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Whenever there are Facebook stories, some people talk about how well designed it is. I'm not a user, but whenever I've tried to use my wife's account I've exper

Whenever there are Facebook stories, some people talk about how well designed it is. I'm not a user, but whenever I've tried to use my wife's account I've experienced it as a horribly confusing clutterfest. People talk about the clean UI design, but I've found it to be the opposite. Even my wife couldn't explain how to do things without resorting to cargo cult voodoo. Maybe FB used to be clean and useable, especially compared to MySpace, but is it really still the case? Am I just an idiot? Also, in what ways has Facebook been technologically innovative? The other thing I hear about FB is that their engineering team is amazing and fast. Again, as a non-user, I really don't know what the feature set is like. I feel like I don't really hear about genuinely interesting features that much, but people always talk about the engineering with reverence. Can someone enlighten me?

wmeredith 15y ago
Facebook won on design vs. MySpace. It's a bit aged now, but their reputation for great on design remains as a holdover from that early period.
epynonymous 15y ago
yes, wmeredith hit it right on the nose; it's all relative, so compared to friendster and myspace of the time, fb was a breath of fresh air. regarding the technology, some of the amazing things that happen unfortunately can't always be seen via a browser. for example, the fact that they're able to store (and retrieve) millions of photos a day is quite an engineering feat. the number of user posts per hour must also be quite astonishing and probably a multiple higher than photos. the scale with which fb is able to launch datacenters and manage thousands upon thousands of servers also makes for quality engineering.
dasil003 15y ago
The thing about design is it's so much easier to design a simple minimalist thing vs a feature rich mammoth site that has hundreds of function. FB succeeds at the latter fairly well. Sure it's not perfect, but they have done and continue to do a great job with it. Remember, Facebook has a huge, actively-engaged userbase, so the design is tailored largely for the experienced user, not the beginner. Technology-wise the nature of the problem is the impressive thing. They have hundreds of millions of users visiting the site daily, each one seeing a completely customized page view on every load. There's no low-hanging fruit caching wise. What Google does for search or Amazon does for product pages is of negligible benefit. They were essentially the first company to tackle this type of problem successfully. Remember, Friendster failed because of this. MySpace pages loaded at half the speed despite doing only 10% as much. Facebook innovated at every level of the service. Just look at BigPipe (http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-pipelining-web-pages-for-high-performance/389414033919 http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-p...) as an example of how they optimize the page loading experience itself for minimal perceived latency (then load Facebook and observe how fast it feels).
- Tiomaidh 15y ago
  >then load Facebook and observe how fast it feels Considering the scale of the problem, you're right--it's impressively responsive. But I'd still hesitate to call it fast--on almost every visit, I'll have pictures that won't load, "like" tooltips that perpetually display "Loading..." instead of "John Doe liked this", newsfeed loading problems, etcetera. It could definitely be much faster.
  - dasil003 15y ago
    Maybe you have latency to their data centers? For me (in Mountain View) it's hard to imagine it being any faster. The page appears within 200ms and all the boxes are completely filled in including images on my main page probably in under a second.

wmeredith 15y ago

Facebook won on design vs. MySpace. It's a bit aged now, but their reputation for great on design remains as a holdover from that early period.

epynonymous 15y ago

yes, wmeredith hit it right on the nose; it's all relative, so compared to friendster and myspace of the time, fb was a breath of fresh air. regarding the technology, some of the amazing things that happen unfortunately can't always be seen via a browser. for example, the fact that they're able to store (and retrieve) millions of photos a day is quite an engineering feat. the number of user posts per hour must also be quite astonishing and probably a multiple higher than photos. the scale with which fb is able to launch datacenters and manage thousands upon thousands of servers also makes for quality engineering.

dasil003 15y ago

The thing about design is it's so much easier to design a simple minimalist thing vs a feature rich mammoth site that has hundreds of function. FB succeeds at the latter fairly well. Sure it's not perfect, but they have done and continue to do a great job with it. Remember, Facebook has a huge, actively-engaged userbase, so the design is tailored largely for the experienced user, not the beginner. Technology-wise the nature of the problem is the impressive thing. They have hundreds of millions of users visiting the site daily, each one seeing a completely customized page view on every load. There's no low-hanging fruit caching wise. What Google does for search or Amazon does for product pages is of negligible benefit. They were essentially the first company to tackle this type of problem successfully. Remember, Friendster failed because of this. MySpace pages loaded at half the speed despite doing only 10% as much. Facebook innovated at every level of the service. Just look at BigPipe (http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-pipelining-web-pages-for-high-performance/389414033919 http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-p...) as an example of how they optimize the page loading experience itself for minimal perceived latency (then load Facebook and observe how fast it feels).

Tiomaidh 15y ago
>then load Facebook and observe how fast it feels Considering the scale of the problem, you're right--it's impressively responsive. But I'd still hesitate to call it fast--on almost every visit, I'll have pictures that won't load, "like" tooltips that perpetually display "Loading..." instead of "John Doe liked this", newsfeed loading problems, etcetera. It could definitely be much faster.
- dasil003 15y ago
  Maybe you have latency to their data centers? For me (in Mountain View) it's hard to imagine it being any faster. The page appears within 200ms and all the boxes are completely filled in including images on my main page probably in under a second.