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Note that meta has A/B tested their ux to death. Any opinions you have don’t hold water to the aggregate opinion

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mrits 3y ago
When looking at the aggregate you can get things like the two political party system in the US that is a perfect compromise but doesn't function for anyone in the aggregate.
notahacker 3y ago
They've A/B tested Meta's goals of increasing user time on site and ad views, not user goals like discovering how to change the setting for something that annoyed them. A/B testing isn't immune to being as broken as the UX in some of the gnarlier bits too. Perhaps some of the links that simply don't work on the Facebook mobile app are busy signalling that they get way more clicks than the one that successfully loaded the content...
- greatpostman 3y ago
  I don’t agree with this viewpoint. Major companies with billions in R&D and some of the smartest people on the planet are not making fundamental ux mistakes.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Dead wrong. Google's terrible at UX. I once spent about five full minutes figuring out how to navigate my dad's phone app on his Android phone, so I could help him use it, after an OS upgrade. There were some tabs that didn't look like tabs and didn't indicate which was active, turns out. He'd have had no hope of figuring it out on his own. Once was helping my grandma add contacts in Gmail. She had failed repeatedly. Kept hitting "add contact" and it'd blank the form she was on, without adding the contact. This was because there were two same-color-and-weight add-contact buttons on the page, with the same copy, and one submitted the form, while the other gave you a blank contact form. You pretty much had to be familiar with how HTML nesting worked to have good shot at guessing which was the one you wanted, just by looking at it. That second one's an older version of the UI, but holy shit it was bad. They definitely make mistakes, and really obvious ones at that. Money and "smart" doesn't mean shit.
  - ralmidani 3y ago
    I read GP as saying they intentionally make the UX dysfunction for actually features (e.g. privacy settings, finding the “most recent” feed - I didn’t even bother to look for that one recently), and only optimize for eyeballs on the main feed and therefor monetization.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    One important caveat: Defining good UX is subjective. Ensuring the user has the best possible experience using the product how they want to use it is very different from ensuring they have the best possible experience using the products how the company wants them to use it. I agree that they're not likely making many technical design mistakes in implementing their strategies, but whether or not it yields "good UX" depends on if you're willing to accept the X boundaries applied by the company as "good." You can have a seamless, perfectly implemented, smooth and appealing process that leads users into a dark pattern pushing them towards an action that doesn't work in their best interest: great UX work from the company marketing perspective, shitty from the user perspective.
chefandy 3y ago
They also choose what those A/B tests present, and it's not free from motivation that's often misaligned with the users' best interests.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  Yeah, good example is Preply. All the site and interactions seem to be geared into tripping you up. I don't use it but sometimes help people here who are learning a language and it's infuriatingly bad, making sure that you are booking the wrong (more expensive) thing. And support acting like they don't get it 'it should work'. Could be bugs, but if bugs, why does the amount always come up higher, never lower?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

When looking at the aggregate you can get things like the two political party system in the US that is a perfect compromise but doesn't function for anyone in the aggregate.

notahacker 3y ago

They've A/B tested Meta's goals of increasing user time on site and ad views, not user goals like discovering how to change the setting for something that annoyed them. A/B testing isn't immune to being as broken as the UX in some of the gnarlier bits too. Perhaps some of the links that simply don't work on the Facebook mobile app are busy signalling that they get way more clicks than the one that successfully loaded the content...

greatpostman 3y ago
I don’t agree with this viewpoint. Major companies with billions in R&D and some of the smartest people on the planet are not making fundamental ux mistakes.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Dead wrong. Google's terrible at UX. I once spent about five full minutes figuring out how to navigate my dad's phone app on his Android phone, so I could help him use it, after an OS upgrade. There were some tabs that didn't look like tabs and didn't indicate which was active, turns out. He'd have had no hope of figuring it out on his own. Once was helping my grandma add contacts in Gmail. She had failed repeatedly. Kept hitting "add contact" and it'd blank the form she was on, without adding the contact. This was because there were two same-color-and-weight add-contact buttons on the page, with the same copy, and one submitted the form, while the other gave you a blank contact form. You pretty much had to be familiar with how HTML nesting worked to have good shot at guessing which was the one you wanted, just by looking at it. That second one's an older version of the UI, but holy shit it was bad. They definitely make mistakes, and really obvious ones at that. Money and "smart" doesn't mean shit.
- ralmidani 3y ago
  I read GP as saying they intentionally make the UX dysfunction for actually features (e.g. privacy settings, finding the “most recent” feed - I didn’t even bother to look for that one recently), and only optimize for eyeballs on the main feed and therefor monetization.
- chefandy 3y ago
  One important caveat: Defining good UX is subjective. Ensuring the user has the best possible experience using the product how they want to use it is very different from ensuring they have the best possible experience using the products how the company wants them to use it. I agree that they're not likely making many technical design mistakes in implementing their strategies, but whether or not it yields "good UX" depends on if you're willing to accept the X boundaries applied by the company as "good." You can have a seamless, perfectly implemented, smooth and appealing process that leads users into a dark pattern pushing them towards an action that doesn't work in their best interest: great UX work from the company marketing perspective, shitty from the user perspective.

chefandy 3y ago

They also choose what those A/B tests present, and it's not free from motivation that's often misaligned with the users' best interests.

anonzzzies 3y ago
Yeah, good example is Preply. All the site and interactions seem to be geared into tripping you up. I don't use it but sometimes help people here who are learning a language and it's infuriatingly bad, making sure that you are booking the wrong (more expensive) thing. And support acting like they don't get it 'it should work'. Could be bugs, but if bugs, why does the amount always come up higher, never lower?