Regardless of personal opinion, I hope people on HN understand that this is a talented person providing an honest opinion about their work. Which is rare, and should be commended, rather than being treated as evidence of a conspiracy.
Also, Dustin Curtis seems to forget (or not understand) that Facebook is the same company that made a decision to implement AJAX at the expense of pageviews, at a time when that decision was highly controversial (the era of the Empire of MySpace). You can ding the management at Facebook for a lot of things, but this really isn't one of them.
The bigger story, really, is that poor people use Facebook on a computer, and thus that is where web-based experience optimization is focused. If you don't have a smartphone, or your smartphone sucks, you're going to be on the web; otherwise, why aren't you using your iPhone or iPad? (And remember, that's where Facebook derives a majority of their revenue -- so if there's going to be a conspiracy, it's going to be a conspiracy to get you to stop using the website, and to buy a high-ad-revenue-generating iPhone). Welcome to the wacky user landscape of 2014, where the Web is for nerds and poor people.
I like that Julie used Medium for her thoughts, rather than a Facebook post. Experimentation with others' products and services is super cool.
I hope people on HN understand that this is a talented person providing an honest opinion about their work. Which is rare, and should be commended, rather than being treated as evidence of a conspiracy.
I'm not going to get all conspiratorial on you, but to pretend like someone blogging on the Internet is being completely candid about their work? C'mon.
I suspect that it did have to go through some kind of PR person at Facebook, and perhaps wasn't even written by her, but I still like it. Most companies couldn't turn a response out to a non-crisis so quickly. It highlights agility to constructively engage in a discussion with a critic.
Much has been said/written already about the Facebook community and where users are. There is a long term trend that early adopters of Facebook (read Western world) are using Facebook less (though using their OAuth identification more). Facebook is growing in the rest of the world (read Asia - WhatsApp has a billion non-US users). The main means of internet access (almost exclusively) for these users (the next billion Facebookers) are feature phones and smart phones. Through this context, it is quite intuitive why they are making the decisions they are.
If facebook was set on using media queries, im sure they would have kept the same general design but just optimised layout and spacing for different screen sizes.
You guys are going down a pointless path of pedantry. The original attack suggested Facebook's sole reason for making the decision was advertising metrics. This person is saying that isn't true. I'm guessing the team running one of the top trafficked sites in the world is aware of media queries.
It doesn't have to look vastly different, it just has to look 'designed' for each screen size. This isn't a difficult problem... I'm wondering if responsive web design is a foreign concept within facebook. :\
Facebook.com isn't responsive (you'll see fixed width's, just check it out), so it does seem that responsive design is something they disregard purposefully.
People are used to different experiences on different devices. You can argue that they expect mobile and desktop versions to differ, but I can also argue that a 10-inch netbook is a very different device from a Retina MacBook.
Facebook already has an inconsistent experience. For instance, I've been viewing Facebook with this new design for a few days now, whereas other people are presumably still on the old one.
I'm sorry, but they fix EXACTLY that problem. If you need a UI to work at different sizes... that is what media queries are for.
The design can change quite drastically using media queries. I can look at facebook for about 2 minutes to see how they could improve at different sizes.
They fix exactly what problem? The single problem of the sizing of components on the screen? Great!
I did not mention one problem—I alluded to many. What about the problem of people not clicking links? What about the problem of users not understanding how to navigate to events? How about lack of awareness of which of your friends are online? Etc. etc.
Media queries fix exactly one problem. The size and position of elements on different sized screens.
There are thousands of other things to evaluate in a design that have nothing to do with that. I realize you're focused on this specific issue, but Facebook has to worry about all of them at once.
They could do both (like every other competent UX team does).
All of those problems are still their, I was responding to the point made in the post, that they couldn't ship the awesome design, because there are people with little screens... That is what responsive is for, meaning they could have shipped exactly what they shipped PLUS the awesome design (that they themselves, said was awesome).
So yes, media queries fix exactly their problem, as they had two designs that they liked, but one was only good for big screens, the other for little screens.
To put it more bluntly they had already solved all the other issues (and more) you talked about... just the screen size was the only problem (cited in that post!)
in case you are serious: the full quote was 'shitty "poor people" screens' which parses not to 'shitty poor people' but to 'shitty screens for poor people' and is not really offensive.
Despite having a decent phone, an iPad, and not being "poor" in any meaningful sense of the word, I still read Facebook on a PC, and am glad they design for it.
Is it a org-wide policy at Facebook that the relevant product / operations head respond to criticism leveled at Facebook in private forums?
Are employees required to proactively defend their decisions, on private / public forums?
Is this the raison d'être for PMs at Facebook?
The reason I'm curious is that I have never seen a Facebook employee ever admit a flub here on HN. They mostly surface here to reaffirm the company position.
I don't know if the employees realize it or not but for the most part, this kind of spineless defending - and I have observed it on more than one occasion - appears to outsiders as virtue-less boot-licking.
I hope that the Facebook employees know that they are allowed to have differing and contrasting opinions.
Just because their founder doles out hundreds of millions of dollars to nameless causes and charities with unaccountable outcomes, does not mean that his every strategic move is unimpeachably virtuous, made with the best intentions of the user-base in mind.
Forsaking their reputation to salvage their founder's self-serving acquisitions might seem great now.
But these kinds of self-inflicted character-assassinations are bound to haunt the careers of the employees, in the long run.
I would advise Ms.Zhuo to think twice before coming to the defense of her founder especially in such nakedly crony-corporate-land-grab decisions, especially when she knows full well this kind of thing is indefensible and not in the interest of the public.
You've got a lot of chips on your shoulder it appears. I would advise you to figure out why you hate Facebook so much, and try to come up with a better reason to disagree than the angry place you are coming from.
How do you know? She's a director, and by definition totally in bed with the leadership. Would she publicly admit to decisions made in favor of ad revenue and against what's best for the user? Why didn't she, as Product Design Director, or anyone else at Facebook argue for defaulting to stronger rather than weaker privacy settings, or object to the undermining or even ignoring of previously made privacy choices under the guise of new feature releases? And if she or anyone did, and they were shot down, would she tell us?
So many people trusted Colin Powell, including much of the world after his U.N. testimony. Look where that got us. (What Colin Powell Knew and What He Said: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-schwarz/colin-powell-...) [And no, waterlesscloud, I'm not comparing "the design of the Facebook newsfeed to the Iraq War," I'm making a point about trusting people with a conflict of interest and/or loyal to the party under question.]
While I don't agree with the parent, accusing her of being "in bed" with another person or group is not sexist – it's a common idiom which refers to having an undesirably close or underhanded association with others.
Nearly every time I've heard the phrase "in bed with" it's been in reference to men, and the meaning is hot man-on-man collusion (not sex).
However it is a really unfortunate phrase to use where the group is mixed gender. Especially so when it's an imbalanced mix, such as very few women.
(I think everyone should get a small stack of "Yikes did I really say that?" chips. Only after someone runs out of their chips should we bring out the pitchforks and enjoy ourselves a nice cathartic public shaming spree.)
I'm glad Julie took the time to respond to Dustin's article and dispel the lower revenue assumption. I looked back at the articles in March of last year and it does appear that everyone reported that the new design would bring in more ad revenue via more engaging ad formats for advertisers.
One thing I want to understand is if the concern is about accommodating people on less-than-the-latest tech or smaller screens, etc. then we've solved largely for that via responsive design. It's not hard to detect that I have enough real estate to support having a 2x larger photo in my feed. Why not adjust as needed?
So what Curtis says is false? Then did he get this from?
"After an investigation into the problem by Facebook’s data team, they discovered that the new News Feed was performing too well. It was performing so well from a design standpoint that users no longer felt the need to browse areas outside of the News Feed as often, so they were spending less time on the site."
Someone presenting speculation as fact ON THE INTERNET? Never. I'm being snarky, but it certainly seems that she's in a better position to know what facebooks data and reasoning were.
You don't even need metrics to figure out that, for example:
> The old design was worse for many of the things we value and try to improve. Like how much people share and converse with their friends. [old design: http://img.svbtle.com/gpnggaky8d1gog.jpg]
The "only icons" on the left + "icons AND text labels" for "Share/Like/Comment" + much higher text density on the right constantly shift your thinking form "photo/visual" to "reading/writing", it mind-fucks you in a very subtle way, so your brain ends up focusing on the only thing that makes sense: (a) the overall visual structure (that was beautifully designed, I admit) and (b) the photos.
If you want user engagement beyond the "click like" level you need to focus people towards the "reading/writing/verbal" mode of interaction. Like, if you have to read a button's label to know what it does, this puts your mind into "reading mode" so the comment that immediately follows the link/button has more chances of actually being read and of the people actually writing a reply instead of just clicking a like and staring at a cute picture. They really got this right (either through someone's insight or metrics, I dunno) with the "Like Comment Share" links - getting rid of the icons pushed you more towards "text/words mode" thinking, which is exactly the mode you need to be in to actually post a comment, and a comment is more content so it will be a positive feedback loop for even more and so on.
(Also, another obvious bad idea was the left bar - while theoretically good for screen estate, it's essentially "mystery meat navigation" to unsophisticated desktop users. Also it puts less focus on the Apps. Also by putting the active contacts list in the bottom left corner pushes them out of your mental focus.)
EDIT+: ...now that it really got me thinking of it, I can't believe how incredibly bad the "old new" design was. How did they even chose to deliver that? It looked like textbook "design driven design", it didn't focus at all on how the users think and what they actually do on Facebook.
Totally agree with that last line. I think the failure was that they came up with a design that looked really good, but fell short on the interactions that mattered.
It's a classic UX design problem: insular critique led the design in a certain direction, everyone loved it because it was pretty and "content focused." Then someone pointed out the user testing results, and probably used data to support an argument about how it didn't actually work that well, which made a whole bunch of people go "oh yeah, huh" and finally it fell flat.
Happens all the time. This blog post was spot on, and I found nothing unusual about it.
The unusual part is that an organization as large as Facebook had the ability to stop the momentum of a very large project because it wasn't that great. That's a lesson to take to heart.
I think it's fairly easy to come up with reasons after the fact why a design is bad, but it certainly didn't look bad and many people in the more tech community felt it was better than the new redesign: in particular the guy who wrote the article to which this one is a response to.
Maybe I exaggerated a bit and I wouldn't have considered it "incredibly bad" before having the latest version to compare it to, I agree.
But the "photo/visual" vs "text/reading/verbal" switching it imposed on you was obvious in it at the beginning. I know, this is not something that pops up as a "big red flag" to most other UI/X people, but to me it really does. Take HN as an example: the text only interface keeps you in the zone and focused on actually reading peoples' comments and replying meaningfully to the. Take http://www.microsoft.com/ as another one: the pictures swallow your focus and they make it very hard for you to actually read the link texts and decide what to click on to get to what you wanted. Also http://www.bing.com/ - you use it to search for text, but it bombards you with pictures, so you may actually end up getting worse search results not (only) because the search engine is worse, but because you mind is not "words focused" anymore and you fail to come up with more appropriate search phrase. Also compare https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ and https://www.python.org/ on one side vs. http://www.scala-lang.org/ on the other side (the picture and design totally "unfocus" and disorient your mind so it takes you longer to find the relevant content, like "top language features" even if they are right there on the landing page and very well explained too).
> Irrelevant. The tech community is not a representative sample of Facebook's user-base.
Indeed they aren't, but who do you think designers interact with on a day to day basis? I think that the tech community's thoughts are important as they influence other tech people's thoughts and, therefore, might shift them away from reality.
> And looking good and working well are two completely different things.
Again agreed, which is why using metrics is a sound approach. You just have to make sure you're using the right ones.
Dammit... why did I have to read this article? I was just about to post a rant in the comments of the original one about how evil and money-grabbing Facebook is, and now I find out the final design choice was made for perfectly-rational usability reasons that take into account the diversity of the user population.
How am I supposed to make myself feel superior now?
Did you feel the same way and take back your doubts about invading Iraq when Gen. Colin Powell testified so convincingly to the world at the U.N. of the impending danger of Iraq's WMDs?
#1 design flaw on Facebook: It should be dead easy to search my newsfeed. I saw something yesterday, or last week -- there's no way to see it again. (If there is, you've hidden this feature so well that you should get an award for obfuscation)
One thing I hate is how all these screenshots are made with unrepresentatively interesting posts and high quality photographs.
Show what the feed looks like with a news stories posted by a few people (fortunately FB is now smart enough to coalesce them), a bunch of moronic memes, one line stupid text, and a few long posts with ~100 comments with lots of debate, and that's more representative of my facebook newsfeed.
Not to me. I don't understand why Facebook takes so much to bring changes to European users. I use the English language, there's really no reason to delay the rollout. I don't care much because I rarely use Facebook anymore, but it still sucks.
Slow rollout is a great tool for suppressing dissent (and discontent).
You likely remember that people were upset en masse with design changes of Facebook. However, if you get a new style change and none of your friends have it, your venting comment either gets lost or you won't write one at all, seeing as nobody else complains. Then a second person gets the style change and again, seeing no complaints himself, he is much more likely not to complain.
I'm surprised this topic (complaint control through trickery) isn't addresssed as often.
So far it's been just a theory of mine. An interesting observation is that Facebook can easily deny this concept saying that "slow rollout can prevent excessive server stress", which is without a doubt true.
It seems to me that it is hard to test whether the random rollout just aims at preventing server crashes or it has behavioural connotations as well.
Yup. It can catch bugs. It also allows them to catch drops in numbers and other problems. This is the main reason that the 2013 newsfeed design never made it to anyone else.
Also, at least in the past, FB used to roll out redesigns to groups that were relatively isolated from the rest of the graph like New Zealand.
It seems to be more than just "Europeans". I got it a few days ago, a friend of mine several days before that. Both Germans in Germany, both browsing FB in English.
I'm baffled as to why the experience needs to be 100% consistent across all demographics.
Why can't Facebook adapt the news feed to be the best for each individual, both content wise and design?
I have a 27" screen, why degrade my experience, as a minority when you are completely capable of enhancing it. Enhance the 11, 13 and 17 inch screens too, and let us all have the best experience possible.
The idea that the majority should be the only number worth optimizing is one that should be completely dismissed.
Look, my view is this: it's not about maintaining N different interfaces.
Each news feed is totally personalized. This is done without having to worry about maintaining "N" feeds, it's built into the system, built into the approach.
Why is the design something that needs to be fragmented into buckets? This is a broader choice, accepting that all users need to be on some defined path.
You can measure and improve metrics without being concerned about the particular CSS file being delivered to each person.
Because maintaining N different user interfaces is hard.
No matter if the underlying approach or data is the same, the user interface is different and from that point on you have to take them all into account when you make a change.
Ridiculously large expense. And not always all that well -- it's just that most people don't use most of the platform simultaneously on different devices / stacks / versions, so they don't notice.
Give people some sliders and a rest button in their preferences. I find the lack of visual configurability in web apps deplorable. I hate having no control over the look of things unless I install a restyling plugin.
I do find it a little ironic that JZ has taken to Medium to say this, since that platform shares a lot of the visual sensibility with the old FB feed - titles sitting inside the image frame, minimalist icon-driven design and so on.
Look into Responsive Web Design. Poster seemed to be questioning UI and UX choices for different screen sizes. Facebook is behind the curve on RWD...shocking.
Being able to save and display options or settings has been done...at scale.
Handling billions of requests everyday is hard. Scaling storage for millions of images is hard. Rolling out updates to a live platform twice a day is hard.
Lots of software development is hard. Whilst maintaining one interface is easier, they already serve and maintain different interfaces (Android, iPhone and web). What's another subset or two for the web? Responsiveness can only do so much. The article makes out as though the majority of users are using 'legacy' hardware... even if that were the case, there's still hundreds of millions of people that are using decent screens, peripherals etc, which they're not doing "whatever's best for the people" for.
No place on the internet feels so heavy handed in telling you what to do and trying to influence your behaviour like Facebook. You can feel like they frequency with which you are compelled to provide some missing information for FB's databases is algorithmically fine tuned to how much you can probably bear. It feels soulless, a site nearing the end of it's life cycle. I check out my friend's photos almost daily, and not too many people seem to be leaving, but no one's writing or posting anything personal any more. Hesitation, distrust.
So, you can try to roll out a layout that makes the "News Feed all about the content" (wtf?), but you can't design the love back in.
The design is terrible. So much of the width is wasted with two sidebars that are seldom used. "People you may also know"? Really? And big areas of grey.
Also don't get me started on the ridiculously persistent desire for facebook to show you random stories "Top stories" rather than sorted by date, or the ridiculously irritating auto-play videos.
People are dropping facebook. It's just becoming a worse user experience each time they change anything.
One of their objectives is to keep expanding their user base. This feature is crucial to be in a visible place on the screen. Also quite useful for users that have just joined Facebook.
And about:
> random stories "Top stories" rather than sorted by date
It's a known fact that when you add randomness to the action -> reward relationship, addictiveness significantly increases. (it's not intuitive, but has been proven on everything from rats to humans!)
I stopped using Facebook "personally" some time ago, but I admit that they know their shit and do it well. Whether they do it by brute-force metrics or they have some really smart UI/X evil geniuses, I don't know, but it's well done!
Yeah, this is what you get if you use metrics to find a "common ground of preference". But this is the primitive way of doing it. We already know the better way to do this, thanks to things like Howard Moskowitz's research and all the work done afterwards (http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce).
But nobody has successfully applied this to commercial UI/X design yet. Maybe because people are not sophisticated enough to appreciate choice when it comes to apps/websites. Or maybe because they are so overloaded that making them make any choice actually scares them away and drops the retention/click-through/interaction/etc. numbers. Then again, if would work, the company successfully using this would get a monopoly in their field instead of naturally sharing the user base with other competitors simply because the users don't all like the same things. I kind of like the idea of having 4 different tomato sauces made by 4 different producers, the "letting the market solve the problem" way, so I'm secretly glad the "better way of doing UX/I by numbers" hasn't been well applied in software :)
As one of the people who uses Facebook only for Groups, I like having them constantly available in a sidebar. I'd wager that I know many people who use groups more than they use the news feed.
I can forgive most things that Facebook has done. But auto-play videos is not one of them. I use click-to-play for media but have Facebook white listed, which probably won't last much longer.
What is Responsive Web Design? How could it be used to enhance the UX and UI? Why isn't Facebook using RWD? Real, scalable RWD? I must be way off base, but their issues with the News Feed design are surmountable. Not impressed by Julie.
I have never thought of FB as a bastion of design...and I have not yet been swayed to think or see otherwise.
> These people may not be early adopters or use the same hardware we do, but the quality of their experience matters just as much.
This speaks to the value FB sees in low-quality, high-reach experiences. Well, this and the WhatsApp acquisition. It's a very mature and reasonable response to Dustin's armchair speculation.
Obviously, this could just be corporate PR disguised as a blog, but it seems plausible when I consider how rarely I even go to www.facebook.com. For users not on mobile (I'm imagining grandparents), an immersive photo experience creates a nice experience but one distinctly unlike what most mobile users (which is to say, most users) experience. I can see big laptop-screen filling images deemphasizing text and overshadowing some of the utility that FB wants to assume for users. It might seem daunting to share an update that you're making tea for your granddaughter when you seem to be competing with your relatives' screen filling, HD photos and videos. "Immersive" pictures might make you less likely to check your events.
This follow up response is completely expected. No doubt, Justin's blog was incomplete information. While I am still not convinced about how the ads section got bigger, is it really so difficult to identify the user's medium?
I am using a mac book pro. My request header is yelling at you that I am. Your argument makes no sense, if you agree that you know I am not suffering from the lack of a scroll pad. What about that!
Julie's argument wraps around the idea of "designing for the lowest common denominator". In an age of responsive design, I find it strange that a tech company wouldn't have the manpower to design arguably the most used website it the world to give the best experience to different types of end users.
The image she presents is starkly different from what I see under one of my test user's Facebook (so no apps, groups, etc). Massive ads on the right, a very different set of links on the left, etc.
And what if providing different user experiences is the next thing Facebook should aim towards?
What if users would actually enjoy being able to choose from different UIs? "Which one do you use?"
I just wish I could turn off the news feed. Facebook is a great social tool, but I'm sick of all the literal status updates. I tried Facebook Purify but their CSS ,trick didn't work.
Why is someone from Facebook making an official(ish?) statement via medium? Seems kinda amateur.
And, maybe it's just me, but I hate links from medium because on HN they strictly say (medium.com) with no information as to who they are. Much, much prefer personal blog links where there is some context.
I don't really understand why this explanation was even warranted. People looking from outside don't get the picture at all. Ergo, conclusions are erroneous at best and malicious at worst.
Also, Dustin Curtis seems to forget (or not understand) that Facebook is the same company that made a decision to implement AJAX at the expense of pageviews, at a time when that decision was highly controversial (the era of the Empire of MySpace). You can ding the management at Facebook for a lot of things, but this really isn't one of them.
The bigger story, really, is that poor people use Facebook on a computer, and thus that is where web-based experience optimization is focused. If you don't have a smartphone, or your smartphone sucks, you're going to be on the web; otherwise, why aren't you using your iPhone or iPad? (And remember, that's where Facebook derives a majority of their revenue -- so if there's going to be a conspiracy, it's going to be a conspiracy to get you to stop using the website, and to buy a high-ad-revenue-generating iPhone). Welcome to the wacky user landscape of 2014, where the Web is for nerds and poor people.
I like that Julie used Medium for her thoughts, rather than a Facebook post. Experimentation with others' products and services is super cool.