
Whatever goes up, that’s what we do - uptown
http://dcurt.is/facebooks-predicament
======
steven2012
This 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 stuck in a company that can't innovate because a shitty site
leads to more money due to inertia, then you know you are on your way down.
This leads to your best developers thinking "what the fuck did I waste all my
time for?" and they will leave in no uncertain terms.

~~~
ignostic
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 actually lead to long-
> term benefits–or do you scrap the new design and start over?"_

Would the simplified, modern design have led Yahoo into a new era of
profitability? Maybe. Or maybe they'd just have a nicer site that made less
money for a year.

Our team made a site that made less per visitor, but we felt like it was a
better-looking and more useful site. We decided to stick with it and work out
the kinks, but ~6 months went by without reaching our old sites' benchmark.
There was a _ton_ of pressure on me to make it work or admit defeat and
revert. I nearly gave in as the stress built, but eventually revenue surpassed
the old site. I later learned that I was almost fired over it.

My story has a happy ending, but just barely. I have sympathy for the people
making these decisions.

~~~
kenko
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.

~~~
baddox
I don't really see much of a difference. If a company must make money to
continue to exist, then I think it's reasonable to say that company "exists to
make money." Of course, that doesn't mean is exists _only_ to make money.

~~~
kenko
Lots of bookstores, cafes, antique shops, whatever, are labors of love. And
not only things like that. A bakery---a good bakery!---exists to make good
bread. It has to sell that bread and cover its costs, etc., in order to do
that, but it doesn't exist in order to make the money necessary to cover its
costs. If _that_ were why it existed, it would be easier to abandon the end of
making _good_ bread!

------
akamaka
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 to, and I'd have
to go through and hover over each icon one by one.

My theory (which I think has as much evidence to back it up as Dustin's) is
that if the feed performed better in this design, it was because the poorly
designed menu made it more difficult to navigate the rest of the site!

~~~
epistasis
>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.

~~~
benihana
> _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.

~~~
benstein
Show me a "Save" icon that doesn't _still_ look like a floppy disk. Until then
I'll take my text labels.

~~~
baudehlo
Modern apps don't have a save function. There's no need for it.

~~~
z3phyr
All the apps must have 'Manual Override'. Save is desirable in ethical
scenarios.

~~~
mcherm
What?

I don't comprehend what you mean by "manual override", nor how saving can have
any ethical implications whatsoever.

~~~
andrewflnr
I'm pretty sure it's a joke, probably a reference.

------
modeless
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'd rather be spending on things they
actually care about.

Users didn't want the news feed to change, and the users were right.

~~~
Mz
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.

~~~
aryastark
There is no evidence that points to QWERTY being designed to be inefficient.

[http://www.economist.com/node/196071](http://www.economist.com/node/196071)

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-
fiction-t...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-the-
legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249/)

~~~
pkamb
There is plenty of evidence that points to it _being_ inefficient, however.
Regardless of the various QWERTY origin stories, it's not a very good touch-
typing layout compared to Dvorak or Colemak.

------
grey-area
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](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-term objectives
like user satisfaction and retention.

~~~
gfodor
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.

~~~
grey-area
I'd dispute that many design changes can be _proven_ in any meaningful way.
There are too many variables, and optimising for clicks on one button might
affect all others on a page. It's very hard to measure everything at once, and
it doesn't sound like Google tried in this instance.

------
dsjoerg
The core of Dustin's argument is that Facebook may not have been patient
enough; they should have trusted in their beautiful new design and waited long
enough for the benefits to bear fruit.

However, it's a cheap argument to make, because the Hard Thing is to decide
how many months of crappy numbers are you going to withstand before you admit
that your Beautiful New Design in fact isn't any good?

Six months? Two years?

And it's not just revenue you look at. How's overall engagement? Sharing
rates? Communication? Discovery?

The article is a shallow snipe; the real issues here are hard, interesting,
and unexplored by this piece.

------
notahacker
The alternate design isn't "performing too well" by not telling you which of
your friends are online to chat with, like the current version does. It's just
decluttering, and relegating that important function to one of many miniscule,
_unlabelled_ icons. It's not "performing too well" by rendering links in the
same colour as body text, and making the search function look like a header:
it's just making them subtly less obvious, which matters when your users are
in the hundreds of millions and some of them really aren't that savvy.
(Possibly it matters even more with casual users who are web-savvy, in that
you're missing an opportunity to _encourage_ them to search by prominently
positioning the sort of medium white box that makes them think about
searching)

Whatever is cleanest and most elegant is not necessarily the most user-
friendly design, never mind the optimal design from the point of view of user
engagement.

~~~
jbaskette
Very good observations. You made obvious to me most of what I did not like in
that new design. My first reaction to the look of the new design is that is
made each entry much larger filling the screen making the text less noticeable
and having fewer posts on a page. A useful design for me will be concise so I
can scan more quickly.

------
programminggeek
I'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.

~~~
droopyEyelids
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.

~~~
programminggeek
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.

------
swombat
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.

~~~
mathattack
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.

~~~
snowwrestler
Facebook was very carefully structured so that investors cannot oust
Zuckerberg.

~~~
mathattack
Yes. Google too. That's very rare though. Even still, you have to expect those
investors to demand attention to the current value of their investment.

------
waterlesscloud
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 time for individual sessions?
Or is there some sort of "engagement longevity" which might show a better
timeline keeps people visiting more often over a longer period of time?

The other possible approach would be to see what could be done to make events
and profile pages more appealing to spend time on. There may not be a way to
do that if the timeline satisfies people, but it would be worth investigating.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _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!

~~~
ampersandy
It seems like you said that disdainfully/sarcastically, but if you had
metadata about thousands of experiments and the ability to do a meta-analysis
on that data; wouldn't you? It seems like a great opportunity to identify
potentially destructive trends in the way your company runs experiments.

------
wpietri
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!"

------
eldude
This is the result of placing the burden of proof on vision and innovation.
Companies optimize for local maxima at the expense of global maxima because
proving that both the mountain exists in the distance and that you can reach
it, turns out to be extremely difficult.

And so, in companies like Facebook and Google, it doesn't matter what you
know, it only matters what you can prove. Meanwhile your competitors in the
market are unburdened by the need for proof and shout down at you from the
mountain in the distance when they arrive.

~~~
bqe
I also thought of local maxima and hill climbing algorithms.

How do you encourage finding a global maxima within your company?

~~~
eldude
I think the human subconcious mind is capable of levels of pattern-matching
and intuitions that manifest as vision: aka something you "know" but can't
necessarily explain.

Visions aren't always correct, but they're enhanced by immersing yourself in
the relevant context and data to provide your subconscious mind ample time and
information to make those connections to generate those "Aha" moments called
inspiration.

Richard Feynman described in one of his books the best way to appear like a
genius is to always be actively learning at least 3 new unrelated topics, and
you will glean patterns and details from everywhere to constantly increase you
understanding of these topics, leading to inspiration.

------
joulee
I worked on the design of the desktop Facebook News Feed. Just posted a
response to the article here:
[https://medium.com/p/ed75a0ee7641](https://medium.com/p/ed75a0ee7641)

Actually, the older version of the design we tested would have been positive
for revenue had we shipped it. But there were a number of other issues that
made it harder for people to use (which also resulted in them liking it less.)

------
nedwin
Speaking of numbers going up, I'd love to hear how Svbtle is going these days.

Don't seem to hear much from the inside since the funding announcement over 12
months ago...

------
k-mcgrady
A depressing thought but important especially if you are running a startup.
It's ok for Facebook to take a hit like this and revert but if you spend 6
months at your startup redesigning your product and even though people like it
your revenues suffer massively you might not even have time to test and revert
back.

------
higherpurpose
It seems Facebook really is going through the Google phases, and they've
always wanted to "be Google" anyway. Right now they're in the Google phase of
5-7 years or so ago, when Google was still doing everything by the numbers,
even at the expense of UI and UX.

Just like Google of 5-7 years ago, they're also spreading their focus on many
projects, and in a few years probably forgetting about them and ignoring them,
if they don't turn into big cash cows for them almost immediately. Then expect
Facebook to kill a lot of services, just like Google did.

~~~
coppolaemilio
The've already killed the mailing service :(

------
brandonhsiao
This is really an instance of the general phenomenon that the eminent tend to
take fewer risks. A change that decreases revenue isn't necessarily bad; it
may even yield a net profit in the long run. It's just perceived as a risk
because things like user happiness and product culture (a) can't be as easily
measured and (b) don't yield results for a while.

I think this is actually a rational-- or at least natural-- course of action.
As you get more eminent, the stakes are also higher, and when you have more to
lose you tend to take less risk. In fact, it'd be surprising if a big company
_continued_ taking risks by trusting non-structural decisions.

This is probably related to the phenomenon that large organizations tend to
fall into bureaucracy. In fact the two questions are probably overlapping, if
not identical. How can you grow big and famous and take on big
responsibilities without losing your ability to trust your intuition and care
about the feel and usability of the product? How can you stop yourself from
degenerating into bureaucracy?

I'm pretty confident it's possible. Steve Jobs managed it. My own hunch is
that the trick is to hire people who don't care about money too much. The kind
of people who think, if we lose a bit of revenue, who cares? Which is
paradoxical, my hunch continues, because people like this will eventually make
better products in the long run, and end up increasing revenue in a thousand
different little ways.

------
calbear81
... or that beauty doesn't necessarily convert better. We've seen this time
and time again with sites like Craigslist and Ebay and recently 42Floors wrote
about a similar experience when experimenting with radically different search
result treatments.

I really do like the new treatment and I think they should have gone with this
and figured out how to recover the revenue stream later. Given how much
Facebook traffic is going to mobile instead of desktop, this wouldn't have a
large impact over the long run.

------
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.

~~~
exodust
The point is about design being held back or distorted by numbers - which are
often a false prophesy when it comes to UX improvements.

Nobody is suggesting that numbers don't matter, but if you can't decide on a
border thickness of 1 or 2 pixels without numbers to tell you which to go
with, you've lost your mojo. And that matters in the long term.

When the aim is to increase length of time on the site or in the app, the
numbers will "tell you" to make the interface more complicated, to hide the
sign-out button (common practice), to hide the exit button (like Dropbox did
on the desktop application), to force dependencies between unrelated services
(Google does this a lot).

When the aim is to increase clicks on Ads, the numbers will tell you to make
ads look like normal posts. The numbers will tell you to autoplay videos on
tabloid news article pages. But all these "optimizations" are not unlike speed
cameras placed at the bottom of the hill where lots of people can't help
bumping over the speed limit for a couple of seconds. Good for revenue, bad
vibes in every other way.

~~~
ignostic
> "design being held back or distorted by numbers - which are often a false
> prophesy when it comes to UX improvements."

> "the numbers will "tell you" to make the interface more complicated, to hide
> the sign-out button"

Oh yes, I definitely understand that we misinterpret what the numbers mean. My
point is that this isn't the numbers' fault - it's our fault for not
understanding what we're measuring and what the numbers mean. Often
_additional_ tests can even help resolve the "what should we do" question.

We run tests all the time, but when we see something like, "pageviews are up
x%" that's just a starting place. We begin to ask why and continue to develop
a hypothesis and proof for it. It might be that users are confused so they
start clicking around, or it could be because we've grabbed their attention
and enticed them to learn more. Without the numbers we wouldn't even know
where to start.

If Dustin's point is just to think critically about test numbers that seems to
go without saying.

~~~
exodust
Fair enough. I agree the interpretation of the data we collect leaves a lot to
be desired.

Where I work, I've seen good products killed off because of low traffic, but
the low traffic was due to people not finding the product due to poor
navigation - which in turn was made poor because of marketing requirements to
"drive traffic" to their latest short term gimmick. It's a complex web.

------
pjaspers
This reminds me of the RealNetworks [0] story a few weeks back.

[0] [https://medium.com/launching-ux-
launchpad/385ff833f9c8](https://medium.com/launching-ux-
launchpad/385ff833f9c8)

------
richforrester
I did some design and coding work for the adult industry for a while. The
company I worked for had one large members area with all kinds of niches, with
thousands of sites acting as doorways into it. Instead of a nice overview, and
a smooth experience, they had built in tons of tricky ways to delay the user
getting to the content. From loading delays to tricky dropdowns instead of
simple buttons.

Users had access to the site as long as they stayed on the phone to our
special 2 dollar per minute phone line.

It worked, but it was a pain to work for a company like that. I was fresh out
of school and just wanted to get better at my trade, but wasn't allowed to do
the best I could. Frustrating.

Needless to say, things have changed in that industry, gotten a lot trickier,
and the company has had to switch into different avenues. They now offer
payment solutions and run a huge dating site.

------
mikeg8
If that quote at the end is accurate, that would be a very disappointing
culture to be apart of.

------
jfoster
This is a weakness of ad-supported business models. When users are buying or
subscribing to a product, you want them to love it as much as possible so that
they will always buy more. Ad-supported models untie the relationship between
UX and revenue. In an ad-supported model, you do need users to like the
product enough to keep coming back, but small decreases in utility that
generate more impressions could be great for revenue.

The people at Facebook are extremely talented. It's a shame they're stuck with
this business model. It would be awesome to see how good they could make
Facebook if this wasn't tying them down.

~~~
babesh
Isn't that what the Instagram, Whatsapp, and Occulus purchases are for? None
of them are yet tied down to an advertising based business model.

~~~
jfoster
Potentially they can even untie the Facebook product from the ad model. They
could introduce "Facebook Premium" whereby you would pay a small monthly fee
and have a different interface due to the space freed up from deciding to not
show you ads.

------
thisishugo
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 help but feel that something has gone wrong when Facebook - or any
company - will deliver its users a worse product for the sake of few more
dollars.

~~~
nemothekid
>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 new
feature that is pretty, but costs the company a fortune?

Arguably there are those who have considered the iPhone a worse product
because of its locked down nature. Does Apple deliver a worse product for the
sake of a "few more dollars?" Even then you have to consider is the App Store
ecosystem, the relatively high quality of iPhone Apps, and ease-of-use-
through-handcuffs just worth a few more dollars?

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
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.

------
cliveowen
Facebook stopped innovating 4 years ago, it's become boring. I only use the
Messenger app now.

------
buckmower
Beyond, Beside or Within The following in response to Facebook’s Newsfeed
Redesign: Why do what makes everyone else do what you want them to do if doing
so isn’t right? If we all can determine what’s right and what’s wrong as a
community of equals then doing what’s right is a matter of doing what everyone
else, for the most part, wants you to do. As is the case with Facebook and
most other companies that offer products to consumers, when it comes to
offering their product they aren’t exactly equal with the rest of us; because,
they have control over the products we so willingly consume; thus, they are
faced with the conundrum of what to do about product design and consumer
retention. Dustin seems to be saying that Facebook does what makes Facebook
users do what Facebook wants its users to do. The numbers that go up and down,
it seems, are numbers related to people spending time on other people’s pages
rather than just on the news feed. What’s wrong with that?

------
tomphoolery
I would have much preferred the proposed layout as seen in this photo. In
fact, it is (almost scary) similar to the most recent Diaspora single-page
view that was just rolled out no more than a year ago. We designed our single-
page view to focus on content, and unlike Facebook, we don't care about ad
revenue, so we don't have these problems. :)

------
dhawalhs
FB could probably do an open graph search to figure out who gave him that
information

"Friends of Drew Curtis who work at Facebook"

------
mcgwiz
Facebook can afford not to provide an better user experience because it has no
competition. Should Google Plus one day threaten Facebook's usage, Facebook
may pull this design out of it's archives.

Until then, they will provide the minimal user experience that keeps them on
top of the hill with as much ad inventory as possible.

------
mtgentry
Zuck is brilliant at many things. But when someone says he's great at product,
I raise an eyebrow. Seems to me they A/B tested their way to the top. FB today
reminds me of Google 5 years ago. Their 41-shades-of-blue-testing days.

But Google learned to listen to more right-brain arguments so maybe FB can
too.

~~~
pbreit
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.

~~~
elwell
It's not just about "known-how". Many people downloaded Instagram because it
was cool and precisely because it wasn't Facebook.

~~~
sharkweek
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...

~~~
jklp
They tried to, with Facebook Camera -
[https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/facebook-
camera/id525898024?...](https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/facebook-
camera/id525898024?mt=8)

------
adrianhoward
Am I the only person on the planet who vastly prefers the newer design?

Yes, the larger images were nice to look at - but they got in the way of
actually viewing the content for me.

My personal viewing habits of the newsfeed are to give facebook a glance over
once a day with my morning coffee. The purpose is to get an overview -
quickly. The newer look got in the way of that, especially when viewing in
smaller windows.

There are also all the folk who aren't looking at it on large displays, and
maybe consistency of experience is important too.

Sure - maybe there's a metrics issue too. But I've seen _more_ than my fair
share of usability tests where things that my "design" persona like end up
being disliked by the people who actually use the site.

------
kybernetyk
> 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 actually lead to long-
> term benefits–or do you scrap the new design and start over?

Doesn't this only apply to CEOs who run companies that give away their
products to indirectly monetize it? If you had a product you sold to your
customers wouldn't this improvement in usability/product quality be a no-
brainer because better product = more sales = more revenue?

~~~
wtracy
I can think of lots of counter-examples.

What if your product is licensed per-seat, and your change allows your
customer to achieve their goals with fewer employees using your product,
reducing the number of licenses purchased?

What if your change allows your customer to complete their task more quickly,
and they stop paying for your SaaS product as soon as they complete said task?

What if your improvement improves interoperability, and your customer's
partners decide not to purchase your product because they no longer need it to
work together?

What if your change reduces the need for your customer to later purchase an
upgrade?

------
mkbrody
Culture is internal marketing. The numbers are what really matters.

~~~
mikeg8
> The numbers are what really matters.

To survive, yes. To make the the deepest impact, no.

~~~
mkbrody
Amazon's UI will never be considered beautiful, but it's core strategy of
focusing on the numbers has allowed it to accomplish more than 99.9% of
companies ever formed.

I'm sure they've sacrificed many redesigns in the name of numbers to get to
where they are.

FB could implement a redesign, look cool for another 15 minutes, and then have
ad revenue dry up, less money for R&D and acquisitions, look bad in the press
& on Wall Street, and then blip out after another "cool" redesign.

To also back up my point, if Zuckerberg and the upper echelon of Facebook
think this way, they're probably right, considering they have a proven track
record of making good decisions and more insider knowledge than anyone else on
the subject.

------
tomasien
This isn't exactly right - optimizing the NewsFeed and eliminating exploration
may be a more efficient UX in a way, but that doesn't mean it's better. I
don't hear "reduced exploration" and think "that's way better". I'm not saying
that's why FB made the decision, but Dustin doesn't know why they made it
either. I'd have made the same decision as a UX focused CEO though is all I'm
saying.

------
sidcool
I might be acting like a devil's advocate, but don't the metrics reflect user
behavior? And it's perfectly fine if they tune their UI for revenue. They are
not missionaries, but they are visionaries. They need money to keep the
innovation going.

I am not a facebook fan or an affiliate, and I do resent few of their design
decisions, but earning money is well within their framework of morality.

------
apalmer
There are metrics and then their are metrics. If a new design causes the
amount of money the company makes to go down... then its not a 'good' design
by business standards.

And its more rational to say here are concrete numbers clearly affecting the
bottomline vs well our 5 experts think this design is better so we are
sticking with it.

~~~
colmvp
There can be a difference between good design that users prefer vs. good
design that aligns with business goals.

------
loceng
"We only optimize. We do what goes up." Deciding what you want to facilitate
going up comes down to governance. If you want to give the user a shittier
experience in order to earn more profits, then you can do that. But you leave
yourself open to someone providing the better experience and losing them
altogether.

------
dreamfactory2
If a better UX turns out to make less money I'd say the problem to be solved
is with the monetisation, not the UX

------
_wesley_
Funny thing - FADC (one of Dustin's groups seen in the screenshot) is getting
a ton of requests today.

------
xg15
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?

~~~
weixiyen
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.

------
crazychrome
Interesting read. it proves one of my arguments against fb: there is not too
much real value to end users.

there is no such thing in the world like "performing too well". if a better
design led to less user engagements, it means the product, in its bare bone,
not valuable to users.

------
tinganho
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.

------
Soarez
It's ok as long as you're sure you're looking at the right numbers.

------
goshx
Facebook's new design is looking a lot like the very old Orkut's design.

------
joubert
It seems to me that if the company's goals are the same as that of their
users, then innovation will lead to profits.

But if your users are not also your customers, then you are likely to run into
these counter-innnovation corners.

------
elleferrer
At the end of the day, data and numbers are powerful. They scream credibility.
They shout, "you did your homework!" But they won’t be as effective as they
could be if you don't use them wisely.

------
pbreit
Making something easier to glance at doesn't necessarily mean it's better. I
think a better design for something like Facebook is something that's more
engaging. This isn't search.

~~~
roc
Which is just begging the question of whether more time/more hits == more
engagement.

------
pixelcort
One fear I think about is choosing a good UI/UX for an MVP. Users might get
used to it and it could be hard to significantly change it later on.

------
nakedrobot2
This anecdote perfectly illustrates how Facebook is not playing the long game.
Facebook will erode any trust and loyalty that they did have in favor of
short-term gains. We see it again and again. The last thing was the "pay to
access your fans" bait-and-switch that to me was rather abhorrent.

Without any "higher mission" at all, Facebook has to resort to these lowest-
common-denominator values.

I only hope that someone with better values can gain an edge someday, and
refuses to be acquired/neutralized by Facebook.

------
hipaulshi
which, like the FB employee said, is exactly, what a data-driven company
should do to maximize profit. However, Dustin has a good point. CEO needs to
make that very risky call if he vouched for the better design. The customer
may or may not come. Short term loss is inevitable. One would need strong
belief, again, needs to be backed by data, to make that call.

------
roymckenzie
While it does flex, I won't be spending that kind of money on something like
that until it folds up in my pocket.

------
adw
The assumption here is that we _know_ , because we're geniuses, what a good
user experience looks like.

That's aggressive.

------
atmosx
I am not sure if there's any take-away from this article. There are too many
assumptions.

------
abimaelmartell
I hate the new design, the content row is really small, it looks ugly.

------
sharemywin
Prefect example of the innovator's dilemma.

------
imjk
Brings new meaning to the adage, "What goes up, must come down."

------
corresation
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 you need a
really, really good reason to change things.

And to add just a bit more on the "contrived" notion: My Facebook feed looks
very similar to the first page, with big, colourful pictures dominating my
news food. If my network had people posting short twitter-like missives, I
suppose it would look like that. Outside of trivial CSS differences, the only
real variation is that I don't have the confusing iconography down the left,
instead using that massive area of white space for descriptive text.

~~~
addMitt
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.

------
yyyooolll
who honestly gives a fuck what you think? waste of everybody's time. am I
right, am I right?

------
dudus
[citation needed]

