Poll of Facebook Users Finds 94% Hate Redesign | Hacker News Reader

Poll of Facebook Users Finds 94% Hate Redesign

techcrunch.com

43 pointsvaksel69 comments

The issue with the new Facebook is that people used Facebook as a way to connect with random people they kinda met. Random people you've kinda met often have pictures you might find interesting or contact info you'd like to look up. You don't want to be updated on what they're doing every day - you just don't care. And so now people are inundated with information they just don't want because they really only care about a small subset of their friends. Twitter, on the other hand, being based around this philosophy doesn't require two-way relationships and people "followed" others knowing that they wanted this data flying at them.

I don't know whether this stat is valid or anything, but I think Facebook just has a different social graph than sites like Twitter and that Facebook's graph isn't people you want these style updates on.

That's why it's so great that they let you X out on anybody you don't want to see. Once you realize it's there, it's almost an impulse click.

This is probably worth reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

Selection bias exists, but it doesn't explain away numbers like "700,000" and "94%". The fact is that Facebook pissed off a huge number of their users, for seemingly no good reason, as the previous design was quite popular and functional.

First, 700,000 isn't "huge" for Facebook. They gain about that many new users in a day.

Second, the number of respondees or the proportion responding a certain way are irrelevant if the sample is biased. The poll is designed in a way that practically guarantees bias: a self-selected sample, a hot-button issue where one side cares much more strongly than the other, and the viral hooks of Facebook to make sure it gets spread far and wide.

It's worthless if you're looking to draw any real conclusions about how Facebook users feel about the new homepage. It's not worthless if you're looking to exploit people's confirmation bias and get an article all over the web.

So, YMMV, I guess.

Reference for ~700,000 new users per day

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/12/16/facebook-now-growin...

Thank you for this link.

It also reports 13 million users log in once per day. That, in the context of Facebook, is what I'd call an "active user". These, overwhelmingly, are the people who are taking this poll. 700,000 therefore represents about 5% of the core userbase.

> 700,000 therefore represents about 5% of the core userbase.

Your math here is really flawed. Facebook's daily uniques are a magnitude smaller than their weekly and monthly uniques. Since this survey has been up since the redesign, you would have to compare 700k to the number of uniques over that period of time. I can assure you that number is much greater than 13M.

I'd bet you a dollar that at least 3/4 of the poll-takers are dailies. These are the users who really are taking this personally.

The whole point of this argument has been over statistical invalidity. Your guesses are pointless without data.

What? Your logic is as if all users knew about this poll, when I guess that the number of people checking for new apps is extremely tiny compared to the entire user base. I don’t even knew about this app, and it's more likely that 700k is very close to how many actually look for new apps on facebook during this period.

Another point: of Facebook's 175 million active users, 700,000 represents 0.4%.

Here, "active user" means "registered account". It's not a good indicator of who is actually using the site on a regular basis.

Generally FB takes "active" to mean "logged on within the last 30 days." That includes new users and returning users, but not users who haven't been on for the last month.

Please, if you're going to act as a proponent of responsible statistics, don't exaggerate like you did in your first line. (EDIT: wow, this is not an exaggeration. An adjacent link confirms it. Currently eating my words.)

True, 700,000 is not a staggering number for Facebook, but is a statistically signifiant portion of their most active users. I wouldn't put money on the figure of 94%, but I think it correctly indicates a strong trend.

I didn't exaggerate anything. Two years ago they were growing at 200-300k users per day. Dave & Ami were using those numbers in public talks. So, let's be generous and say instead that 700k users represents two or three days worth of growth rather than one.

It actually doesn't matter with respect to the more salient point, which is that talk of "statistical significance" is irrelevant because the calculations require an unbiased sample. As I outlined above, there are at least three strong reasons to suspect this poll is irreparably biased.

Self-selection alone is typically enough to condemn a poll. Look up the history of Gallup if you want to see the real-world impact of self-selection in polling.

selection bias is compounded by the fact the costs of voting. i like the redesign, and i was going to vote YES, but it's not a Facebook poll, it's an application. I'd have to sign up to use the app, allowing it access to my user data, just to vote. No thanks. I bet most people who like the redesign don't want to jump through all the extra hoops to vote yes.

Yeah, people who are happy with the new layout (or don't care) are not likely to install an app just to respond to the poll.

I took a few days before adding the app to vote yes, and I just did that because I was pissed off at the people voting no.

For the record: perhaps 10 of my friends have voted no. This is not a significant percentage. Of those 10, probably about 8 of them did it as an impulse vote and 2 actually got annoyed at the layout.

the number of respondees or the proportion responding a certain way are irrelevant if the sample is biased.

Correct. Ordinarily, the ABSOLUTE size of a sample is more crucial than what percentage of the whole a sample makes up, for determining whether the sample is adequately large, but that is only if the sample is unbiased. If that precondition is not met, don't talk about how large the sample is, talk about how badly self-selected "samples" can misrepresent the characteristics of a population. Thanks for reminding HN readers about this important issue.

The one thing you're forgetting is that this happens _every_ time there's a new website redesign for Facebook. Its actually very typical for this to happen in general. People despise change will complain about a new design even if the design is much better. In a couple of weeks no one will even notice or think much of it.

Everytime single time that Facebook has changed the design almost everyone hates it and everytime almost everyone grows to like it.

>the previous design was quite popular and functional.

But there was just the same outrage over that design for a good month. I probably got 10 group invites to groups like "new facebook sucks!" and "don't visit facebook on (some date) to show them how much we hate new facebook."

I'm not sure if anyone took a poll, even a biased one, but I haven't noticed among my friends any more outrage over this redesign than the last one.

Everyone hated the news feed, yet now it's hard to think of wtf Facebook would be if it didn't have the feed. Everyone hated the first major redesign too, but now I'm sure everyone's used to it. They should do a test, wherein they switch the layout back to a previous layout then have people vote. I have a feeling this would show that the vocal majority would dislike ANY major change. I'm pretty sure Facebook's team has a lot better designers than any of the 700,000 voters.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=68992161659

> This application was not developed by Facebook.

Yeah, another semi-misleading headline from TechCrunch. It's not a "Facebook Poll" (since only Facebook itself can actually run polls these days, iirc), it's a third party app that is polling Facebook users.

Edit: Looks like Arrington updated the headline after someone pointed that out... still not a very clear headline since it misleadingly labels this a "Facebook Poll," when it is in fact a Facebook app that is polling users.

Perhaps semantics, but an important distinction given that actual Facebook polls are only available to Facebook.

Fixed.

The new Facebook is horrible and confusing, the main page is just a rubbish of “what country you are” or “what language would you be” from different friends, but I can’t see any useful information in a see of stupid game scores and crazy app stuff. This stuff is not even chronological, and I can’t remove a story to clean it up, I can only block all stories from a user (which is a bit much). Anyway, it’s garbage.

Edit: also only 9 big stories on home page... wtf. And older posts returns "There are no more posts to show right now" after just two clicks.

They don't even stack posts by the same people, I've got 4 messages from one person, all within the space of an hour and no other posts between. Yet all four are displaying, why?

The highlights, display new photo groups... yet a selection of the photos are displayed on the home page anyway. The entire highlight section is completely moronic, it just displays less information in a less convenient way and there's no way to control, remove or filter any of this.

I really don't need to know my wife's cousin has joined the 'I Love Sex' group when I've already removed her stuff from my homepage.

I also have serious problems with Facebook's 'People You May Know' crap, because it's completely unintelligent. There's no way to prioritize your relationships with people, so I'm suggested friends of my wife's cousins who live like a 28 hour drive away. My wife doesn't have the person on, I'm not down as living anywhere near the person... so why does it suggest them to me off of 2 people I know who know them, but doesn't suggest a single one of my wifes friends?

It failed to suggest a family friend who comes over for coffee like 4 days a week, yet it has suggested me someone from a different country before despite having less mutual friends.

For what it's worth, I like the new layout.

In particular, I like that I can just type whatever I want as a status message instead of Facebook deciding that my message should be 'XYZ is <fill in>".

This feature is quite old ... statuses have been "is"-free since roughly the last overhaul, which was what, a year or so?

They still prefilled in the "is " part into the textarea though.

Yeah, but you still had to start it with your name, and it's really difficult to make correct sentences that start with your name in some languages (it can even be difficult in English depending on what you're trying to say).

You can tell that this update had a lot to do with simplifying localisation, in fact. A lot of text is gone. Instead of saying that someone was "tagged in 4 photos", it just says their name and shows the photos.

For what it's worth, that was the one thing I really liked about the Facebook status messages -- the last bastion of the old IRC /me command.

Somehow, having your name at the start of the textbox (and not being able to erase it) seemed to force status updates to be terse and, well, third-person. I've noticed that just in the last few days, this beautiful brevity has completely disappeared.

[Edit: but I concede that it probably didn't work so well for other languages...]

I guess the awkward phrase "Facebook poll users" is a workaround for saying, "Respondents to a voluntary response unscientific poll." We have no idea what the majority of Facebook users feel about the new design. (I'm still deciding what I think about it.) The usual FAQ applies:

VOLUNTARY RESPONSE POLLS

One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.

[quote=Paul Velleman]

-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu Subject: Re: qualtiative study

Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.[/quote]

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

I cant say whether you are the one, or someone else, but I see this exact, word for word quote posted in almost any news story or post that relates to polls or voluntary response data. I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, just the fact that you (or whoever) post the same comment/reference in many stories. Wouldnt it just be easier to link, instead of perpetually pasting this whole thing? I know it would annoy me less. /rant

Every redesign gets the same response.

I joined Facebook for Facebook, not for a twitter clone because I already have an account for that.

I might just be cynical but i reckon that they are having problems getting people to click on their ads. The redesigns seem to be attempts to fix that problem.

All these missteps by Facebook sounds eerily like the MLS in the real estate industry: a closed database that started as private property (belonging to Realtors) and slowly being pried open by lawsuits and by companies who do a much better job presenting the data (Zillow, Trulia, etc). Maybe Facebook isn't a "platform", it's just a database, and eventually people will stop using the site all together and access the database from a completely different site that's customized to suit their needs/ tastes. People argued that everyone had a right to listing info with houses (even though the MLS has some confidential info, that was resolved), so why not with our personal data (with privacy safeguards, of course)?

"Hate" is a fairly strong reaction, no? My casual FB experience led me to be lost, again, when trying to figure out how to set my status ... but I couldn't muster enough reaction to go beyond: "meh". All my weird acquaintances are still there and new/old friends/associates still find me through it, so the value is less the UI and more Facebook's ubiquity. Personally, I prefer this to Classmates.com, don't you?

"I hate it and if it doesn’t change I will only check it once in awhile"

Way to take a hard stance. </sarcasm> I think that this redesign, like the others, will face opposition from nearly everyone at first and once people get used to it they will like it or at the very least accept it. I think that quote says it all. The user is unwilling to stop using the site despite hating the design.

It's Twitter, now, but a little better. It's okay.

Yeah, maybe it's better than Twitter, but it's not as good as it was a month ago. They have removed the organizational features which brought me back to the site after several years of avoiding it.

I can't see why they would want to "catch up" with Twitter, a distant second place in the social networking race.

Another good article is "Facebook's Lousy Facelift" here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-willman/facebooks-lousy-...

Yeah, it is kind of weird to copy someone less successful than you. On the other hand, it seems more addicting now with a more constant stream of updates.

Yeah, it is kind of weird to copy someone less successful than you.

Good general principle.

On my part, Facebook is less addictive to me than it was before the change. I could easily forget that I'm a member, as nothing interesting is happening there.

it is indeed weird to copy someone less successful than you, but very often in software and web services, the simpler service wins - think wordpress over the bloated CMSs of a decade ago, or SalesForce over SAP, or Adwords over Doubleclick - so maybe it makes sense.

The new "constant stream of updates" does not work as well as the previous Live Feed feature. I personally find the new design not just less "addictive" but also quite repulsive. Seeing a stream of fifteen "Jane Doe just gave Joey Someshit a Green Beer! Click here to give a Green Beer to someone!" notifications makes me avoid a site, not hammer on the Reload button.

Facebook has always told users to learn how to filter stories. Filter out people you don't want to hear from and especially filter out applications.

Perhaps that's why I don't get a lot of these complaints. I block apps as a matter of reflex, so the only app stories I get are from Digg or Last.FM or Google Reader - those I can appreciate.

Don't use facebook, but when I hear about things like this I am baffled. Haven't any of these engineers taken human factors courses? One of my brothers works for Honda, and I asked him about the ergonomics of car design. His response: at Honda, it is imperative that you design for 95% of the population. It looks like facebook did the exact opposite.

It's not that they designed for 6% of their users, it's just that a large portion of the users don't like the change for some reason -- some is the fact that there was any change at all, and the rest are probably real design issues.

My comment shouldn't be taken literally. The point is that even if the poll is "worthless" or grossly inaccurate (it is a poll after all, not a scientific study), there is clearly discontent among the users. I've heard people in real life, seen twitter comments, and read blog posts about how people are threatening to either ban facebook or check it less frequently. But guess what: it doesn't matter. People will still use Twitter which is the whole reason facebook made this move to begin with, and I would be surprised if facebook retreated. Facebook used to be the new time consuming activity on the Internet and now Twitter is. Who knows, maybe Heyzap or thesixtyone will be the new ones.

Facebook users have complained about every change from the notification feeds onwards...

Notable complaints: beacon, ToS, this. Beacon was a terrible idea. They shouldn't have backed down from the ToS because it would have blown over. 'this' remains to be seen.

This isn't notable. There are always redesign changes. This is just the first major redesign happening at a time when the tech world thinks hating Facebook is fashionable, so it's echoing more.

I had no problem with the ToS, 'this' I have a problem with, the feel is awkward and now it feels a lot more awkward and cluttered.

I think facebook's main problem is that they could gradually make changes, piece by piece and no one would ever really notice. Yet they change the entire home page and you get reactions like this because the feel is drastically different.

Maybe because the average human is inherently lazy and doesn't want to re-learn how to use the new UI? Or maybe because the average human is pleased when something does never change? Or, maybe, because the average human loves being a whiner? :)

To cite another grossly biased and unscientific metric: last time facebook changed their design, I was flooded with invitations to join groups protesting it ("1 mio strong against", "Say no to" and so on). This time around, not one. At least my 300 friends don't care enough to invite me to join them in a protest.

First of all, Facebook is not just engineers. Believe me, they have plenty of interfacers designers, and they are masters of UI. Very very few sites have the kind of depth and subtlety that Facebook has built in its recent iterations.

What the users say about their opinion of the new design is completely irrelevant. Users who are used to something will always resist change that removes something they are used to. The proof will be in the usage statistics. Eventually Facebook will saturate the market and at that point they may end up with more to gain by maintaining some level of familiarity. But for now I think they are making the right moves to increase engagement, and I believe the numbers will bear me out.

I hope that bet is right. Even so, there must be a way to avoid this kind of response. Sometimes debate to get into the news is good, but I think in this case it would make more sense to have the response be "Facebook releases awesome interface!" Apple was able to do it with the iPhone and while there were people who didn't like the pseudo keyboard, the raves far outweighed the complaints.

The iphone was a new product, that's the difference.

The only thing comparable in the Apple world is the release of OS X. At the time there was A LOT of complaint, much of it extremely well-reasoned. Diehards clung to OS 9 for years for pure interface reasons. Of course Apple didn't take quite as big a public opinion hit as Facebook due to the technical benefits and the horrible obsolescence of OS 9.

Does Facebook need to avoid this backlash? Only if people actually stop using it, which seems unlikely.

It's worth noting that those of us with the Facebook for iPhone app can just decline to update it, and retain an interface more like the pre-redesign Facebook. I find it much more useful.

Yet they've never given this option for people using Facebook on the PC. I mean even windows when they came out with all the Live crap allowed hotmail users to retain the original design.

Facebook has mastered the platform but failed the interface.

94% of users are afraid to change.

This is stupid and Bias... only people who 'dislike' the new layout would add the application AND people don't like change. It is much easier to say 'I don't like something' than to admit that it could be amazing! This riff raff will die down in a week, watch.

Is it wrong to dislike when features are removed from a website? Is removal of features and reinstating the single stream of everything, a la Facebook circa 2004, "amazing"?

It is never wrong but saying you 'hate' Facebook because of it? Really?

There never was a "single stream of everything." There were always filters. Facebook's stream is live for the very first time now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com