8 ms·

Facebook Instant Articles create a better reading experience for users

54 points by williswee 10y ago

chucky_z 10y ago
The article only mentions their app. I try to install as few apps as possible for personal reasons. 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.
spinningarrow 10y ago
"Eating the internet" sounds a bit hyperbolic in this context (instant articles) seeing as the article mentions that Google and Apple are also doing it. Or did I miss something?
- wavefunction 10y ago
  The internet is also much larger than "the Web." Just some hyperbolic tech-is-king nonsense from a breathless journalist.
n0us 10y ago
This article has more to do with publishing platforms than UX but I wonder when we will see the first real businesses founded on the idea of producing high quality news content while completely abandoning publishing platforms and posting direct to Facebook/LinkedIn/other. 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.)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
smrtinsert 10y ago
Good UX? I just uninstalled Facebook Messenger AGAIN on Android because it was taking 17% battery for doing absolutely nothing. Thanks for reminding me how much I hate everything about them. I use Facebook a lot less since I uninstalled their shitty apps and I don't care for their browser clients either. 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.
- adwf 10y ago
  I was going to say much the same. Completely uninstalled the FB app the other day as it was driving me up the wall. The messenger app will probably not be far behind. 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.
- frandroid 10y ago
  Disable all FB notifications, and Facebook will stop using the battery. I use the mobile web version of Facebook, but it's impossible to share a link to a web page from there, so I keep the FB app for sharing, and I use Messenger as well.
- QuantumRoar 10y ago
  I rarely check my Facebook on my phone but when I do, I use their website. 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!
  - realusername 10y ago
    You can use mbasic.facebook.com to see/reply to messages and m.facebook.com for browsing facebook, that's what I do, still better than the app.
FussyZeus 10y ago
I wouldn't say Facebook as good UX so much as so many other websites have downright trash UX. Being the best turd in a toilet isn't much to brag about.
ianpurton 10y ago
The Facebook UX has something in common with their CEO's dress sense. It looks like shit.
oolongCat 10y ago
try facebook with js disabled on your phone. Feels a lot more faster and non of those annoying "Oh please or please mr, please install our app, oh please"
niftich 10y ago
The title overpromises and under-delivers. FB's mobile app prefetches articles that are published with the 'Instant Articles' feature, a publishing platform similar to Google's AMP. This avoids the page-load pause that would occur by visiting an external link on a third-party host in an external browser. 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.
- niftich 10y ago
  Submission title has now been changed from the article's original: "How Facebook is eating the internet with good UX" to "Facebook Instant Articles create a better reading experience for users".
Aldo_MX 10y ago
Notifications: * 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...
- frostmatthew 10y ago
  > No option to disable globally those notifications That's not true, go to Settings -> Notifications -> On Facebook -> and select All Off for Live Videos
  - Aldo_MX 10y ago
    That option didn't exist a few months ago[1], so expecting users to proactively hunt when they implement an opt-out to an annoying feature is also bad UX: [1] https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10207426382755975 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020742...
erokar 10y ago
Facebook looks like something from 2005. It's outdated and has low usability.
max_ 10y ago
Journalists are very good at writing a lot about things they don't understand.
- jasonmp85 10y ago
  Maybe, but the commenters on this post are excelling at it.
mattkevan 10y ago
Facebook and good UX? Ha! Good one. 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.
- wtf_is_frp 10y ago
  what site is a great example of good UX?
  - mattkevan 10y ago
    One of my go-to examples is http://www.gov.uk http://www.gov.uk. Obviously a very different site to Facebook, but the way it combines the content from hundreds of individual sites while still making it easy to navigate is impressive. 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.
    - virtualwhys 10y ago
      I know it's text based but still, the gov.uk is blazing fast. Looked under the hood, seems like they're using client-side template rendering via Mustache, and JQuery. Not sure what the back end is written in, saw a reference to Flask in a javascript comment, so maybe Python.
- Mendenhall 10y ago
  I do the same and have the exact same thoughts about corners dead ends etc. I also cant seem to find the "consistent mental model" seems very scattered.
t3ra 10y ago
So instant article is good because now sites/writers will get to place ads which will not get blocked and will supposedly get more traffic for which Facebook begs you to convert into a sponsored post?
omginternets 10y ago
In what world does Facebook have good UX?
radarsat1 10y ago
Since people are venting, I'll contribute with one more frustration I don't often see. The one thing I'd think facebook would be good at, it is not, and that is: Finding events. 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?

54 points by williswee 10y ago

The article only mentions their app. I try to install as few apps as possible for personal reasons. 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.

spinningarrow 10y ago

"Eating the internet" sounds a bit hyperbolic in this context (instant articles) seeing as the article mentions that Google and Apple are also doing it. Or did I miss something?

wavefunction 10y ago
The internet is also much larger than "the Web." Just some hyperbolic tech-is-king nonsense from a breathless journalist.

n0us 10y ago

This article has more to do with publishing platforms than UX but I wonder when we will see the first real businesses founded on the idea of producing high quality news content while completely abandoning publishing platforms and posting direct to Facebook/LinkedIn/other. 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.)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

smrtinsert 10y ago

Good UX? I just uninstalled Facebook Messenger AGAIN on Android because it was taking 17% battery for doing absolutely nothing. Thanks for reminding me how much I hate everything about them. I use Facebook a lot less since I uninstalled their shitty apps and I don't care for their browser clients either. 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.

adwf 10y ago
I was going to say much the same. Completely uninstalled the FB app the other day as it was driving me up the wall. The messenger app will probably not be far behind. 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.
frandroid 10y ago
Disable all FB notifications, and Facebook will stop using the battery. I use the mobile web version of Facebook, but it's impossible to share a link to a web page from there, so I keep the FB app for sharing, and I use Messenger as well.
QuantumRoar 10y ago
I rarely check my Facebook on my phone but when I do, I use their website. 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!
- realusername 10y ago
  You can use mbasic.facebook.com to see/reply to messages and m.facebook.com for browsing facebook, that's what I do, still better than the app.

FussyZeus 10y ago

I wouldn't say Facebook as good UX so much as so many other websites have downright trash UX. Being the best turd in a toilet isn't much to brag about.

ianpurton 10y ago

The Facebook UX has something in common with their CEO's dress sense. It looks like shit.

oolongCat 10y ago

try facebook with js disabled on your phone. Feels a lot more faster and non of those annoying "Oh please or please mr, please install our app, oh please"

niftich 10y ago

The title overpromises and under-delivers. FB's mobile app prefetches articles that are published with the 'Instant Articles' feature, a publishing platform similar to Google's AMP. This avoids the page-load pause that would occur by visiting an external link on a third-party host in an external browser. 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.

niftich 10y ago
Submission title has now been changed from the article's original: "How Facebook is eating the internet with good UX" to "Facebook Instant Articles create a better reading experience for users".

Aldo_MX 10y ago

Notifications: * 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...

frostmatthew 10y ago
> No option to disable globally those notifications That's not true, go to Settings -> Notifications -> On Facebook -> and select All Off for Live Videos
- Aldo_MX 10y ago
  That option didn't exist a few months ago[1], so expecting users to proactively hunt when they implement an opt-out to an annoying feature is also bad UX: [1] https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10207426382755975 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020742...

erokar 10y ago

Facebook looks like something from 2005. It's outdated and has low usability.

max_ 10y ago

Journalists are very good at writing a lot about things they don't understand.

jasonmp85 10y ago
Maybe, but the commenters on this post are excelling at it.

mattkevan 10y ago

Facebook and good UX? Ha! Good one. 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.

wtf_is_frp 10y ago
what site is a great example of good UX?
- mattkevan 10y ago
  One of my go-to examples is http://www.gov.uk http://www.gov.uk. Obviously a very different site to Facebook, but the way it combines the content from hundreds of individual sites while still making it easy to navigate is impressive. 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.
  - virtualwhys 10y ago
    I know it's text based but still, the gov.uk is blazing fast. Looked under the hood, seems like they're using client-side template rendering via Mustache, and JQuery. Not sure what the back end is written in, saw a reference to Flask in a javascript comment, so maybe Python.
Mendenhall 10y ago
I do the same and have the exact same thoughts about corners dead ends etc. I also cant seem to find the "consistent mental model" seems very scattered.

t3ra 10y ago

So instant article is good because now sites/writers will get to place ads which will not get blocked and will supposedly get more traffic for which Facebook begs you to convert into a sponsored post?

omginternets 10y ago

In what world does Facebook have good UX?

radarsat1 10y ago

Since people are venting, I'll contribute with one more frustration I don't often see. The one thing I'd think facebook would be good at, it is not, and that is: Finding events. 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?