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As an American who looks at WeChat and sees a massive, unintuitive jumbled mess, you've explained in this comment how that could possibly be so popular in China

• 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  You're comparing apples to oranges here. WeChat is a "superapp" platform for doing distinct things: chat, payments, ticket bookings, etc. Instagram's features, on the other hand, are all purely social networking.
  • alehul 6y ago
    I wouldn't say the UX challenges get any easier as you grow from social networking "super app" to generalized "super app." If anything, it would become more challenging, and the top comment would make more sense as to how it appears intuitive. On the topic of social, though, WeChat has private messaging and broadcasting, location sharing, a social feed of friends' updates, and public accounts that can push feeds to subscribers [1]. Mediums include text, voice, photo, video, and location, all shared through a variety of types of feeds. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat
    • ethbro 6y ago
      We used to call "super apps" portals. Mistaken valuations of their stickiness generally led to the first cratering of internet company values.
      • bobthepanda 6y ago
        AOL and Yahoo eventually died because there were individual sites that did the individual parts that they had better, and then they became less than the sum of their parts. Similar to how massive industrial conglomerates in America fell apart, or department stores when specialized fashion retailers became a thing. East Asia is just a lot more friendly to conglomerate structures in general. Korea has Naver and there's Yahoo Japan.
  • interestica 6y ago
    Nah, I think the comparison was apt. IG's features are not purely social networking. The 'TV' portion is an attempt to create a youtube/video alternative. The video chat can replace phone/video messaging. The 'shop' feature is an e-commerce gateway.
• tanilama 6y ago
  TikTok however is the opposite of WeChat where the interface is dead simple and intuitive. What is Reels immitating here?
  • galuggus 6y ago
    The Chinese version of TikTok douyin is also a hybrid of games, shopping, live streams a messenger and instant apps. The ui is far less important than having a captive user base
    • echevil 6y ago
      Douyin is a mix of lots of things but you barely realize that. It has one main surface - the feed. IG on the other hand, feels like several unrelated things stitched together
    • tanilama 6y ago
      It is not part of the core UX. TikTok or Doubin, just swipe up/down would be enough for 90% of your input
    • xmprt 6y ago
      Doesn't douyin also have a very different demographic than TikTok though? I think their audience is much older in China.
  • developer2 6y ago
    Facebook is in the slow process of finally dying. Their ownership of Instagram is sustaining them for the time being, but they are now desperate to steal some market share away from Reddit, TikTok, and WeChat. Facebook is far more desperate than they're letting on publicly. They have already been on the decline for multiple years; the competition is now finally speeding that process up dramatically. When was the last time you truly cared about anything Facebook-related? A few Twitch streamers switching to their platform? The only reason anyone is streaming on Facebook right now is because they were offered multi-million contracts, or because Facebook is currently paying out "autoplay while scrolling through feeds" as view counts (ie. advertising payouts based on PPV instead of PPC/PPA); when that stops, those streamers will lose everything. Facebook has inflated its viewership numbers by cheating via a "loss leader" tactic, but with nothing else recuperating the losses, which only leads to financial collapse. tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.
• echevil 6y ago
  WeChat has lots of things hidden behind low impression entrypoints. You can explore them when you want. Its primary features, chat and moments, are dead simple, like WhatsApp. Facebook on the other hand, are mixing lots of stuff into their main feed, making the experience horrible for everyone
  • dmix 6y ago
    Marketing/business side always demand prime real-estate to push 'features' instead of just blending them into the UI. This is extra-apparent on mobile apps but FB did it on their website for years (I haven't seen what it looks like recently). It's not easy to say no as a designer but the best companies are the ones most capable of keeping things as focused on primary UX flows as possible. TikTok figured this out by making it all about scrolling a simple page of high-density videos, the entire screen is full of the content you want. No extra tapping or side scrolling needed. Reddit is another company that missed the boat on what made their website great during their redesign. Making it feel top-heavy JS-wise and sparser instead of simple high-density information like newspaper site with simple links. For ex: the first article on old.reddit.com is 100px from the top and can fit 10 articles within 1000px, while the new one starts at 400px and lists 3-4 posts by 1000px (HN is 55px and 20+ posts).
    • meristem 6y ago
      Let’s ship features! To heck with what users may need or want!
      • cpach 6y ago
        The employees want it, management want it, the owners want it – yes, considering user needs can sometimes be very low down on the list.
      • matthewaveryusa 6y ago
        That's right, in FBs case user != customer
  • syrrim 6y ago
• Miner49er 6y ago
  It's not a mistake in the short-term, but in the long-term it'll hurt growth. New users will find Instagram confusing and why signup and download an app for 3 different things when you only want one of them?
  • asutekku 6y ago
    People will flock in where other people are. Unless Instagram gets a decent competitor, people will just get used to it.
    • Miner49er 6y ago
      Well there already is a competitor - TikTok. As it stands, if I only care about the TikTok/Reels functionality, I'm going with TikTok. It doesn't come with all the extra bloat. I guess we'll see what happens with the potential Trump ban and Microsoft acquisition though.
      • beenBoutIT 6y ago
        If Microsoft acquires TikTok how would they go about vetting all of the code to remove any potentially malicious components?
        • Miner49er 6y ago
          What malicious components? And how do you define malicious? Every social media contains malicious components, do you mean something different? I don't think TikTok is anymore malicious then Instagram.
          • beenBoutIT 6y ago
            Malicious as in doing things outside the scope of what Microsoft wants done.
        • nindalf 6y ago
          They will grep for and comment out the code that goes like “maliciouslyUploadSecretInfo.*()“ Sorry, but that was a ridiculous question.
• bobthepanda 6y ago
  To me WeChat has more in common with the old AOL or Yahoo web portals in a 2020 wrapping.
• didip 6y ago
  As an American who had to use WeChat for some stubborn friends... I think WeChat UI is superior because they organize features in a nice boxed grid. I can ignore things that I don't care about easily.
• sjg007 6y ago
  I can’t use snap chat but apparently it’s very popular!
  • spanhandler 6y ago
    I'm not sure if I'm just turning into an old man prematurely or what, but "social" sites and apps usually turn too confusing for me to use around their second or third iteration. Facebook c. 2010 was too confusing for me, so I bounced off (from descriptions of what it was like a couple years before that, I think I'd have enjoyed it then). Twitter's been too confusing for me to understand for years, I can barely follow what's going on when reading it, let alone use it (I've tried within the last couple years, and never got the hang of it). Used to be easy for me to read & use but the interface and interaction options don't make sense to me anymore. I didn't even figure out that Instagram was supposed to primarily be a social site/service, despite repeatedly being exposed to it, until some time after the Facebook acquisition.
    • sjg007 6y ago
      Yep I agree. I find FB the easiest of them all but I had to log off b/c of the politics. I'd rather be ignorant.
      • anunnymouse 6y ago
        You're are not any more ignorant for avoiding political content on Facebook, it is a bunch of strawman echo chamber trash.
    • blisseyGo 6y ago
      I think out of all of them, Twitter is the most complicated. Their comment threads itself are super complex. Plus the character limit forcing people to post in multiple threads makes it worse. UI wise, Snapchat is the worst.
    • bobthepanda 6y ago
      The "genius" of Instagram is that it's social media as advertising where people are mostly advertising photos of themselves. This of course makes it very easy to actually insert advertising in as well, because the ads look less conspicuous given the identical layout to a normal photo post (as opposed to say, Facebook, where an ad looks very different from a text status)
• namelosw 6y ago
  Actually those features WeChat wants people to use as new users are pretty intuitive and straightforward. For other functionalities, those are intentionally 'hidden'. Those advanced or experiment features are for those who look for those features or just spreading by friends. On the contrary, the other big player in China is Alipay, it's pretty much trying to put everything on the first page like Kowloon Walled City - noisy, messy. It just punches everything in your face. Interestingly, they both serve their purpose, but following different design philosophies. WeChat wants to be a good product, while the Alipay wants to be a portal for every new service around you from Alibaba. PS: To have an initial impression on how Alipay is not only a payment app, it literally trying to directly covers everything around you, for example: * Buy everything, or course. * Pay for electric, gas, and water. * Riding bikes, bus and metro. Parking, re-fuel, pay your fines. * Loan, pay credit cards, stocks, insurance, lottery and donations. Or give your child or your spouse some pocket money on monthly basis. * Also the 'social credit' system you might have heard of.
  • rapnie 6y ago
    Scary. I'm going to pay with cash again out of principle (which I stopped doing due to the pandemic).