Durtis didn't the "left navigation" made that they browsed the feed more than other parts. I have never thought that the left navigation was any good. Since navigation navigation is a big part of UX and hiding it in the left is not good.
Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
141–150 of 231 posts
Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
#142I'll give another way to look at it. Good design is by no means the same as optimal design. A lot of beautiful designs done by talented designers end up being worse than what was before. They might be prettier, but they are very likely worse by many conversion metrics.
Don't think of it in terms of pure design. Think of it in terms of cost. Everything has a cost and sometimes good design's real cost is in user behavior. Pageviews and time on site could go down because people aren't going through so many steps to get to what they want. There are a lot of metrics that aren't that useful without the context of the ultimate conversion numbers for your site/app/product/project.
Facebook and Google are advertising companies. The financial metric they care about is advertising revenue per user and number of users. It's not much different than a SAAS app in that way. Other metrics are important, but that is the metric that pays the bills.
A beautiful design that doesn't improve the core metrics is like a multi million dollar super bowl commercial that flops. Sure, it might be really cool and well produced, but if it doesn't sell your product, you might as well light that money on fire. The net effect is the same.
Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
#143Earlier 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.
> I really hope that the fad dies out soon I wouldn't hold my breath. I think a lot of the reasons we're moving to icons instead of text is because sometime in the next ten years, the majority of all internet traffic will originate on phones, and phones don't have nearly as much real estate to devote to labels as desktop screens do.
Show me a "Save" icon that doesn't _still_ look like a floppy disk. Until then I'll take my text labels.
Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
#144I'll give another way to look at it. Good design is by no means the same as optimal design. A lot of beautiful designs done by talented designers end up being worse than what was before. They might be prettier, but they are very likely worse by many conversion metrics. Don't think of it in terms of pure design. Think of it in terms of cost. Everything has a cost and sometimes good design's real cost is in user behavi…
The underlying assumption being something like "If you're not increasing the amount of money you make, you are of no value"
Facebook says it's values are connecting people and other helpful ideas for a reason. If they created a design that helped people connect more fluidly, it'd still be valuable, even if it didn't increase their revenue. I find your comment a bit cynical and oversimplified.
Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really hope that the fad dies out soon I wouldn't hold my breath. I think a lot of the reasons we're moving to icons instead of text is because sometime in the next ten years, the majority of all internet traffic will originate on phones, and phones don't have nearly as much real estate to devote to labels as desktop screens do.
Show me a "Save" icon that doesn't _still_ look like a floppy disk. Until then I'll take my text labels.
Modern apps don't have a save function. There's no need for it.
Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've actually faced a similar situation, and let me tell you it was hard . Companies like Yahoo exist to make money - or, at least, they must continue to make money in order to continue existing. Like Dustin said, > "This is truly a nightmare scenario for any CEO: do you take the risk and proceed with the better user experience/product at the expense of short term numbers–with no promise that the better design will a…
There's a lot of room between "exist to make money" and "must make money in order to exist". Like, a staggering amount of room.
there's also a lot of pressure when you're public
Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
#147Brings new meaning to the adage, "What goes up, must come down."
Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
#149I'll give another way to look at it. Good design is by no means the same as optimal design. A lot of beautiful designs done by talented designers end up being worse than what was before. They might be prettier, but they are very likely worse by many conversion metrics. Don't think of it in terms of pure design. Think of it in terms of cost. Everything has a cost and sometimes good design's real cost is in user behavi…
The underlying assumption being something like "If you're not increasing the amount of money you make, you are of no value" Facebook says it's values are connecting people and other helpful ideas for a reason. If they created a design that helped people connect more fluidly, it'd still be valuable, even if it didn't increase their revenue. I find your comment a bit cynical and oversimplified.
Well, I don't think it's a completely binary money or UX type decision, but I do know that working at a larger scale of users shifts your priorities significantly.
For example, I worked on a website that would sometimes process as much as a million dollars in donations in a single day for a nonprofit. If the site went down for even a half hour, that could be tens of thousands of dollars in missed donations. That is like someone not getting paid for almost a year.
We had a cool autocomplete feature that went out and due to a bug that made it past QA caused a on of DB queries and took down the server. It was maybe a better user experience, but the way it was implemented would cost too much in reliability for it to be worth it. The team reengineered the concept until it worked at scale.
A lot of hackers I know who aren't working on that scale don't worry about QA or bugs so much because hardly anybody is using their software and it's not mission critical. When you have millions of people touching your software and it is processing millions of dollars in transactions, the metrics that matter are different.
I am sure Facebook cares about UX, but they are a publicly traded company and if a slightly better UX delivers a significantly worse ad revenue number, that isn't just sort of bad for investors, it's bad for the employees job security (and stock value), it's bad for the advertisers who can't get the same ROI on their ad spend, and ultimately it's a little bit bad for the end users because if "good UX" doesn't make money, then over the long haul, Facebook will learn to not invest in "good UX".
I think the scale that Facebook's engineers are working at is a lot bigger than most of us can easily appreciate.
Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
#150This is essentially what happened in my group when I was at Yahoo. Our group spent several months on a redesign that made it significantly more modern and easier to use. After it went live, though, this decreased the number of ad clicks by a significant number, and the people in charge hurriedly reverted all the changes back, since they needed to make their revenue numbers in order to make their bonus. When you are s…
I've actually faced a similar situation, and let me tell you it was hard . Companies like Yahoo exist to make money - or, at least, they must continue to make money in order to continue existing. Like Dustin said, > "This is truly a nightmare scenario for any CEO: do you take the risk and proceed with the better user experience/product at the expense of short term numbers–with no promise that the better design will a…
interesting