raise an eyebrow. Seems to me they A/B tested their way to the top. FB today reminds me of Google 5 years ago. Their 41-shades-of-blue-testing days.
But Google learned to listen to more right-brain arguments so maybe FB can too.
Facebook's biggest shortcoming is that it appears to have no ability to roll out a new product. I would be much more impressed if Facebook were able to crush Instagram, Whats App or SnapChat. It certainly has the resources but apparently not the know-how.
I think you're definitely right that a non-arbitrary number of people fit that description, but I think most are likely similar to me in that I downloaded Instagram because my friends were on Instagram - If Facebook had created a photo sharing/editing app this good directly into their news feed, I kind of assume it would have been a hit. Who knows though...
It baffles me that businesses such as Facebook seem to be driven so heavily by the numbers. If I were the FB product manager given the choice between a News Feed that is pleasant to use, or one that at times feels actively user-hostile but provides better metrics, I would want to have the freedom to pick user happiness over the bottom line, in no small part because I would (I assume) be one of those users.
I can't help but feel that something has gone wrong when Facebook - or any company - will deliver its users a worse product for the sake of few more dollars.
>will deliver its users a worse product for the sake of few more dollars
Its hard - we don't know if its a "few" more dollars, the article and facebook doesn't share this info. If it possibly meant that each user was spending half as much time on facebook, which could possibly meant half as much revenue for the company - what choice do you have?
As a product manager, are you willing to graze half of company because a new feature that is pretty, but costs the company a fortune?
Arguably there are those who have considered the iPhone a worse product because of its locked down nature. Does Apple deliver a worse product for the sake of a "few more dollars?" Even then you have to consider is the App Store ecosystem, the relatively high quality of iPhone Apps, and ease-of-use-through-handcuffs just worth a few more dollars?
Of course, you have to take into account advertising performance. I don't have any figures to back this up, but I haven't seen any to the contrary so I'm going to hypothesise that ads on a really nice site that people enjoy using are going to do better than on a site that's horrible and pisses people off. Plus, the former gives people more spare time to click ads and buy stuff. I don't think the 'more time viewing pages with ads on = more money' is the full story.
I suppose Facebook can get away with it as long as the barriers to competition are high enough. If competition was possible then users would presumably use the site with the best interface.
>>> will deliver its users a worse product for the sake of few more dollars.
When you are operating in FB scale, few more dollars become millions. Repeat 'few more dollars' several times, you have hundreds of millions/billion.
While morally you are correct and that's definitely what a startup should do, when you are large you have managers striving for bonuses, investors keen on getting higher ROI etc. It's not that simple and pure anymore.
Making something easier to glance at doesn't necessarily mean it's better. I think a better design for something like Facebook is something that's more engaging. This isn't search.
Amazon's UI will never be considered beautiful, but it's core strategy of focusing on the numbers has allowed it to accomplish more than 99.9% of companies ever formed.
I'm sure they've sacrificed many redesigns in the name of numbers to get to where they are.
FB could implement a redesign, look cool for another 15 minutes, and then have ad revenue dry up, less money for R&D and acquisitions, look bad in the press & on Wall Street, and then blip out after another "cool" redesign.
To also back up my point, if Zuckerberg and the upper echelon of Facebook think this way, they're probably right, considering they have a proven track record of making good decisions and more insider knowledge than anyone else on the subject.
A depressing thought but important especially if you are running a startup. It's ok for Facebook to take a hit like this and revert but if you spend 6 months at your startup redesigning your product and even though people like it your revenues suffer massively you might not even have time to test and revert back.
It seems Facebook really is going through the Google phases, and they've always wanted to "be Google" anyway. Right now they're in the Google phase of 5-7 years or so ago, when Google was still doing everything by the numbers, even at the expense of UI and UX.
Just like Google of 5-7 years ago, they're also spreading their focus on many projects, and in a few years probably forgetting about them and ignoring them, if they don't turn into big cash cows for them almost immediately. Then expect Facebook to kill a lot of services, just like Google did.
What I take from this is that Dustin Curtis plays Farmville and is a member of a shadowy group named "secret group".
Actually, the question of the piece is a good one. It's really about what you're optimizing for. As every halfway decent manager knows, you get what you measure. Which means deciding what to measure is one of the most important decisions you can make.
So, in this case, do you measure user engagement time for individual sessions? Or is there some sort of "engagement longevity" which might show a better timeline keeps people visiting more often over a longer period of time?
The other possible approach would be to see what could be done to make events and profile pages more appealing to spend time on. There may not be a way to do that if the timeline satisfies people, but it would be worth investigating.
It seems like you said that disdainfully/sarcastically, but if you had metadata about thousands of experiments and the ability to do a meta-analysis on that data; wouldn't you? It seems like a great opportunity to identify potentially destructive trends in the way your company runs experiments.
And there's things you can't measure, like long-term reputation and habit forming. I think long-term reputation is how a lot of good startups become successful against big, organized, optimizing companies.
At the end of the day, data and numbers are powerful. They scream credibility. They shout, "you did your homework!" But they won’t be as effective as they could be if you don't use them wisely.
If you trust your metrics and nothing else, you have to be very sure that your metrics encompass every aspect of the reality you are modelling. If they just tell you about clicks and sales, they might be missing longer-term objectives like user satisfaction and retention.
I've never worked at Google and I can respect the sentiment, but it seems to me that if you are a skilled designer that Google's massive audience and experimental capabilities can cut both ways. It means that you have to prove even the most minor design changes, but it also means that you have the ability to really prove your work is helpful and not fool yourself.
If you make a few small wins you surely can build up the credibility to take bigger steps -- the catch is though in my experience bigger steps never improve metrics anyway and are a waste of time since you end up having to throw more work out. I would kill to be able to run a 0.1% test on a large change and not disrupt things too much, while still getting statistical significance. Few places other than Google seem to have the traffic to do that.
I'd dispute that many design changes can be proven in any meaningful way. There are too many variables, and optimising for clicks on one button might affect all others on a page. It's very hard to measure everything at once, and it doesn't sound like Google tried in this instance.
This sounds contrived. Being the skeptical sort we should all be, there is no reason to believe the sources (if you believe they exist) regarding supposed cynical reasons they didn't proceed with a considered UI.
Maybe Facebook found that people really actually liked the other variant better? Or maybe they were just ambivalent about it, and if we've learned anything about widely deployed social media sites, it's that you need a really, really good reason to change things.
And to add just a bit more on the "contrived" notion: My Facebook feed looks very similar to the first page, with big, colourful pictures dominating my news food. If my network had people posting short twitter-like missives, I suppose it would look like that. Outside of trivial CSS differences, the only real variation is that I don't have the confusing iconography down the left, instead using that massive area of white space for descriptive text.
It wasn't just the style. It would separate content into easy to digest categories. You could pull up a picture feed (from that top-right section) and just see new pictures. It would filter stuff like music/pictures/game shit/etc into categories, and deliver more focused content in each category. The primary News Feed wasn't as cluttered with bullshit. It made it easier to ignore things like game notifications.
Accordingly, we could see the content we wanted to, faster. Which is bad, because we don't forcefully digest as much undesired content as before. Meaning we leave the site faster and don't look at as many ads. And thus, it's more profitable to stick with the shitty News Feed that is essentially your only source of compiled information from your network, outside of group/list feeds that filter content by user, but not type of content.
I was really looking forward to the filter-by-type-of-content direction, but I'm sure it's now something they'll leave in their back pocket, should they start losing numbers directly due to user experience.
Nice theory, but I think Dustin's conclusions are wrong.
I got to use this alternative design on my second Facebook account that I used for app development, while my personal account didn't have it enabled. I really disliked like the new sidebar design. The concept was similar to what GMail has done lately, with text links replaced by only graphical icons. I found it really difficult to remember what each icon linked to, and I'd have to go through and hover over each icon one by one.
My theory (which I think has as much evidence to back it up as Dustin's) is that if the feed performed better in this design, it was because the poorly designed menu made it more difficult to navigate the rest of the site!
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people (including myself) just need the feed. I personally preferred the clean approach because outside of Events, I never need the left navigation. Now it obnoxiously takes up a segment of the page and the main content in the center feels tight especially with the bigger typography.
On the contrary, I don't need the feed at all. I use just the messaging features. I never post on the feed and everything I share is in the private or group messages.
Bog standard Jabber except for the changes they make - group messaging, 'seen' notifications, in line attachments, 'stickers' are all proprietary stuff which a standard jabber client doesn't support, unfortunately.
Their Facebook Messenger for Windows client was discontinued earlier this month unfortuntaely, so I'm back using Trillian and boy do I miss the group messaging feature.
I already never leave my feed—and all they've done by streamlining it is make ads a full third of the screen. Ads for me, a 22 year old, to bulk up, grow my hair back, certain for any male over 55 to like.
If you want to be really depressed about what the future holds for us, try setting your age to 90. I tried that for a while and ended up with ads for 'discreet catheters' and funeral finance.
That's part of it. The other part is that the content is so obviously secondary to serving ads and trying to get you to interact in a valuable way (to them). It's a miserable experience.
This is a terribly pernicious trend in all sorts of software, not just GMail. I really hope that the fad dies out soon, because it's preventing me form effectively using software that otherwise may have been great.
I think it's done to more easily deal with internationalization. Instead of making the design fit the translated text, just remove the text altogether and stick with just the icons.
Well "mystery mean navigation" refers to something specifically where there's little chance of understanding what the icons refer to without rolling over them, much like "mystery meat" in your fridge that you can't remember what it is without opening the tupperware.
I think he's talking within the context of software, you know.
Even within this context, icons have been used for a long time in things like toolbars. But historically they've been quite descriptive of what they do, and often times have been accompanied by a textual description if there's any uncertainty as to their meaning.
Like the earlier commenter wrote, however, we've seen the use of icons really taken to a stupid extreme as of late. This is especially true when it comes to websites and web apps. The icons are often rather abstract, to the point of causing confusion and harming usability.
Even desktop apps have succumbed to this. Look at Chrome's menu icon. In the last version I used, it was a stack of three horizontal lines. At a glance, it's not clear at all what it represents. It's only after clicking it, and seeing the menu that opens, that the connection is made.
Of all the things that inhibit our use of programs, icons are surely the least because after you've pressed them a couple thousand times, I hope you still don't forget them. Text takes up a lot of space.
What you're saying about icons is true, but only if we're talking about desktop software that has major releases only every few years, or software that otherwise uses a very standardized and common set of icons.
That isn't what we see with most web apps these days, including the major ones. There's continual change, including the icons that are used, where they're positioned, and what happens when they're clicked on. If you discover what an icon means and does today, there's a very good chance it'll have changed by tomorrow, if it's even still around.
We're much better off losing a small amount of space, but getting an obvious and unambiguous description when text is used instead of icons.
Also the trend is wrong. Old mobile devices needed icons. But then you have a 1920x1080 screen on a new mobile device, you can read and distinguish truly tiny text quite easily (I'm finding a lot of websites are much better in desktop mode on my S4 these days, for example).
Text works just fine in most applications, because the shape of a particular word is itself iconography.
Only if the iconography is more obvious than the equivalent English text (or icon + text). If it's not, then you might as well be using Egyptian hieroglyphs.
wow that site's still going. I remember reading his book when I first started learning web design. Always thought the bad design on that site was done ironically though..
I wouldn't hold my breath. I think a lot of the reasons we're moving to icons instead of text is because sometime in the next ten years, the majority of all internet traffic will originate on phones, and phones don't have nearly as much real estate to devote to labels as desktop screens do.
When Stack Overflow recently released the new top bar no one could figure out the Inbox icon. I guess office desks don't have inboxes anymore, either. I'm really curious what the next one to go will be. The standard trash can??
Reminds me of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where most people can't actually read and just follow animated icons. "Mediaglyphs" I think it was called.
It wasn't stuck at just the icons, it let you expand to see words as well. It was much better in my opinion and I rarely had it at the collapsed state like his screenshot shows.
I haven't seen this UI, so I'm commenting out of ignorance for Facebook's particular revisions, but anything that requires the user to take an action before seeing the options is going to severely limit the number of users that take the options. In fact, many will never see those options.
Click-to-reveal and hover-to-reveal require manual dexterity, a curiosity to see what's behind a link, and time to discover and parse the new visual information. Making these cognitive demands, particularly on sites where users relax, is going to reduce engagement.
There are metrics and then their are metrics.
If a new design causes the amount of money the company makes to go down... then its not a 'good' design by business standards.
And its more rational to say here are concrete numbers clearly affecting the bottomline vs well our 5 experts think this design is better so we are sticking with it.
... or that beauty doesn't necessarily convert better. We've seen this time and time again with sites like Craigslist and Ebay and recently 42Floors wrote about a similar experience when experimenting with radically different search result treatments.
I really do like the new treatment and I think they should have gone with this and figured out how to recover the revenue stream later. Given how much Facebook traffic is going to mobile instead of desktop, this wouldn't have a large impact over the long run.
This article makes one big unstated assumption: that users wanted the news feed to change. In fact, users didn't want the news feed to change. Users hate change. And when I say that I don't mean that users are stupid and hate good things. Users have good reasons for hating change that's forced on them: it reduces the value of their previous experience and requires extra time and effort on their part; effort that they'd rather be spending on things they actually care about.
Users didn't want the news feed to change, and the users were right.
You make me think of QWERTY keyboards and how they remain the most common format globally in spite of being intentionally designed to be inefficient.
Some people seem to believe in an "ideal world" and let that interfere with interacting with actual reality in a practical way. Things need to be backwards compatible with user experience to succeed. New designs sometimes simply are not that.
On the contrary, QWERTY is a great example to contradict the above comment. If things worked as we want them to, we should have moved to more efficient layouts a long time ago, right? Net productivity would be dramatically higher even if there was an initial lull, and the earlier we had done that the better off we'd be in aggregate.
In other words, the ubiquity of QWERTY represents a failure of the current mode, where "the market" is behaving with an irrational obsession with the short term. Likewise, preserving a worse facebook design indefinitely because it might require effort to adapt to seems obviously misguided.
I suspect that the issue here is what is and isn't better. I don't know if I buy that previous changes that sparked outrage were improvements, and I think it's possible that people really were reacting to liking the new system less, not just that it was unfamiliar.
QWERTY's initial design was for typewriters. To prevent jamming of typebars, commonly used letter pairs were not placed together.
Saying that it was designed to be inefficient is wrong, however it's fair to say that preventing typewriter jams overrode typing efficiency as a design consideration.
There is plenty of evidence that points to it being inefficient, however. Regardless of the various QWERTY origin stories, it's not a very good touch-typing layout compared to Dvorak or Colemak.
Would be really interesting to put a number on "users hate change".
Based on my own experience at a company where we actually researched this stuff, the number I would forward is 30%. Given an existing user base, on average 30% will hate any given change to their user experience, independent of whether the that experience is actually worse or better.
That's probably about right, maybe a little high for hating enough to do something different. I quit using MS Office when the "Ribbon" was introduced, but most people I know just sort of sighed and kept with it.
That's why the team behind the Paper app were smart to make it a separate app instead of a redesign. They know the consistent negative user reaction when facebook redesigns.
I don't know that that was a smart idea actually. The problem is now they are in a precarious situation. They have forked Facebook's UI in a way that makes it incredibly hard to A/B test. How does Paper get beyond being a niche experience? What was the point of building it if that wasn't the goal?
The only thing I can imagine is Paper is meant to be a playground, where they can experiment with new UI, have a place to innovate tooling and the design process, and then maybe roll much less ambitious versions of it piecemeal into the main facebook experience. It's not a bad strategy but it comes with a lot of downsides. For example, they can't really kill it at this point without massive outrage, so it's a maintenance burden for what amounts to an experiment. They also aren't able to sanely compare metrics between Facebook proper and the Paper app due to selection bias, etc.
It is cool though, and they probably did learn alot of tactical skills while building it. The question is can they take what they learned and built and apply it in a way that really levels up the main experience.
There's a subtle distinction to be made here. The argument is that a better user experience was abandoned in favor of a worse user experience that generated more impressions per user.
It might be true that users would have an immediately negative reaction to change; I suppose it's impossible to know for sure. But that doesn't mean that the new design wouldn't have been better at providing the functionality that Facebook purports to offer.
Even if you're right, there's a similar long-term-vision vs. short-term-incentives situation. The overhead of having to "learn" a new system (which is already and would have remained fairly passive and simple to use) becomes less reasonable to hate when amortized over years of improved performance.
I don't really use Facebook much and am agnostic about the extent to which one site or another would better serve users. It's ambiguous to me what Facebook truly sees as its function / purpose anyway, so the criteria is murky here.
But the argument in this article isn't necessarily assuming anything about what users want, rather it purports to know from a design perspective what will ultimately serve them better.
The argument is that a better user experience was abandoned in favor of a worse user experience that generated more impressions per user.
The argument is that an experience that Dustin Curtis liked better was a better experience. Maybe the victorious layout really was liked by more people, just as more people clearly like a 4" (or greater) smartphone screen than 3.5".
I have no way of knowing if the author is lying in his reporting on internal conversations that happened at Facebook, but his argument isn't merely that he liked it better. Rather it's that user testing revealed that it functioned better but resulted in less advertising impressions, and that facebook consciously decided to prioritize the latter.
Not sure, I've seen users kick and scream about change and then after all the fuss dies down they end up loving the product even more then before the change. The trick is knowing when your right. (Example: All smartphones need physical keyboards, Apple was right, how is BlackBerry doing these days?)
Are the users' opinions even relevant to Facebook? Remember, the users aren't their "customers," they're their product. Their actual "customers" are the advertisers. If the new news feed is making their advertisers happy (and bringing revenue into Facebook), then that's what they optimize for.
Not entirely true though. Yes the advertisers are their customers, but their customers need a large supply of the product (the users). In order to keep a consistently large supply of the product, Facebook has the difficult task of finding that middle ground where users are happy using the site and advertisers are happy with the revenue they are making from it.
I can say that I have disliked more or less every change Facebook has made since I joined. I, like a large section of early adopters, only keep my account around because of an attachment to old social connections.
> Users didn't want the news feed to change, and the users were right.
This time maybe (you'd have to look at the stats, not at the ones shouting the loudest). Usually they're not though. Users will complain about every single thing that changes, even if it objectively changes for better. Just look at the bad press Google is getting for... forcing users to use HTTPS.
Sometimes it's because benefits are not immediately apparent. Sometimes it's attention whoring (and ad-revenue for your site). And then sometimes it's just that complaining about how everything sucks is a popular way of doing smalltalk these days. But the truth is, one just really has to ignore what users "want". They'll come around anyway. Ford's faster horses, and the like.
There will always be users who have strong, nonstandard design preferences. For those we invented userscripts and bookmarklets.
The alternate design isn't "performing too well" by not telling you which of your friends are online to chat with, like the current version does. It's just decluttering, and relegating that important function to one of many miniscule, unlabelled icons. It's not "performing too well" by rendering links in the same colour as body text, and making the search function look like a header: it's just making them subtly less obvious, which matters when your users are in the hundreds of millions and some of them really aren't that savvy.
(Possibly it matters even more with casual users who are web-savvy, in that you're missing an opportunity to encourage them to search by prominently positioning the sort of medium white box that makes them think about searching)
Whatever is cleanest and most elegant is not necessarily the most user-friendly design, never mind the optimal design from the point of view of user engagement.
Very good observations. You made obvious to me most of what I did not like in that new design. My first reaction to the look of the new design is that is made each entry much larger filling the screen making the text less noticeable and having fewer posts on a page. A useful design for me will be concise so I can scan more quickly.
The thing that makes me really insane about this approach is how mindless it ends up being. If you're going to abdicate all responsibility to some set of metrics, it's the opposite of thinking. The numbers become a capitalist lullaby that switches everybody's brains off.
If you're going to work strictly by the short-term numbers, you might as well be the bubonic plague. "Good news! We're up 32% in London! Quarterly bonuses for all the fleas, and gift cards for the rats at the all-hands!"
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 75.7 ms ] threadThis is more an issue of optimization versus long term vision. Some firms can act like Apple, ignore feedback, and invent the future. That's very rare. The rest must react to feedback.
He says, "Given an existing user base, on average 30% will hate any given change to their user experience, independent of whether the that experience is actually worse or better."
I wonder how @harrf's number would play out over time as users adjust, get used to, and accept changes the way many Apple users do. I'm not convinced that designers always know what's best for users, but I do think it sometimes takes a little while for users to catch on to the long-term benefits designers are designing for.
But Google learned to listen to more right-brain arguments so maybe FB can too.
I can't help but feel that something has gone wrong when Facebook - or any company - will deliver its users a worse product for the sake of few more dollars.
Its hard - we don't know if its a "few" more dollars, the article and facebook doesn't share this info. If it possibly meant that each user was spending half as much time on facebook, which could possibly meant half as much revenue for the company - what choice do you have?
As a product manager, are you willing to graze half of company because a new feature that is pretty, but costs the company a fortune?
Arguably there are those who have considered the iPhone a worse product because of its locked down nature. Does Apple deliver a worse product for the sake of a "few more dollars?" Even then you have to consider is the App Store ecosystem, the relatively high quality of iPhone Apps, and ease-of-use-through-handcuffs just worth a few more dollars?
When you are operating in FB scale, few more dollars become millions. Repeat 'few more dollars' several times, you have hundreds of millions/billion.
While morally you are correct and that's definitely what a startup should do, when you are large you have managers striving for bonuses, investors keen on getting higher ROI etc. It's not that simple and pure anymore.
To survive, yes. To make the the deepest impact, no.
I'm sure they've sacrificed many redesigns in the name of numbers to get to where they are.
FB could implement a redesign, look cool for another 15 minutes, and then have ad revenue dry up, less money for R&D and acquisitions, look bad in the press & on Wall Street, and then blip out after another "cool" redesign.
To also back up my point, if Zuckerberg and the upper echelon of Facebook think this way, they're probably right, considering they have a proven track record of making good decisions and more insider knowledge than anyone else on the subject.
Just like Google of 5-7 years ago, they're also spreading their focus on many projects, and in a few years probably forgetting about them and ignoring them, if they don't turn into big cash cows for them almost immediately. Then expect Facebook to kill a lot of services, just like Google did.
Actually, the question of the piece is a good one. It's really about what you're optimizing for. As every halfway decent manager knows, you get what you measure. Which means deciding what to measure is one of the most important decisions you can make.
So, in this case, do you measure user engagement time for individual sessions? Or is there some sort of "engagement longevity" which might show a better timeline keeps people visiting more often over a longer period of time?
The other possible approach would be to see what could be done to make events and profile pages more appealing to spend time on. There may not be a way to do that if the timeline satisfies people, but it would be worth investigating.
Sounds like we should be measuring our decisions about what to measure!
[0] https://medium.com/launching-ux-launchpad/385ff833f9c8
http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
If you trust your metrics and nothing else, you have to be very sure that your metrics encompass every aspect of the reality you are modelling. If they just tell you about clicks and sales, they might be missing longer-term objectives like user satisfaction and retention.
If you make a few small wins you surely can build up the credibility to take bigger steps -- the catch is though in my experience bigger steps never improve metrics anyway and are a waste of time since you end up having to throw more work out. I would kill to be able to run a 0.1% test on a large change and not disrupt things too much, while still getting statistical significance. Few places other than Google seem to have the traffic to do that.
Maybe Facebook found that people really actually liked the other variant better? Or maybe they were just ambivalent about it, and if we've learned anything about widely deployed social media sites, it's that you need a really, really good reason to change things.
And to add just a bit more on the "contrived" notion: My Facebook feed looks very similar to the first page, with big, colourful pictures dominating my news food. If my network had people posting short twitter-like missives, I suppose it would look like that. Outside of trivial CSS differences, the only real variation is that I don't have the confusing iconography down the left, instead using that massive area of white space for descriptive text.
Accordingly, we could see the content we wanted to, faster. Which is bad, because we don't forcefully digest as much undesired content as before. Meaning we leave the site faster and don't look at as many ads. And thus, it's more profitable to stick with the shitty News Feed that is essentially your only source of compiled information from your network, outside of group/list feeds that filter content by user, but not type of content.
I was really looking forward to the filter-by-type-of-content direction, but I'm sure it's now something they'll leave in their back pocket, should they start losing numbers directly due to user experience.
I got to use this alternative design on my second Facebook account that I used for app development, while my personal account didn't have it enabled. I really disliked like the new sidebar design. The concept was similar to what GMail has done lately, with text links replaced by only graphical icons. I found it really difficult to remember what each icon linked to, and I'd have to go through and hover over each icon one by one.
My theory (which I think has as much evidence to back it up as Dustin's) is that if the feed performed better in this design, it was because the poorly designed menu made it more difficult to navigate the rest of the site!
I do my FB messaging through Messages on my Mac and the FB Messages app on my phone. Works great.
Their Facebook Messenger for Windows client was discontinued earlier this month unfortuntaely, so I'm back using Trillian and boy do I miss the group messaging feature.
How is group messaging different from MUC[1]? The naming group messaging sounds alike, but I don't know the internals of FBs feature.
in line attachments is also possible[2] - I assume you mean sending files, embedding photos in messages and such?
As for seen and stickers I don't know of a XMPP equivalent, but I am curious as to why MUC wasn't used instead of proprietary group messaging.
[1]: XEP-0045, http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html
[2]: html and/or XEP-0231, http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0231.html
Maybe you'll like it :-)
This is a terribly pernicious trend in all sorts of software, not just GMail. I really hope that the fad dies out soon, because it's preventing me form effectively using software that otherwise may have been great.
You realize that iconography predates all civilization, right?
Even within this context, icons have been used for a long time in things like toolbars. But historically they've been quite descriptive of what they do, and often times have been accompanied by a textual description if there's any uncertainty as to their meaning.
Like the earlier commenter wrote, however, we've seen the use of icons really taken to a stupid extreme as of late. This is especially true when it comes to websites and web apps. The icons are often rather abstract, to the point of causing confusion and harming usability.
Even desktop apps have succumbed to this. Look at Chrome's menu icon. In the last version I used, it was a stack of three horizontal lines. At a glance, it's not clear at all what it represents. It's only after clicking it, and seeing the menu that opens, that the connection is made.
That isn't what we see with most web apps these days, including the major ones. There's continual change, including the icons that are used, where they're positioned, and what happens when they're clicked on. If you discover what an icon means and does today, there's a very good chance it'll have changed by tomorrow, if it's even still around.
We're much better off losing a small amount of space, but getting an obvious and unambiguous description when text is used instead of icons.
Text works just fine in most applications, because the shape of a particular word is itself iconography.
> fad [of replacing text links with icon-only buttons in software UI]
At least for me it made gmail bearable again.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html
I wouldn't hold my breath. I think a lot of the reasons we're moving to icons instead of text is because sometime in the next ten years, the majority of all internet traffic will originate on phones, and phones don't have nearly as much real estate to devote to labels as desktop screens do.
I don't comprehend what you mean by "manual override", nor how saving can have any ethical implications whatsoever.
Click-to-reveal and hover-to-reveal require manual dexterity, a curiosity to see what's behind a link, and time to discover and parse the new visual information. Making these cognitive demands, particularly on sites where users relax, is going to reduce engagement.
And its more rational to say here are concrete numbers clearly affecting the bottomline vs well our 5 experts think this design is better so we are sticking with it.
Don't seem to hear much from the inside since the funding announcement over 12 months ago...
I really do like the new treatment and I think they should have gone with this and figured out how to recover the revenue stream later. Given how much Facebook traffic is going to mobile instead of desktop, this wouldn't have a large impact over the long run.
Users didn't want the news feed to change, and the users were right.
Some people seem to believe in an "ideal world" and let that interfere with interacting with actual reality in a practical way. Things need to be backwards compatible with user experience to succeed. New designs sometimes simply are not that.
In other words, the ubiquity of QWERTY represents a failure of the current mode, where "the market" is behaving with an irrational obsession with the short term. Likewise, preserving a worse facebook design indefinitely because it might require effort to adapt to seems obviously misguided.
I suspect that the issue here is what is and isn't better. I don't know if I buy that previous changes that sparked outrage were improvements, and I think it's possible that people really were reacting to liking the new system less, not just that it was unfamiliar.
Saying that it was designed to be inefficient is wrong, however it's fair to say that preventing typewriter jams overrode typing efficiency as a design consideration.
http://www.economist.com/node/196071
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-t...
Based on my own experience at a company where we actually researched this stuff, the number I would forward is 30%. Given an existing user base, on average 30% will hate any given change to their user experience, independent of whether the that experience is actually worse or better.
The only thing I can imagine is Paper is meant to be a playground, where they can experiment with new UI, have a place to innovate tooling and the design process, and then maybe roll much less ambitious versions of it piecemeal into the main facebook experience. It's not a bad strategy but it comes with a lot of downsides. For example, they can't really kill it at this point without massive outrage, so it's a maintenance burden for what amounts to an experiment. They also aren't able to sanely compare metrics between Facebook proper and the Paper app due to selection bias, etc.
It is cool though, and they probably did learn alot of tactical skills while building it. The question is can they take what they learned and built and apply it in a way that really levels up the main experience.
It might be true that users would have an immediately negative reaction to change; I suppose it's impossible to know for sure. But that doesn't mean that the new design wouldn't have been better at providing the functionality that Facebook purports to offer.
Even if you're right, there's a similar long-term-vision vs. short-term-incentives situation. The overhead of having to "learn" a new system (which is already and would have remained fairly passive and simple to use) becomes less reasonable to hate when amortized over years of improved performance.
I don't really use Facebook much and am agnostic about the extent to which one site or another would better serve users. It's ambiguous to me what Facebook truly sees as its function / purpose anyway, so the criteria is murky here.
But the argument in this article isn't necessarily assuming anything about what users want, rather it purports to know from a design perspective what will ultimately serve them better.
The argument is that an experience that Dustin Curtis liked better was a better experience. Maybe the victorious layout really was liked by more people, just as more people clearly like a 4" (or greater) smartphone screen than 3.5".
Harsh, I know, but that's the reality.
This time maybe (you'd have to look at the stats, not at the ones shouting the loudest). Usually they're not though. Users will complain about every single thing that changes, even if it objectively changes for better. Just look at the bad press Google is getting for... forcing users to use HTTPS.
Sometimes it's because benefits are not immediately apparent. Sometimes it's attention whoring (and ad-revenue for your site). And then sometimes it's just that complaining about how everything sucks is a popular way of doing smalltalk these days. But the truth is, one just really has to ignore what users "want". They'll come around anyway. Ford's faster horses, and the like.
There will always be users who have strong, nonstandard design preferences. For those we invented userscripts and bookmarklets.
Whatever is cleanest and most elegant is not necessarily the most user-friendly design, never mind the optimal design from the point of view of user engagement.
If you're going to work strictly by the short-term numbers, you might as well be the bubonic plague. "Good news! We're up 32% in London! Quarterly bonuses for all the fleas, and gift cards for the rats at the all-hands!"