Whatever goes up, that’s what we do
dcurt.is
dcurt.is
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.
> "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.
"We survive by breathing but we can't say we live to breathe. Likewise, making money is very important for a business to survive, but money alone cannot be the reason for business to exist."
Hows that working for Yahoo now?
Actually, that's kind of disingenuous. Google optimises for less clicks per user, because Google is a site for people who want to get stuff done.
Yahoo and Facebook are time-wasters. And unlike Yahoo, I can't see it ever transitioning to anything other than a time-waster.
Time-wasters are basically unprofitable (you're getting clicks from people who are looking to kill time, not find a new insurance policy), but that's what Facebook is. Unless Facebook wants to become the new Linked-In (and they don't - Linked-In just doesn't have the market cap), they just have to be a better time-waster.
If Facebook had a lower valuation, they might be able to move to a position where their focus was on serving people doing stuff, not wasting time, but they can't.
Pretty well, considering they are still around more than a decade after they stopped being "cool". They're not trendy in tech circles, they are just a business that makes money.
Yahoo and Facebook are time-wasters... Time-wasters are basically unprofitable
Yeah, unprofitable to the tune of $600 million a year. That's Yahoo's net profit last year.
I swear to god, the blindness of people to anything that's not hip right now is amazing. People assume because they personally stopped caring about something that it must have failed.
That could just be investors / analysts being stupid (either the ones valuing alibaba too highly, or valuing Yahoo too low). But Yahoo doesn't make a ton of money off its core business.
It's still quite possible for them to turn it around. They are really very good at what they, and they have the eyeballs.
At the same time, I don't think Yahoo is purely money-minded. From what I read, they were the only company which challenged the FISA orders last year (even before the Snowden leaks).
Look at Lycos. Excite. Altavista. Even the nominal survivors like AOL are largely shadows of their old selves. Frankly, it's fairly impressive that they've held out. Consider their starting point: Just a directory.
The bubble in retrospect makes them look faded and tired, because they're "only" $36bn today. But $36bn is $36bn...
And being "the default homepage" with an audience so much smaller was a much less impressive position to be in than their current reach.
2 things about Yahoo:
1) I'm still paying for their email service, and have been for 10 years. Their UI redesigns have been horrendous at times, but email lockin is powerful.
2) I really don't think dominance on the internet should be expected or desired, just because its possible. There's an example below about Yahoo Japan "owning" auctions in Japan. Sure, eBay has cornered peer-to-peer non-local vending in the US (let's not kid oursevelves what "auctions-buy-now" really are), but why should they be the preferred platform in Japan? Yes the internet allows it, but in the end, for a variety of historic and social reasons, different companies will fill different niches in different places, even if the internet looks like one gigantic niche and place. In other words, there is very little benefit seen from dominating auctions in US and Japan. Sure a few people would be able to order items more easily across the Pacific, but that effect pales in comparison to other internal factors. Maybe some local website had a marketing deal with a popular franchise in a certain country and got more popular initially, and then dominated that local market by network effect.
To summarize: I think it's normal to have local companies cornering local markets at the country/cultural level, even though the internet and e-commerce could theoretically be dominated globally. Google and search is a unique case, and expecting all companies to be like them in every market is misguided. I think that leaves a lot of space for Yahoo and many other similar companies to survive.
In addition, $590 million is not Yahoo's net income, but their pretax income from operations. In other words, excluding Alibaba.
Here's the breakdown for 2013, in thousands:
Income from operations 589,926
Other income, net 43,357
-----------------------------------------
Provision for income taxes (153,392)
Earnings in equity interests 896,675
=========================================
Net income 1,376,566
See 10-K at Yahoo's investor relations site: http://investor.yahoo.net/sec.cfm
That's a ~14% (artificial) boost in profit that takes them from "$65M down on 2012" (bad) to "$23M up on 2012" (adequate).
Is that supposed to be snark? I realize they're not fashionable, but Yahoo is still quite successful.
But I think they really made it worst after the updated UI, I never got back there.
IT'S NOT FREE
We’re not Facebook’s customers, advertisers are (more on this below). But we are the advertiser’s customers, and the cost of the "free lunch" is simply shifted to the price of the things we buy from them. In other words we still end up paying for the full cost of Facebook (and even more, as I'll get to next). Costs may even shift regressively, to advertised products predominately consumed by those with lower incomes, in which case the poor are subsidizing the better off.
IT'S MORE EXPENSIVE...
Not only are you still paying for the full cost of the Facebook product you use, you are paying for all the advertising overhead: the costs of its advertising technology and infrastructure (huge, btw), the agency and creative costs (Don Draper and company have to pay for the hookers and scotch somehow, not to mention what’s-his-name who basically just lounges in his office barefoot thinking Japanese), and the advertiser's big marketing departments (that often outnumber and outspend the people making the product!).
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
So in addition to the original product cost and the ad overhead costs, you are also paying the opportunity cost of an inferior product (as Dennis Curtis points out in the OP) as well as the engineering costs of figuring out how to optimize ad revenue, because that’s what happens when websites have to design to please advertisers over pleasing us, the users. Dalton Caldwell makes this point comparing Sourceforge to Github[1]. As ergo says in a comment[2], “If the new news feed is making their advertisers happy (and bringing revenue into Facebook), then that's what they optimize for.” As jfoster says in a comment[3], “Ad-supported models untie the relationship between UX and revenue.”
Furthermore, our identities and privacy are bought and sold to the highest bidders. And where do the bidders get their money? From us of course! A double whammy! We're trading our privacy for free product? Bullshit. We get personalization? Bullshit. Personalization means optimizing something for me, not optimizing for the advertiser. Again, we're not the real customer. We’re certainly not Google’s[4][5].
WAIT. IT'S EVEN WORSE...
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Think of the social costs of advertising. The web is infested with misinformation and manipulation. Beside the lying ads themselves, relying on a revenue stream entirely dependent on how many ads are seen severely affects the moral choices of those who decide what gets produced and how its presented. What are the costs of a misinformed and variously manipulated citizenry, of distortions to the free-market?
Knowledge and discourse are the lifeblood of both democracy, free markets, progress. The web, from the little scammy websites to the big brand ones that so many blindly trust, has a huge influence on who we vote for, what we buy, and most importantly, what we believe.
There is no free lunch, and there is no free web. This "free" ad-"supported" web we have is much too expensive.
—
[1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484075
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484442
[4] Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. "They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services," he joked. - Wired, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/computers-big-data...
[5] Google's once famous clean and neutral search results are now cluttered and biased (http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/10/new-banner-ads-push-...).
And it's not just children. How would people in poor countries afford to pay the same amount as a Westerner for access to StackOverflow or a motorcycle repair forum or whatever?
I don't think it's such a clear win to make the Internet for-pay.
In your pre-eighteen-year-old case:
* Most likely you (or your parents) bought stuff from a company that advertises on the web. So you (or your parents) were paying, just not directly. And as I point out, you were paying extra.
* If you didn't buy enough of the advertised products, your internet was subsidized by other users who did. Same for people in poor countries. But these subsidies are wasteful, as the advertising overhead takes a huge cut.
* You still paid for the opportunity costs of an inferior product.
* Most importantly, you still paid for and will continue to pay for the damage to society that advertising and an ad-supported web inflicts. Ads are dishonest and manipulative. An ad-supported web is driven by click-rates, not user satisfaction, so we get the proliferation of link-baiting empty (if not manipulative) content that we all see today.
But you are right in that if we ditch advertising, we need some way of distributing the costs progressively, and make sure that people who have little still have plenty of internet and internet content access.
What amazed me was how intense the push for in-app purchasing was! Every one of the several games had a popup after each level or activity that would offered some in-game "power-up" for just $0.99 or various amounts. It wasn't just that you could make an in-app purchase, but that the app was very aggressively pushing it. He told me, "my mom says I can't do that", but the "no" button was much smaller and harder to press than the yes button, visually.
His mom indicated that he had made such purchases before, and so far she hadn't found a way (on this particular tablet) to disable in-app purchases.
AppLock on Android solved this issue for me and my kids (since any intent that goes to the Play store will get intercepted and challenged for authentication), but it's very frustrating to them to have to try to navigate these screens that have 12 big, bright "goes to the lock screen" buttons and 1 small, uninteresting button that does what they actually want.
IAP/microtransactions are a plague.
We (as app users) brought this on ourselves, or at the very least we're half culpable.
The day the app store stops being the primary marketing channel for apps the better off we will be.
This does not preclude the possibility of mutual growth, though. A system interested in long-term stability will optimize minimally for short-term advertiser revenue, and primarily for long-term attention provider satisfaction.
One counterfactual of the current model that can be instructive is the following. Assume a system whereby all communication is happenstance -- there is no advertising or selective filtration (which is what advanced advertising becomes). Such a system degrades in much the way twitter does -- manual (attentive) classification and differentiation are not used universally enough, people don't sufficiently filter their own attention sinks, and the attention eventually dries up in the vacuum of entropy.
It would certainly be possible to move to such a manually filtered system, but it would require a massive reconstruction of social norms. The best system would be one that could passively or subconsciously negotiate filtration strategies in a decentralized runtime environment. It will need to be spatially collocated with the conscious being, eventually, or the latency will be unacceptable.
Eventually, then, we'll find that such filtration will actively seek out opportunities for novelty or for the satisfaction of latent (either unrecognized or frustrated) desires, and surface them to attention. This is precisely what advertising becomes.
Finally, you are right that we're approaching the equilibrium from an oblique angle, but it is a direction from which we can make progress at every step of the way, and the endpoint is ultimately a fairly ideal state.
1. Fix/revert the update so that those stats increase again. This is probably the easiest/quickest option, especially the revert, but it obviously sucks to have "wasted" time on the updates.
2. Collect new/more stats that you deem meaningful and see if those have increased. This is the one that I like best from the perspective of a lowly programmer who worked hard on the updates, because it provides the possibility that even though existing stats have worsened, the updates are still empirically better. Of course, it's hard to figure out what new stats to look for, and whether or not to deem them truly meaningful. An oversimplified example would be if all you're looking at is ad conversions, maybe you should start looking at user retention as well, because even if ad conversions decrease, a large increase in retention can in the long (or even short) run lead to more revenue.
3. Ignore the numbers on the prediction that the numbers will increase over time. This one is also appealing, but will and probably should be rejected by management.
Something that also needs to be recognized is that "significantly more modern and easier to use" is a subjective claim, and is not necessarily "better" for whatever definition of "better" the company is using.
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!
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.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html
Some people have asked, "Where are the sites?" Well, the
menu above should aim you in the right direction.
At least for me it made gmail bearable again.
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.
I don't comprehend what you mean by "manual override", nor how saving can have any ethical implications whatsoever.
You realize that iconography predates all civilization, right?
Even within this context, icons have been used for a long time in things like toolbars. But historically they've been quite descriptive of what they do, and often times have been accompanied by a textual description if there's any uncertainty as to their meaning.
Like the earlier commenter wrote, however, we've seen the use of icons really taken to a stupid extreme as of late. This is especially true when it comes to websites and web apps. The icons are often rather abstract, to the point of causing confusion and harming usability.
Even desktop apps have succumbed to this. Look at Chrome's menu icon. In the last version I used, it was a stack of three horizontal lines. At a glance, it's not clear at all what it represents. It's only after clicking it, and seeing the menu that opens, that the connection is made.
That isn't what we see with most web apps these days, including the major ones. There's continual change, including the icons that are used, where they're positioned, and what happens when they're clicked on. If you discover what an icon means and does today, there's a very good chance it'll have changed by tomorrow, if it's even still around.
We're much better off losing a small amount of space, but getting an obvious and unambiguous description when text is used instead of icons.
Text works just fine in most applications, because the shape of a particular word is itself iconography.
> fad [of replacing text links with icon-only buttons in software UI]
Maybe you'll like it :-)
I do my FB messaging through Messages on my Mac and the FB Messages app on my phone. Works great.
Their Facebook Messenger for Windows client was discontinued earlier this month unfortuntaely, so I'm back using Trillian and boy do I miss the group messaging feature.
How is group messaging different from MUC[1]? The naming group messaging sounds alike, but I don't know the internals of FBs feature.
in line attachments is also possible[2] - I assume you mean sending files, embedding photos in messages and such?
As for seen and stickers I don't know of a XMPP equivalent, but I am curious as to why MUC wasn't used instead of proprietary group messaging.
[1]: XEP-0045, http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html
[2]: html and/or XEP-0231, http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0231.html
Click-to-reveal and hover-to-reveal require manual dexterity, a curiosity to see what's behind a link, and time to discover and parse the new visual information. Making these cognitive demands, particularly on sites where users relax, is going to reduce engagement.
Users didn't want the news feed to change, and the users were right.
It might be true that users would have an immediately negative reaction to change; I suppose it's impossible to know for sure. But that doesn't mean that the new design wouldn't have been better at providing the functionality that Facebook purports to offer.
Even if you're right, there's a similar long-term-vision vs. short-term-incentives situation. The overhead of having to "learn" a new system (which is already and would have remained fairly passive and simple to use) becomes less reasonable to hate when amortized over years of improved performance.
I don't really use Facebook much and am agnostic about the extent to which one site or another would better serve users. It's ambiguous to me what Facebook truly sees as its function / purpose anyway, so the criteria is murky here.
But the argument in this article isn't necessarily assuming anything about what users want, rather it purports to know from a design perspective what will ultimately serve them better.
The argument is that an experience that Dustin Curtis liked better was a better experience. Maybe the victorious layout really was liked by more people, just as more people clearly like a 4" (or greater) smartphone screen than 3.5".
Harsh, I know, but that's the reality.
Based on my own experience at a company where we actually researched this stuff, the number I would forward is 30%. Given an existing user base, on average 30% will hate any given change to their user experience, independent of whether the that experience is actually worse or better.
This time maybe (you'd have to look at the stats, not at the ones shouting the loudest). Usually they're not though. Users will complain about every single thing that changes, even if it objectively changes for better. Just look at the bad press Google is getting for... forcing users to use HTTPS.
Sometimes it's because benefits are not immediately apparent. Sometimes it's attention whoring (and ad-revenue for your site). And then sometimes it's just that complaining about how everything sucks is a popular way of doing smalltalk these days. But the truth is, one just really has to ignore what users "want". They'll come around anyway. Ford's faster horses, and the like.
There will always be users who have strong, nonstandard design preferences. For those we invented userscripts and bookmarklets.
The only thing I can imagine is Paper is meant to be a playground, where they can experiment with new UI, have a place to innovate tooling and the design process, and then maybe roll much less ambitious versions of it piecemeal into the main facebook experience. It's not a bad strategy but it comes with a lot of downsides. For example, they can't really kill it at this point without massive outrage, so it's a maintenance burden for what amounts to an experiment. They also aren't able to sanely compare metrics between Facebook proper and the Paper app due to selection bias, etc.
It is cool though, and they probably did learn alot of tactical skills while building it. The question is can they take what they learned and built and apply it in a way that really levels up the main experience.
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.
http://www.economist.com/node/196071
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-t...
In other words, the ubiquity of QWERTY represents a failure of the current mode, where "the market" is behaving with an irrational obsession with the short term. Likewise, preserving a worse facebook design indefinitely because it might require effort to adapt to seems obviously misguided.
I suspect that the issue here is what is and isn't better. I don't know if I buy that previous changes that sparked outrage were improvements, and I think it's possible that people really were reacting to liking the new system less, not just that it was unfamiliar.
Saying that it was designed to be inefficient is wrong, however it's fair to say that preventing typewriter jams overrode typing efficiency as a design consideration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A search company makes money from ads, which are unobtrusive text links which are clearly separated from search results.
The search company is forever trying to improve metrics, and in this quest, it pushes more intrusive monitoring of users, and the adverts become more and more like search results at the top of their results. According to their metrics, this is a winning move - more and more people are clicking ads, and advertisers love the stats on users.
The search company slowly starts to lose users, because they don't like the privacy issues and the intrusive ads in their search, even if more people click on them.
A few years later, the search company starts to lose its dominance of the field and hence all the money they made from more and more ads is now drying up, but every change they make to increase clicks on ads is actually having a worse effect on usage a few months down the line, even if it helps their metrics in the short term. No-one notices because the users have always been there, and this is not a primary metric or one that is easily correlated with changes.
Was this a good strategy? It was certainly a local maximum, and all the numbers went up, but was it in their long term interests?
I agree for someone like Google or FB the metric which is important is selling ads (that is their business after all), but both companies actually have two sets of users - one set are the users who read the ads, and one set are the advertisers - both are vitally important to their brand and continuing profit. Only one of those is represented in the advert CTR metric, and only one directly makes money, but both are vitally important to continuing profits.
Now you can change your metrics to try to measure user retention, but happiness and satisfaction are notoriously slippy concepts, and people often don't even know what they want before they see it and use it for a while (e.g. users of yahoo or one of the other portals would not have voted for changes to make it more like google), people hate any change, and haters are the most vocal. All those things completely skew any attempt to get numbers on customer satisfaction.
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.
He says, "Given an existing user base, on average 30% will hate any given change to their user experience, independent of whether the that experience is actually worse or better."
I wonder how @harrf's number would play out over time as users adjust, get used to, and accept changes the way many Apple users do. I'm not convinced that designers always know what's best for users, but I do think it sometimes takes a little while for users to catch on to the long-term benefits designers are designing for.
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.
Sounds like we should be measuring our decisions about what to measure!
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!"
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.
How do you encourage finding a global maxima within your company?
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.
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.)
Don't seem to hear much from the inside since the funding announcement over 12 months ago...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
In the absence of a guiding framework on how to interpret your data, you're bound to min-max individual criteria; we'll never know if we're just in a local maxima, however.
I'm not saying this is an easy problem, mind you. It's easy to wax poetic about having your culture guide decisions when you can point at a graph and say "yep, we're making $xx,000 less per hour".
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.
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.
Google is in the fortunate position of getting to do the best things for users for 99.5% of searches, it is the other .5% that they compromise on.
At times, they have tried to do the best thing for customers on searches like "best morgage refinance rate", but in the end, they cancel the experiments because it would crush their revenues, and all the other good they are doing:
http://www.seroundtable.com/mortgages-google-advisor-14813.h...
Google advisor was an amazing product that super beneficial to Google users, but the problem was it displaced $20/click ads.
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.
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?
When you are operating in FB scale, few more dollars become millions. Repeat 'few more dollars' several times, you have hundreds of millions/billion.
While morally you are correct and that's definitely what a startup should do, when you are large you have managers striving for bonuses, investors keen on getting higher ROI etc. It's not that simple and pure anymore.
"Friends of Drew Curtis who work at Facebook"
Until then, they will provide the minimal user experience that keeps them on top of the hill with as much ad inventory as possible.
But Google learned to listen to more right-brain arguments so maybe FB can too.
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.
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?
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?
Not really, because again, "better product" is only a proxy for the real goal of many companies, i.e. "more revenue". Even earning money directly on the product won't stop sales people from inserting various money extracting tricks that abuse people's cognitive biases and heuristics. Just look at Badoo. Or Zynga.
To survive, yes. To make the the deepest impact, no.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
But if your users are not also your customers, then you are likely to run into these counter-innnovation corners.
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.
That's aggressive.
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.
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.