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.
Comments
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.
Harsh, I know, but that's the reality.
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.
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.
Who is this 'users' you talk about?
The ones who create and like the "IF THIS PAGE GETS 500K LIKES, FACEBOOK WILL CHANGE BACK THE NEWS FEED" page.
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 no evidence that points to QWERTY being designed to be inefficient.
http://www.economist.com/node/196071
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-t...
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 was intentionally designed to be inefficient? I thought it was based on statistics of common letters or something. Care to shed some light?
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.
Rather, it sped up typing by preventing jams.