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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers

Anyone who's tried to use their advertiser tools is unlikely to agree with this. Hard to remember any software I've used with a worse user interface in recent memory.

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Google ads is pretty bad too but facebook's business portal / ad manager / whatever they call it this week almost seems to be designed to be a nightmare to use on purpose. I sincerely hope a player comes along to disrupt this market with a product that is actually nice to use and offers decent customer support - these shouldn't be unrealistic wishes!

Haha, they AB tested on there "customers" to get them to overspend and dark patterned even the imperators salon. This is hellarious.

Actually I think this could be the reason. Given the sufficient number of A/B testing, it may turn out the more complex the interface is, the more likely the customer is likely to (make the mistake of) spending more.

There's no way to disrupt that market without first owning the audience. Facebook and Google can afford to build awful ad management software, because that's the only way advertisers can reach their audiences.

Perhaps it's the classical case of enterprise software - the people who make the call to spend on Facebook ads mostly don't have to work with the advertiser UI themselves - they have underlings for that.

I need to explain the user interface of Facebook to one of my clients but it would be a lot easier if the interface didn’t change every week and it didn’t had 4 points of contact for settings all in different places. I guess design by committee is at work here.

My guess is that (just like other big players) they have a team for each part/page/section of their platform. There is no cohesive product vision and no product principles (promises) to the users.

Experimented with it recently to see if we could advertise to people with an interest in our audio plugins. Ended up with a bunch of likes from mostly single mothers in Mexico who didn't seem at all interested in spectral audio processing :'(

Remember teaching people how to navigate and use that is a whole industry for them too.

Pretty sure you can do courses and get certified in it.

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