This is essentially what happened in my group when I was at Yahoo. Our group spent several months on a redesign that made it significantly more modern and easier to use. After it went live, though, this decreased the number of ad clicks by a significant number, and the people in charge hurriedly reverted all the changes back, since they needed to make their revenue numbers in order to make their bonus.
When you are stuck in a company that can't innovate because a shitty site leads to more money due to inertia, then you know you are on your way down. This leads to your best developers thinking "what the fuck did I waste all my time for?" and they will leave in no uncertain terms.
I've actually faced a similar situation, and let me tell you it was hard. Companies like Yahoo exist to make money - or, at least, they must continue to make money in order to continue existing. Like Dustin said,
> "This is truly a nightmare scenario for any CEO: do you take the risk and proceed with the better user experience/product at the expense of short term numbers–with no promise that the better design will actually lead to long-term benefits–or do you scrap the new design and start over?"
Would the simplified, modern design have led Yahoo into a new era of profitability? Maybe. Or maybe they'd just have a nicer site that made less money for a year.
Our team made a site that made less per visitor, but we felt like it was a better-looking and more useful site. We decided to stick with it and work out the kinks, but ~6 months went by without reaching our old sites' benchmark. There was a ton of pressure on me to make it work or admit defeat and revert. I nearly gave in as the stress built, but eventually revenue surpassed the old site. I later learned that I was almost fired over it.
My story has a happy ending, but just barely. I have sympathy for the people making these decisions.
"We survive by breathing but we can't say we live to breathe. Likewise, making money is very important for a business to survive, but money alone cannot be the reason for business to exist."
I don't really see much of a difference. If a company must make money to continue to exist, then I think it's reasonable to say that company "exists to make money." Of course, that doesn't mean is exists only to make money.
Lots of bookstores, cafes, antique shops, whatever, are labors of love. And not only things like that. A bakery---a good bakery!---exists to make good bread. It has to sell that bread and cover its costs, etc., in order to do that, but it doesn't exist in order to make the money necessary to cover its costs. If that were why it existed, it would be easier to abandon the end of making good bread!
The practical difference disappears when your operating margin is 0. When you have money left over after paying your essential expenses, though, you can do stuff. Like, if you're Microsoft and you have 60 billion in cash, you can have a big R&D department that sometimes engages in blue-sky research.
> Companies like Yahoo exist to make money - or, at least, they must continue to make money in order to continue existing.
Hows that working for Yahoo now?
Actually, that's kind of disingenuous. Google optimises for less clicks per user, because Google is a site for people who want to get stuff done.
Yahoo and Facebook are time-wasters. And unlike Yahoo, I can't see it ever transitioning to anything other than a time-waster.
Time-wasters are basically unprofitable (you're getting clicks from people who are looking to kill time, not find a new insurance policy), but that's what Facebook is. Unless Facebook wants to become the new Linked-In (and they don't - Linked-In just doesn't have the market cap), they just have to be a better time-waster.
If Facebook had a lower valuation, they might be able to move to a position where their focus was on serving people doing stuff, not wasting time, but they can't.
Pretty well, considering they are still around more than a decade after they stopped being "cool". They're not trendy in tech circles, they are just a business that makes money.
Yahoo and Facebook are time-wasters... Time-wasters are basically unprofitable
Yeah, unprofitable to the tune of $600 million a year. That's Yahoo's net profit last year.
I swear to god, the blindness of people to anything that's not hip right now is amazing. People assume because they personally stopped caring about something that it must have failed.
That could just be investors / analysts being stupid (either the ones valuing alibaba too highly, or valuing Yahoo too low). But Yahoo doesn't make a ton of money off its core business.
It's still quite possible for them to turn it around. They are really very good at what they, and they have the eyeballs.
IIRC, they were the top destination 15 years back. They were the default homepage in most browsers. From that spot to "just a business that makes money" is perhaps not the best thing to happen to them.
At the same time, I don't think Yahoo is purely money-minded. From what I read, they were the only company which challenged the FISA orders last year (even before the Snowden leaks).
How many others of the top destinations from that era are still around?
Look at Lycos. Excite. Altavista. Even the nominal survivors like AOL are largely shadows of their old selves. Frankly, it's fairly impressive that they've held out. Consider their starting point: Just a directory.
The bubble in retrospect makes them look faded and tired, because they're "only" $36bn today. But $36bn is $36bn...
And being "the default homepage" with an audience so much smaller was a much less impressive position to be in than their current reach.
I can't find any links ("Yahoo finance 2013" is exceedingly useless) but wasn't that $600M partially/mostly from them selling off stakes in things like AliBaba and not from the core business?
No. None of that $590 million came from the sale of Alibaba shares, as the Alibaba sale took place in 2012, not in 2013.
In addition, $590 million is not Yahoo's net income, but their pretax income from operations. In other words, excluding Alibaba.
Here's the breakdown for 2013, in thousands:
Income from operations 589,926
Other income, net 43,357
-----------------------------------------
Provision for income taxes (153,392)
Earnings in equity interests 896,675
=========================================
Net income 1,376,566
Nobody jumped on your "time-waster" comment. I think that's an interesting concept. Is your startup a "time-waster" or a "time-saver"?
2 things about Yahoo:
1) I'm still paying for their email service, and have been for 10 years. Their UI redesigns have been horrendous at times, but email lockin is powerful.
2) I really don't think dominance on the internet should be expected or desired, just because its possible. There's an example below about Yahoo Japan "owning" auctions in Japan. Sure, eBay has cornered peer-to-peer non-local vending in the US (let's not kid oursevelves what "auctions-buy-now" really are), but why should they be the preferred platform in Japan? Yes the internet allows it, but in the end, for a variety of historic and social reasons, different companies will fill different niches in different places, even if the internet looks like one gigantic niche and place. In other words, there is very little benefit seen from dominating auctions in US and Japan. Sure a few people would be able to order items more easily across the Pacific, but that effect pales in comparison to other internal factors. Maybe some local website had a marketing deal with a popular franchise in a certain country and got more popular initially, and then dominated that local market by network effect.
To summarize: I think it's normal to have local companies cornering local markets at the country/cultural level, even though the internet and e-commerce could theoretically be dominated globally. Google and search is a unique case, and expecting all companies to be like them in every market is misguided. I think that leaves a lot of space for Yahoo and many other similar companies to survive.
I also have no interest in using Yahoo, but my (Japanese) wife loves using the Japanese-language version to browse news, etc. I wonder if they are making most of their money in Japan.
Nearly everyone has bought into the utter bullshit that advertising makes the web free. This delusion buries not only the fact that we have made a deal with the devil, but also that the deal really sucks. What we traded our souls for we don’t even get. The web would be both cheaper and better if we just paid for what we use straight up. And more importantly, society would be better. I'll explain all of these.
IT'S NOT FREE
We’re not Facebook’s customers, advertisers are (more on this below). But we are the advertiser’s customers, and the cost of the "free lunch" is simply shifted to the price of the things we buy from them. In other words we still end up paying for the full cost of Facebook (and even more, as I'll get to next). Costs may even shift regressively, to advertised products predominately consumed by those with lower incomes, in which case the poor are subsidizing the better off.
IT'S MORE EXPENSIVE...
Not only are you still paying for the full cost of the Facebook product you use, you are paying for all the advertising overhead: the costs of its advertising technology and infrastructure (huge, btw), the agency and creative costs (Don Draper and company have to pay for the hookers and scotch somehow, not to mention what’s-his-name who basically just lounges in his office barefoot thinking Japanese), and the advertiser's big marketing departments (that often outnumber and outspend the people making the product!).
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
So in addition to the original product cost and the ad overhead costs, you are also paying the opportunity cost of an inferior product (as Dennis Curtis points out in the OP) as well as the engineering costs of figuring out how to optimize ad revenue, because that’s what happens when websites have to design to please advertisers over pleasing us, the users. Dalton Caldwell makes this point comparing Sourceforge to Github[1]. As ergo says in a comment[2], “If the new news feed is making their advertisers happy (and bringing revenue into Facebook), then that's what they optimize for.” As jfoster says in a comment[3], “Ad-supported models untie the relationship between UX and revenue.”
Furthermore, our identities and privacy are bought and sold to the highest bidders. And where do the bidders get their money? From us of course! A double whammy! We're trading our privacy for free product? Bullshit. We get personalization? Bullshit. Personalization means optimizing something for me, not optimizing for the advertiser. Again, we're not the real customer. We’re certainly not Google’s[4][5].
WAIT. IT'S EVEN WORSE...
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Think of the social costs of advertising. The web is infested with misinformation and manipulation. Beside the lying ads themselves, relying on a revenue stream entirely dependent on how many ads are seen severely affects the moral choices of those who decide what gets produced and how its presented. What are the costs of a misinformed and variously manipulated citizenry, of distortions to the free-market?
Knowledge and discourse are the lifeblood of both democracy, free markets, progress. The web, from the little scammy websites to the big brand ones that so many blindly trust, has a huge influence on who we vote for, what we buy, and most importantly, what we believe.
There is no free lunch, and there is no free web. This "free" ad-"supported" web we have is much too expensive.
[4] Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. "They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services," he joked. - Wired, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/computers-big-data...
There was no way for me to buy anything online until I turned eighteen (no longer true now that Canada got with the program and started issuing visa debit cards). I'm very grateful for the opportunity I had to use the Internet to learn and communicate for free.
And it's not just children. How would people in poor countries afford to pay the same amount as a Westerner for access to StackOverflow or a motorcycle repair forum or whatever?
I don't think it's such a clear win to make the Internet for-pay.
I don't think you got what I was saying. Try a closer read. The internet is for-pay; we are paying for it, and there's no way around it. The question is how we pay for it.
In your pre-eighteen-year-old case:
* Most likely you (or your parents) bought stuff from a company that advertises on the web. So you (or your parents) were paying, just not directly. And as I point out, you were paying extra.
* If you didn't buy enough of the advertised products, your internet was subsidized by other users who did. Same for people in poor countries. But these subsidies are wasteful, as the advertising overhead takes a huge cut.
* You still paid for the opportunity costs of an inferior product.
* Most importantly, you still paid for and will continue to pay for the damage to society that advertising and an ad-supported web inflicts. Ads are dishonest and manipulative. An ad-supported web is driven by click-rates, not user satisfaction, so we get the proliferation of link-baiting empty (if not manipulative) content that we all see today.
But you are right in that if we ditch advertising, we need some way of distributing the costs progressively, and make sure that people who have little still have plenty of internet and internet content access.
Advertising is not the worst. In-App purchasing is. It turns the whole thing into endless ad stream. Every purchase confirms the success of previous efforts as ad, then what to do next? hit the f*cking user harder!
Yesterday I was sitting with a friend's young boy who was showing me some math games on a tablet. These are games designed to teach simple addition, subtraction, etc to young children.
What amazed me was how intense the push for in-app purchasing was! Every one of the several games had a popup after each level or activity that would offered some in-game "power-up" for just $0.99 or various amounts. It wasn't just that you could make an in-app purchase, but that the app was very aggressively pushing it. He told me, "my mom says I can't do that", but the "no" button was much smaller and harder to press than the yes button, visually.
His mom indicated that he had made such purchases before, and so far she hadn't found a way (on this particular tablet) to disable in-app purchases.
This is a plague of a problem. Developers who put IAP into their games frequently, in no uncertain terms, try to trick young kids into pressing the "buy $100 worth of database bits with your parents' credit card!" button. It's despicable.
AppLock on Android solved this issue for me and my kids (since any intent that goes to the Play store will get intercepted and challenged for authentication), but it's very frustrating to them to have to try to navigate these screens that have 12 big, bright "goes to the lock screen" buttons and 1 small, uninteresting button that does what they actually want.
I would think you could defund the account...? I am not familiar with iDevices, but with Google I could just remove payment information from my account, and that would pretty much put a stop to accidental purchases.
This is why I donate to PBS. Their content is unrivaled and unimpeachable. What is the name of the app your friend's son was using, they deserve a special place in hell.
The sad truth is if the developer had priced the game at say five dollars they most likely never would have been discovered or if they had the user's conditioning would have kicked in: "Must find free alternative! Dumb greedy developers trying to rip me off, entertain and teach my child for free. FREE I SAY!"
We (as app users) brought this on ourselves, or at the very least we're half culpable.
The day the app store stops being the primary marketing channel for apps the better off we will be.
I stand by my original comment. Yes, developers deserve to make money, that doesn't mean you have to be an asshole, especially when they probably go around claiming to be "educators".
Macroeconomically, it is true that the resource, human, and energy costs of the internet sum to the integrated time discounted expectation of future returns for communication sources (advertisers).
This does not preclude the possibility of mutual growth, though. A system interested in long-term stability will optimize minimally for short-term advertiser revenue, and primarily for long-term attention provider satisfaction.
One counterfactual of the current model that can be instructive is the following. Assume a system whereby all communication is happenstance -- there is no advertising or selective filtration (which is what advanced advertising becomes). Such a system degrades in much the way twitter does -- manual (attentive) classification and differentiation are not used universally enough, people don't sufficiently filter their own attention sinks, and the attention eventually dries up in the vacuum of entropy.
It would certainly be possible to move to such a manually filtered system, but it would require a massive reconstruction of social norms. The best system would be one that could passively or subconsciously negotiate filtration strategies in a decentralized runtime environment. It will need to be spatially collocated with the conscious being, eventually, or the latency will be unacceptable.
Eventually, then, we'll find that such filtration will actively seek out opportunities for novelty or for the satisfaction of latent (either unrecognized or frustrated) desires, and surface them to attention. This is precisely what advertising becomes.
Finally, you are right that we're approaching the equilibrium from an oblique angle, but it is a direction from which we can make progress at every step of the way, and the endpoint is ultimately a fairly ideal state.
I think I can see both sides. If all meaningful stats you are collecting are going down, I think something is definitely wrong. There are basically three options:
1. Fix/revert the update so that those stats increase again. This is probably the easiest/quickest option, especially the revert, but it obviously sucks to have "wasted" time on the updates.
2. Collect new/more stats that you deem meaningful and see if those have increased. This is the one that I like best from the perspective of a lowly programmer who worked hard on the updates, because it provides the possibility that even though existing stats have worsened, the updates are still empirically better. Of course, it's hard to figure out what new stats to look for, and whether or not to deem them truly meaningful. An oversimplified example would be if all you're looking at is ad conversions, maybe you should start looking at user retention as well, because even if ad conversions decrease, a large increase in retention can in the long (or even short) run lead to more revenue.
3. Ignore the numbers on the prediction that the numbers will increase over time. This one is also appealing, but will and probably should be rejected by management.
Something that also needs to be recognized is that "significantly more modern and easier to use" is a subjective claim, and is not necessarily "better" for whatever definition of "better" the company is using.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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??
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The core of Dustin's argument is that Facebook may not have been patient enough; they should have trusted in their beautiful new design and waited long enough for the benefits to bear fruit.
However, it's a cheap argument to make, because the Hard Thing is to decide how many months of crappy numbers are you going to withstand before you admit that your Beautiful New Design in fact isn't any good?
Six months? Two years?
And it's not just revenue you look at. How's overall engagement? Sharing rates? Communication? Discovery?
The article is a shallow snipe; the real issues here are hard, interesting, and unexplored by this piece.
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.
I'll give another way to look at it. Good design is by no means the same as optimal design. A lot of beautiful designs done by talented designers end up being worse than what was before. They might be prettier, but they are very likely worse by many conversion metrics.
Don't think of it in terms of pure design. Think of it in terms of cost. Everything has a cost and sometimes good design's real cost is in user behavior. Pageviews and time on site could go down because people aren't going through so many steps to get to what they want. There are a lot of metrics that aren't that useful without the context of the ultimate conversion numbers for your site/app/product/project.
Facebook and Google are advertising companies. The financial metric they care about is advertising revenue per user and number of users. It's not much different than a SAAS app in that way. Other metrics are important, but that is the metric that pays the bills.
A beautiful design that doesn't improve the core metrics is like a multi million dollar super bowl commercial that flops. Sure, it might be really cool and well produced, but if it doesn't sell your product, you might as well light that money on fire. The net effect is the same.
The underlying assumption being something like "If you're not increasing the amount of money you make, you are of no value"
Facebook says it's values are connecting people and other helpful ideas for a reason. If they created a design that helped people connect more fluidly, it'd still be valuable, even if it didn't increase their revenue. I find your comment a bit cynical and oversimplified.
Well, I don't think it's a completely binary money or UX type decision, but I do know that working at a larger scale of users shifts your priorities significantly.
For example, I worked on a website that would sometimes process as much as a million dollars in donations in a single day for a nonprofit. If the site went down for even a half hour, that could be tens of thousands of dollars in missed donations. That is like someone not getting paid for almost a year.
We had a cool autocomplete feature that went out and due to a bug that made it past QA caused a on of DB queries and took down the server. It was maybe a better user experience, but the way it was implemented would cost too much in reliability for it to be worth it. The team reengineered the concept until it worked at scale.
A lot of hackers I know who aren't working on that scale don't worry about QA or bugs so much because hardly anybody is using their software and it's not mission critical. When you have millions of people touching your software and it is processing millions of dollars in transactions, the metrics that matter are different.
I am sure Facebook cares about UX, but they are a publicly traded company and if a slightly better UX delivers a significantly worse ad revenue number, that isn't just sort of bad for investors, it's bad for the employees job security (and stock value), it's bad for the advertisers who can't get the same ROI on their ad spend, and ultimately it's a little bit bad for the end users because if "good UX" doesn't make money, then over the long haul, Facebook will learn to not invest in "good UX".
I think the scale that Facebook's engineers are working at is a lot bigger than most of us can easily appreciate.
Here's a hypothetical counterpoint to your proposition here:
A search company makes money from ads, which are unobtrusive text links which are clearly separated from search results.
The search company is forever trying to improve metrics, and in this quest, it pushes more intrusive monitoring of users, and the adverts become more and more like search results at the top of their results. According to their metrics, this is a winning move - more and more people are clicking ads, and advertisers love the stats on users.
The search company slowly starts to lose users, because they don't like the privacy issues and the intrusive ads in their search, even if more people click on them.
A few years later, the search company starts to lose its dominance of the field and hence all the money they made from more and more ads is now drying up, but every change they make to increase clicks on ads is actually having a worse effect on usage a few months down the line, even if it helps their metrics in the short term. No-one notices because the users have always been there, and this is not a primary metric or one that is easily correlated with changes.
Was this a good strategy? It was certainly a local maximum, and all the numbers went up, but was it in their long term interests?
I agree for someone like Google or FB the metric which is important is selling ads (that is their business after all), but both companies actually have two sets of users - one set are the users who read the ads, and one set are the advertisers - both are vitally important to their brand and continuing profit. Only one of those is represented in the advert CTR metric, and only one directly makes money, but both are vitally important to continuing profits.
Now you can change your metrics to try to measure user retention, but happiness and satisfaction are notoriously slippy concepts, and people often don't even know what they want before they see it and use it for a while (e.g. users of yahoo or one of the other portals would not have voted for changes to make it more like google), people hate any change, and haters are the most vocal. All those things completely skew any attempt to get numbers on customer satisfaction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
This is the result of placing the burden of proof on vision and innovation. Companies optimize for local maxima at the expense of global maxima because proving that both the mountain exists in the distance and that you can reach it, turns out to be extremely difficult.
And so, in companies like Facebook and Google, it doesn't matter what you know, it only matters what you can prove. Meanwhile your competitors in the market are unburdened by the need for proof and shout down at you from the mountain in the distance when they arrive.
I think the human subconcious mind is capable of levels of pattern-matching and intuitions that manifest as vision: aka something you "know" but can't necessarily explain.
Visions aren't always correct, but they're enhanced by immersing yourself in the relevant context and data to provide your subconscious mind ample time and information to make those connections to generate those "Aha" moments called inspiration.
Richard Feynman described in one of his books the best way to appear like a genius is to always be actively learning at least 3 new unrelated topics, and you will glean patterns and details from everywhere to constantly increase you understanding of these topics, leading to inspiration.
I worked on the design of the desktop Facebook News Feed. Just posted a response to the article here: https://medium.com/p/ed75a0ee7641
Actually, the older version of the design we tested would have been positive for revenue had we shipped it. But there were a number of other issues that made it harder for people to use (which also resulted in them liking it less.)
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.
This is really an instance of the general phenomenon that the eminent tend to take fewer risks. A change that decreases revenue isn't necessarily bad; it may even yield a net profit in the long run. It's just perceived as a risk because things like user happiness and product culture (a) can't be as easily measured and (b) don't yield results for a while.
I think this is actually a rational-- or at least natural-- course of action. As you get more eminent, the stakes are also higher, and when you have more to lose you tend to take less risk. In fact, it'd be surprising if a big company continued taking risks by trusting non-structural decisions.
This is probably related to the phenomenon that large organizations tend to fall into bureaucracy. In fact the two questions are probably overlapping, if not identical. How can you grow big and famous and take on big responsibilities without losing your ability to trust your intuition and care about the feel and usability of the product? How can you stop yourself from degenerating into bureaucracy?
I'm pretty confident it's possible. Steve Jobs managed it. My own hunch is that the trick is to hire people who don't care about money too much. The kind of people who think, if we lose a bit of revenue, who cares? Which is paradoxical, my hunch continues, because people like this will eventually make better products in the long run, and end up increasing revenue in a thousand different little ways.
... 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.
And your solution is to do LESS TESTING? We don't know what we're doing, so let's cut back on the amount of data we can use to inform our decisions?
> "We are slaves to the numbers. We don’t operate around innovation. We only optimize."
I don't see why numbers should ever stop you from innovating. The difference between "innovating" and "optimizing" is just a difference of scale. You can make a huge change to your layout or site function and look at the numbers it the same way you'd look at a font and color change.
The quote above seems to say that people shouldn't make decisions based on numbers, and that's absurd for a company like Facebook. What should be the basis of their decisions then? Management's gut reaction? Whoever feels the strongest about a change wins?
Customer surveys and user metrics matter - both are often numbers. The real issue here isn't that Facebook uses numbers too much. If they made the wrong choice, it's because they put too much emphasis on the wrong numbers.
The point is about design being held back or distorted by numbers - which are often a false prophesy when it comes to UX improvements.
Nobody is suggesting that numbers don't matter, but if you can't decide on a border thickness of 1 or 2 pixels without numbers to tell you which to go with, you've lost your mojo. And that matters in the long term.
When the aim is to increase length of time on the site or in the app, the numbers will "tell you" to make the interface more complicated, to hide the sign-out button (common practice), to hide the exit button (like Dropbox did on the desktop application), to force dependencies between unrelated services (Google does this a lot).
When the aim is to increase clicks on Ads, the numbers will tell you to make ads look like normal posts. The numbers will tell you to autoplay videos on tabloid news article pages. But all these "optimizations" are not unlike speed cameras placed at the bottom of the hill where lots of people can't help bumping over the speed limit for a couple of seconds. Good for revenue, bad vibes in every other way.
> "design being held back or distorted by numbers - which are often a false prophesy when it comes to UX improvements."
> "the numbers will "tell you" to make the interface more complicated, to hide the sign-out button"
Oh yes, I definitely understand that we misinterpret what the numbers mean. My point is that this isn't the numbers' fault - it's our fault for not understanding what we're measuring and what the numbers mean. Often additional tests can even help resolve the "what should we do" question.
We run tests all the time, but when we see something like, "pageviews are up x%" that's just a starting place. We begin to ask why and continue to develop a hypothesis and proof for it. It might be that users are confused so they start clicking around, or it could be because we've grabbed their attention and enticed them to learn more. Without the numbers we wouldn't even know where to start.
If Dustin's point is just to think critically about test numbers that seems to go without saying.
Fair enough. I agree the interpretation of the data we collect leaves a lot to be desired.
Where I work, I've seen good products killed off because of low traffic, but the low traffic was due to people not finding the product due to poor navigation - which in turn was made poor because of marketing requirements to "drive traffic" to their latest short term gimmick. It's a complex web.
I think the problem is that we don't seem to have hypothesis' that guide our interpretation of the numbers.
In the absence of a guiding framework on how to interpret your data, you're bound to min-max individual criteria; we'll never know if we're just in a local maxima, however.
I'm not saying this is an easy problem, mind you. It's easy to wax poetic about having your culture guide decisions when you can point at a graph and say "yep, we're making $xx,000 less per hour".
I did some design and coding work for the adult industry for a while. The company I worked for had one large members area with all kinds of niches, with thousands of sites acting as doorways into it. Instead of a nice overview, and a smooth experience, they had built in tons of tricky ways to delay the user getting to the content. From loading delays to tricky dropdowns instead of simple buttons.
Users had access to the site as long as they stayed on the phone to our special 2 dollar per minute phone line.
It worked, but it was a pain to work for a company like that. I was fresh out of school and just wanted to get better at my trade, but wasn't allowed to do the best I could. Frustrating.
Needless to say, things have changed in that industry, gotten a lot trickier, and the company has had to switch into different avenues. They now offer payment solutions and run a huge dating site.
This is a weakness of ad-supported business models. When users are buying or subscribing to a product, you want them to love it as much as possible so that they will always buy more. Ad-supported models untie the relationship between UX and revenue. In an ad-supported model, you do need users to like the product enough to keep coming back, but small decreases in utility that generate more impressions could be great for revenue.
The people at Facebook are extremely talented. It's a shame they're stuck with this business model. It would be awesome to see how good they could make Facebook if this wasn't tying them down.
I agree, this is primarily a consequence of being ad-supported. The same problem happens at Google, it is just less noticeable.
Google is in the fortunate position of getting to do the best things for users for 99.5% of searches, it is the other .5% that they compromise on.
At times, they have tried to do the best thing for customers on searches like "best morgage refinance rate", but in the end, they cancel the experiments because it would crush their revenues, and all the other good they are doing:
Potentially they can even untie the Facebook product from the ad model. They could introduce "Facebook Premium" whereby you would pay a small monthly fee and have a different interface due to the space freed up from deciding to not show you ads.
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.
>>> 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.
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.
Beyond, Beside or Within
The following in response to Facebook’s Newsfeed Redesign:
Why do what makes everyone else do what you want them to do if doing so isn’t right? If we all can determine what’s right and what’s wrong as a community of equals then doing what’s right is a matter of doing what everyone else, for the most part, wants you to do. As is the case with Facebook and most other companies that offer products to consumers, when it comes to offering their product they aren’t exactly equal with the rest of us; because, they have control over the products we so willingly consume; thus, they are faced with the conundrum of what to do about product design and consumer retention. Dustin seems to be saying that Facebook does what makes Facebook users do what Facebook wants its users to do. The numbers that go up and down, it seems, are numbers related to people spending time on other people’s pages rather than just on the news feed. What’s wrong with that?
I would have much preferred the proposed layout as seen in this photo. In fact, it is (almost scary) similar to the most recent Diaspora single-page view that was just rolled out no more than a year ago. We designed our single-page view to focus on content, and unlike Facebook, we don't care about ad revenue, so we don't have these problems. :)
Facebook can afford not to provide an better user experience because it has no competition. Should Google Plus one day threaten Facebook's usage, Facebook may pull this design out of it's archives.
Until then, they will provide the minimal user experience that keeps them on top of the hill with as much ad inventory as possible.
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...
Am I the only person on the planet who vastly prefers the newer design?
Yes, the larger images were nice to look at - but they got in the way of actually viewing the content for me.
My personal viewing habits of the newsfeed are to give facebook a glance over once a day with my morning coffee. The purpose is to get an overview - quickly. The newer look got in the way of that, especially when viewing in smaller windows.
There are also all the folk who aren't looking at it on large displays, and maybe consistency of experience is important too.
Sure - maybe there's a metrics issue too. But I've seen more than my fair share of usability tests where things that my "design" persona like end up being disliked by the people who actually use the site.
> This is truly a nightmare scenario for any CEO: do you take the risk and proceed with the better user experience/product at the expense of short term numbers–with no promise that the better design will actually lead to long-term benefits–or do you scrap the new design and start over?
Doesn't this only apply to CEOs who run companies that give away their products to indirectly monetize it? If you had a product you sold to your customers wouldn't this improvement in usability/product quality be a no-brainer because better product = more sales = more revenue?
What if your product is licensed per-seat, and your change allows your customer to achieve their goals with fewer employees using your product, reducing the number of licenses purchased?
What if your change allows your customer to complete their task more quickly, and they stop paying for your SaaS product as soon as they complete said task?
What if your improvement improves interoperability, and your customer's partners decide not to purchase your product because they no longer need it to work together?
What if your change reduces the need for your customer to later purchase an upgrade?
> If you had a product you sold to your customers wouldn't this improvement in usability/product quality be a no-brainer because better product = more sales = more revenue?
Not really, because again, "better product" is only a proxy for the real goal of many companies, i.e. "more revenue". Even earning money directly on the product won't stop sales people from inserting various money extracting tricks that abuse people's cognitive biases and heuristics. Just look at Badoo. Or Zynga.
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.
This isn't exactly right - optimizing the NewsFeed and eliminating exploration may be a more efficient UX in a way, but that doesn't mean it's better. I don't hear "reduced exploration" and think "that's way better". I'm not saying that's why FB made the decision, but Dustin doesn't know why they made it either. I'd have made the same decision as a UX focused CEO though is all I'm saying.
I might be acting like a devil's advocate, but don't the metrics reflect user behavior? And it's perfectly fine if they tune their UI for revenue. They are not missionaries, but they are visionaries. They need money to keep the innovation going.
I am not a facebook fan or an affiliate, and I do resent few of their design decisions, but earning money is well within their framework of morality.
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.
"We only optimize. We do what goes up." Deciding what you want to facilitate going up comes down to governance. If you want to give the user a shittier experience in order to earn more profits, then you can do that. But you leave yourself open to someone providing the better experience and losing them altogether.
If we assume that the "UI design by metrics" approach actually works, I wonder, why would we need designers at all?
Shouldn't then the most rational choice be to start with a crude initial design an use a reinforcement learning algorithm to optimize it according to the metrics?
Theoretically that is possible if you could somehow actually show all the possible permutations of a design and throw it at enough users, but there simply are not enough users where you can get very far with such a test. Thus we still need people in this world who can design with empathy for the average user.
Interesting read. it proves one of my arguments against fb: there is not too much real value to end users.
there is no such thing in the world like "performing too well". if a better design led to less user engagements, it means the product, in its bare bone, not valuable to users.
Durtis didn't the "left navigation" made that they browsed the feed more than other parts. I have never thought that the left navigation was any good. Since navigation navigation is a big part of UX and hiding it in the left is not good.
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.
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.
This anecdote perfectly illustrates how Facebook is not playing the long game. Facebook will erode any trust and loyalty that they did have in favor of short-term gains. We see it again and again. The last thing was the "pay to access your fans" bait-and-switch that to me was rather abhorrent.
Without any "higher mission" at all, Facebook has to resort to these lowest-common-denominator values.
I only hope that someone with better values can gain an edge someday, and refuses to be acquired/neutralized by Facebook.
which, like the FB employee said, is exactly, what a data-driven company should do to maximize profit. However, Dustin has a good point. CEO needs to make that very risky call if he vouched for the better design. The customer may or may not come. Short term loss is inevitable. One would need strong belief, again, needs to be backed by data, to make that call.
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.
When you are stuck in a company that can't innovate because a shitty site leads to more money due to inertia, then you know you are on your way down. This leads to your best developers thinking "what the fuck did I waste all my time for?" and they will leave in no uncertain terms.