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Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

dcurt.is

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Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#51

Post by ilovecomputers »

modeless wrote: post #37

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…

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.

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#52

Post by gfodor »

grey-area wrote: post #25

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…

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.

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#53

Post by hpriebe »

mathattack wrote: post #22
swombat wrote: post #4

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.

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#54

Post by gfodor »

ilovecomputers wrote: post #51
modeless wrote: post #37

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…

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.

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#56

Post by jessaustin »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #21
waterlesscloud wrote: post #19

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 ti…

> Which means deciding what to measure is one of the most important decisions you can make. Sounds like we should be measuring our decisions about what to measure!

Haha pretty soon we'll be measuring something new every week!

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#57

Post by duaneb »

akamaka wrote: post #29

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 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.

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#58

Post by ForrestN »

modeless wrote: post #37

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…

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.

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#60

Post by addMitt »

corresation wrote: post #26

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…

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.

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