
Facebook Instant Articles create a better reading experience for users - williswee
https://www.techinasia.com/talk/facebook-eating-internet-with-good-ux
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smrtinsert
Good UX? I just uninstalled Facebook Messenger AGAIN on Android because it was
taking 17% battery for doing absolutely nothing. Thanks for reminding me how
much I hate everything about them. I use Facebook a lot less since I
uninstalled their shitty apps and I don't care for their browser clients
either.

Let me know when I can get a simple list of what happened on Facebook on my
feed by DATE and I'll care again.

~~~
QuantumRoar
I rarely check my Facebook on my phone but when I do, I use their website.

But for a few days now, every time I tap on the messages icon it bounces me to
the Google store app for their messenger. I literally cannot see my messages
anymore!

A workaround is to change the user agent (is that the word?) by requesting the
desktop site. Then, the m.facebook.com domain is a bit more tedious to use but
it works and I can see my messages. The www.facebook.com domain is unusable on
your phone (rescaling is completely broken and text boxes don't work on my
phone, so I guess they didn't really do a good job there).

So now I'm stuck using the mobile version of their website as seen from a
desktop browser.

Great User Experience!

~~~
gjm11
> I guess they didn't really do a good job there

Not if their goal was to make the non-mobile version of their site usable on
your phone. But if their goal was to make the non-mobile version of their site
_unusable_ on your phone, they did just fine. (Why would they want to do that?
To encourage people to use the mobile version. Why would they want to do
_that_? Among other reasons, to make them use the Messenger app.)

Yeah, that's pretty conspiracy-theory-y: it implies that Facebook did
something that was unequivocally bad for user experience, in order to push
people into interacting with their services using the methods they prefer. But
then, disabling messages in the mobile website to push people into using the
Messenger app fits that description perfectly too.

~~~
QuantumRoar
> that's pretty conspiracy-theory-y

I don't think that it counts as a conspiracy theory at this point. I think
their intent is very clear.

Here's Facebooks strategic cookbook according to my experience and opinion:

    
    
       1. Advance into new territory
       2. Make it nice and cozy to attract enough people
       3. Fence it off and lock people in
       4. Go to step 1
    

Examples would be:

\- Anonymity

\- XMPP support for their chat

\- making the time line a clusterfuck (is it actually still a _time_ line or
what do the call it now?)

\- the reach of public posts on business sites (unless you pay)

\- the whole thing how facebook videos are treated unequal to videos from
other sources (probably everything originating from facebook sources is
treated as more relevant in your timeline, who knows...)

\- we also have the facebook articles thing where publishers will likely leave
a few kidneys behind when they try to get out of it again

The fun thing is that as soon as people feel comfortable using a certain
feature, they don't really notice how they get locked in. Like a prison with
walls so far you can't see them. Keep living inside and build your life and
house and whatever have you. When the walls close in, you either leave
everything behind or rearrange yourself according to your new overlords.

Edit: formatting

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mattkevan
Facebook and good UX? Ha! Good one.

I'm a UX designer and Facebook baffles me. Maybe I'm a bit too old or I don't
use it enough, but I find it so unintuitive - there's all kinds of options,
corners and dead ends where things may or may not be hidden. And then once
I've found something, getting back there again is almost impossible.

It just doesn't lend itself to a consistent mental model.

~~~
wtf_is_frp
what site is a great example of good UX?

~~~
mattkevan
One of my go-to examples is [http://www.gov.uk](http://www.gov.uk). Obviously
a very different site to Facebook, but the way it combines the content from
hundreds of individual sites while still making it easy to navigate is
impressive.

To be fair, Facebook's UX is always going to be a bit of a nightmare just due
to the sheer volume of disparate features stuffed in - the 'iTunes effect' as
I've just called it - so the move to focused apps for specific features is
probably a good thing.

To be not so fair, I get the suspicion that the UX is left deliberately
confusing in places, especially the constant rearranging of privacy settings,
to get people to share more than they would otherwise.

~~~
virtualwhys
I know it's text based but still, the gov.uk is blazing fast. Looked under the
hood, seems like they're using client-side template rendering via Mustache,
and JQuery.

Not sure what the back end is written in, saw a reference to Flask in a
javascript comment, so maybe Python.

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niftich
The title overpromises and under-delivers. FB's mobile app prefetches articles
that are published with the 'Instant Articles' feature, a publishing platform
similar to Google's AMP. This avoids the page-load pause that would occur by
visiting an external link on a third-party host in an external browser.

Of course, this prefetching isn't free -- the user is paying in increased data
and battery usage. The content publishers, and the users who do read the
content are happy. The most informative portion of the article is a picture
showing better conversion rates using 'Instant Articles', but image is
directly lifted from Facebook's marketing of the feature.

It's ironic that the article states Instant Articles "may lead to a reduction
of spammy 'content marketing' that dominates the Internet, where we see
unoriginal listicles churned out with an underlying purpose of making
conversions and sales", even though this article is essentially content
marketing for the purpose of promoting conversions and sales. But the takeaway
for me was I didn't know Facebook has a competitor to AMP.

~~~
niftich
Submission title has now been changed from the article's original: "How
Facebook is eating the internet with good UX" to "Facebook Instant Articles
create a better reading experience for users".

------
n0us
This article has more to do with publishing platforms than UX but I wonder
when we will see the first real businesses founded on the idea of producing
high quality news content while completely abandoning publishing platforms and
posting direct to Facebook/LinkedIn/other.

It seems like all credible news agencies try to compete not just on having the
best stories and coverage but they also on building a distribution platform.
Presumably they do this because they think it's the best path to monetization
but I don't see the exact angle there. The NYTimes seems to have done this
well but most other self-built publishing platforms aren't that great. For
example I find the WSJ to be pretty obnoxious and it's considered a major
paper.

I wonder why we haven't seen more agencies/companies that only handle content
creation but don't self distribute. (On the flip side of that, more tech
companies that only build a distribution platform but produce no content.)

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Aldo_MX
Notifications:

* Random page 1 blah blah blah live video *

* Random page 2 blah blah blah live video *

* Random page 3 blah blah blah live video *

* Random page N blah blah blah live video *

> No option to disable globally those notifications

Yeah, sure, good UX...

~~~
frostmatthew
> No option to disable globally those notifications

That's not true, go to Settings -> Notifications -> On Facebook -> and select
_All Off_ for _Live Videos_

~~~
Aldo_MX
That option didn't exist a few months ago[1], so expecting users to
proactively hunt when they implement an opt-out to an annoying feature is also
bad UX:

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020742...](https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10207426382755975)

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FussyZeus
I wouldn't say Facebook as good UX so much as so many other websites have
downright trash UX. Being the best turd in a toilet isn't much to brag about.

------
ianpurton
The Facebook UX has something in common with their CEO's dress sense. It looks
like shit.

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radarsat1
Since people are venting, I'll contribute with one more frustration I don't
often see. The one thing I'd think facebook would be good at, it is not, and
that is: Finding events.

One of the main reasons I ever started a facebook account was to be able to
follow events happening in the city I live in. Now I am in a new city and
don't know much of what is happening.

However, UI-wise, there seems to be relatively few ways (at least,
discoverable ways) to search for events that are targeted to your interests,
and within a certain distance from where you are. This is _exactly_ the kind
of thing I expect facebook to do _well_. It has enough data on me, damn it.
Yet, I find it almost impossible to get FB to actually give me a list of music
events that I might enjoy that are in a given city. (And if you want to search
one city over from where you are, forget it.. it's either your "home" city, or
nothing.)

If I search for very specific terms, sure I can find relevant things, but it
doesn't seem to be much better than text-searching a database. I'd rather it
finds similarities with things my friends like, previous events I've attended,
etc, and use this to recommend things to me in the new city I moved to. But
no. It's like starting from scratch. Meanwhile I continue to get ads for
events in the previous city I lived in, while I already told FB that I moved
to a different continent.

The best approach I've found so far is to find one or two poeple/productions
that do things that I like, and to start checking their friends/likes, but
this feels extremely "manual". Isn't the whole point of a huge database like
FB for it to figure this out for me?

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chucky_z
The article only mentions their app. I try to install as few apps as possible
for personal reasons.

Their mobile web UX is turning sour, fast. (I primarily used the messenger
function, so my view is very skewed the)

I don't have any strong things to point at other than the messenger function,
but it just feels far worse than it did a year ago.

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max_
Journalists are very good at writing a lot about things they don't understand.

~~~
jasonmp85
Maybe, but the commenters on this post are excelling at it.

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t3ra
So instant article is good because now sites/writers will get to place ads
which will not get blocked and will supposedly get more traffic for which
Facebook begs you to convert into a sponsored post?

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spinningarrow
"Eating the internet" sounds a bit hyperbolic in this context (instant
articles) seeing as the article mentions that Google and Apple are also doing
it. Or did I miss something?

~~~
wavefunction
The internet is also much larger than "the Web." Just some hyperbolic tech-is-
king nonsense from a breathless journalist.

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erokar
Facebook looks like something from 2005. It's outdated and has low usability.

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oolongCat
try facebook with js disabled on your phone. Feels a lot more faster and non
of those annoying "Oh please or please mr, please install our app, oh please"

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omginternets
In what world does Facebook have good UX?

