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!"
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…
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.
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…
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.
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 he…
>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…
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.
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.
It's not just about "known-how". Many people downloaded Instagram because it was cool and precisely because it wasn't Facebook.
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...
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…
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…
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.
This really reminds me of the depressing way that Google optimised the blue colour of a button, while ignoring all other considerations: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html If you trust your metrics and nothing else, you have to be very sure that your metrics encompass every aspect of the reality you are modelling. If they just tell you about clicks and sales, they might be missing longer-ter…
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…
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.