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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

#81

Post by ignostic »

> "We're blind." ... "Everything must be tested."

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.

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

#82

Post by pyrocat »

res0nat0r wrote: post #8
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.

Hard to have a sense of mission or purpose when your company goes out of business and you can't pay the bills.

You're right, there's absolutely zero middleground.

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

#83

Post by debt »

Kluny wrote: post #70
epistasis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>text links replaced by only graphical icons 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.

It's like they realize that reading English is kind of tough, so they give you a whole new language to learn, which doesn't help at all.

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.

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

#84

Post by weixiyen »

ploxiln wrote: post #27
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…

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.

Actually it's more like tons of testing, data analysis, and quick turnaround time on execution.

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

#86

Post by weixiyen »

xg15 wrote: post #73

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.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

Mz wrote: post #43
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by phillmv »

ignostic wrote: post #81

> "We're blind." ... "Everything must be tested." 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 differen…

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".

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

#89

Post by duaneb »

pyrocat wrote: post #80
duaneb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So your complaint is that the ads don't know more about you?

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.

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

#90

Post by duaneb »

epistasis wrote: post #66
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…

>text links replaced by only graphical icons 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.

> fad

You realize that iconography predates all civilization, right?

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