Facebook Instant Articles create a better reading experience for users
techinasia.com
techinasia.com
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.
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!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco...
I believe that they made that move in preparation to Android Instant Apps. (https://developer.android.com/topic/instant-apps/index.html)
In the future this button will most likely open the instant version of the messaging app instead of redirecting you to the store.
But I hope I can turn that off. That sounds really dangerous.
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.
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
- 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
I don't even use the website anymore as it's so clunky. FB are dropping the ball in a big way at the moment.
But how will you need to check Facebook regularly to make sure you never miss shuffled content if Facebook shows content chronologically?
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.
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.
Not sure what the back end is written in, saw a reference to Flask in a javascript comment, so maybe Python.
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.
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.)
* 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...
That's not true, go to Settings -> Notifications -> On Facebook -> and select All Off for Live Videos
[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020742...
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?
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.