“A camel is a horse designed by committee.” (source)
The camel/horse quote (no disparagement to camels meant, of course) perfectly captures the problem when too many people have input into a product. Seth Godin talks about how the Walkman would never have been built if Sony had asked its customers what they wanted (see Purple Cow). A few days ago Robert Scoble talked about how a Porsche would be a Volvo if they let their buyers decide on features: “if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say “well, they just designed a Volvo.””
The bottom line is, when you listen to your users, you get vanilla. feature creep. boring. It takes a dictator to create the iPhone and change the course of an entire industry. Imagine if Steve Jobs let other people add features to that device.
So I’m surprised that Facebook, which has stared down its users so many times in the past, is folding on the most recent redesign flareup and reverting back to some old features. Just because, oh, a million people demanded it.
Facebook has always pushed the envelope with users, and those users always hate it (the original News Feed was hated, now people are up in arms to keep it from changing). In an interview last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked with me about how users are willing to accept change over time, and that Facebook would continue to push things along. Suddenly, though, they surrender because a few users have a belly ache over a redesign.
If they wanted to make these changes anyway, they shouldn’t have titled their blog post “Responding to Your Feedback.” They should have just continued to ignore the ranting, and announced further changes. Showing that you’re listening to feedback just invites more of it.
Someday, if they’re not careful, someone is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, who in turn did it to Friendster. Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner.
excellent point! design by committee does not work, period.
Except in this case, it’s not the issue.
The problem most Facebook users are having is that in the process of the redesign, features were taken away. It’s not the design that’s the issue, it’s the functionality – or lack of it.
Also, I don’t think the car analogy works either. If you ask Porsche owners what they want, they *categorically* would not say “smoother ride” or “more legroom”. They would say “more power” or “better handling”.
Mike – I don’t know if you use Facebook as a “normal” user day to day. If you don’t, then you probably wouldn’t notice things like it being impossible to filter out junk apps from the news feed, the lack of live updating and the myriad of other changes that all make it that little bit more difficult to keep up with what friends and family are doing.
Wrong. If they thought the functionality was the problem, they would ask for more options. You are in the very small minority who actually understands whats going on and what can be done.
The masses are wanting the “old Facebook” back, just like every change they have done as Michael has pointed out.
Asking for the old facebook IS simplistic, but if the features were replicated with the redesign, those same folks wouldn’t be complaining at the level or frequency they currently are.
It’s you that is wrong Mark. Features did disappear or were so well hidden in the redesign that they may as well have gone. The UI was simply worse.
And I don’t know a single person that liked the new UI – though I can’t speak to their reasons for disliking it.
Personally I disliked it because it was simply harder to do the stuff I usually do, and more confusing to ignore apps, etc. I shouldn’t have to go to a specific app page to disable that app; I should be able to get rid of it directly from my page – Otherwise I have no ownership of it.
i also think, that the article above dont get the problem itself, its not the visual approach (hu, bigger icons with rounded corner), but the lack of usability, which facebook now clearly have for many day-to-day users like me.
i tend to agree the the articles general approach (innovation comes from steps ahead of the horizon of the users), but if something is less good then the version before, just because of the decreased usability (more clicks needed for simple tasks, information is badly filtered (e.g. conversions between friends are featured like my own communication), invitations, events, etc are just hanging on top of the page, easy to be overlooked), why shouldnt a company like facebook admit it via taking action and plug some of the features missing back into the machine?
the mass of users just can say yes or no to be heard, there are no option for millions of people to say yes, but this and that, or yes, but more features here and there..
cheers
ka
Wrong. The problem with the new facebook isn’t resistance to a new design. It’s lack of functionality.
Every person I’ve talked to who uses Facebook on a regular basis is getting LESS functionality out of the new design.
Sure, there’s more STUFF dumped in front of you. But, that doesn’t necessarily increase functionality. “Options” are only valuable if they add value and are delivered in the right fashion.
The new design and for that matter the Friend Feed layout which you seem to be in love with, sucks. Why? Because it has great features which are horribly packaged and delivered. Dumping every feed for the site onto a splash page may be a database type’s idea of a user interface, but for your average joe it’s a headache and a nuisance. Interface was actually one of Myspace’s biggest issues. Crap overload.
Also, the original article notes the resistance to the original friendfeed.
The concern there was privacy. The majority of the current backlash has nothing to do with privacy concerns. It has to do with information deliver and useless garbage in a difficult to sort fashion.
The other element from a Twitter-esque point of view is stream overload. With the old feed it was possible to easily keep tabs on changes, updates and the like that your friends made, even if you’d been off site for a few hours. The problem with Twitter and the new Facebook feed is that if you have more than a few hundred contacts (and let’s face it – most regular users have 200+ friends) you can no longer keep up to date on the updates. You just give up and periodically sample whatever happening that hour.
“Imagine if Steve Jobs let other people add features to that device.”
Michael, since when can you compare Zuckerberg & Co. design to Steve Jobs, Johnny Ive and the rest of Apple?
Facebook relented because of the overwhelming visceral reaction, which more than 90% of FB users had to the release of the new design.
Every great company falls victim to relenting to their audience at some point, especially if the initial direction was poorly chosen.
No one is asking for design by committee. Simply put, they poorly executed their product decision and its release to 175 million users.
I’m assuming copy and paste integration into the iPhone SDK 3.0 had nothing to do with gripes of Apple users?
When Facebook employees the best designers in the world, then there will be less to gripe, but even the best are not perfect every time.
I have faith in the organization, and everyone stumbles, but “No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook.” is hardly appropriate in this case.
Quietly evolving a design based on a larger vision might have been better.
The News Feed and Wall enhancements should have been the initial release with the new published story format. Then FB could have rolled out the Highlights and Filtering at a later date.
I guess Mike’s comments are not being taken in the right manner. He is by no means saying that user inputs do not make sense.
The point Mike is trying to make here is that you can’t always keep asking users for everything. Generally they follow a herd mentality and while they can help make the product usable, useful their inputs can’t revolutionise the way a product or a service is being used. For this you need someone with a far better vision, someone with the ability to take extremely bold steps. Ofcourse this can do a volte face also but in business only BIG RISK can get you BIG GAINS.
I completely agree with Mike’s thoughts. You need to be a bit off a eccentric to be able to do some amazing stuff
It is not either/or. Best companies can do both.
Exactly Akshay! Design-by-committee’s do exist and problems occur. Lets try to find a middle ground that best suits both. In short -pick your battles
Smart Babes Are Sexy – Easily said, but what is the easiest, most lucrative solution? (time, base, cost) Larger companies like Apple can pour millions into finding great solutions. Smaller companies like Crowd Spring are just as good but lack in the billion dollar revenue. How do they do it?
“Best companies can do both…” I know because I have experience starting dozens of companies in India – NOT. Just a lousy blog.
The spammer from India has spoken. Idiot spammer.
You can not have an either or approach. User feedback/inputs is important but one should filter it before implementation.
Incremental Change can be driven by users and by a democratic process.
Rob – I think you are wrong and I must side with Mr. Arrington.
As the lead designer / project manager of robots I find that you must have a bigger vision for it than the first step. If we would want to upgrade the robot, lets say in 6 months what would we want to put on there and how should we accommodate that now? (Overly simplistic example: Bluetooth chip in the IPod Touch 2.)
I think the reason Mr. Arrington mentioned Steve Jobs is because Steve is, with no doubt, a visionary and thats why many of his products are successful. Facebook on the other hand must not have a strong vision of what they want to do if they are easily strayed away with complaints. (lets be honest – nobody is going to leave Facebook because of it). Facebook must have a vision and stick with it because they are (or at least should be) the experts on social networking and the future of it (not the users).
Henry Ford: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
i think Facebook is trying to monetize their search engine for targeted ads, that’s why they make it harder to find anything
You look at their history. Every single innovation of FB has lead to mass protests. Their most popular feature the news feed created a huge stir and controversy. The lesson for them needs to be to wait 3 months after users have adapted to the change and then revisit and tweak.
FB has lost it.
BTW, loved the camel quote. very apt!
-JP
http://trendsbu...z.blogspot.com/
@Mike – I do agree with your point of view that ask too many users and a Porsche would end being a Volvo but I must say FaceBook redesign was kinda sucky.
The problem with the crappy Volvo-Porsche analogy is that an implicit view of 100% of all porsche owners would still be that it looks/drives/goes as fast as a porsche.
A Volvo would not (even the best ones).
Don’t listen about extra features, fine, but take away core functionality and you’ve screwed the pooch.
Ditto
Perfect point. Facebook made a whole host of its most popular features (friend add updates, photo tags, etc) more difficult to access, while over-emphasizing the status updates in an obvious, “Oh no Twitter is getting huge, lets see if we can do that too!” move.
Twitter and/or micromessaging may have a bright future, but Facebook can’t be all things to all people all the time. At some point they have to define what they’re *not* just as much as they have to understand what they are.
One of the reasons I LOVED the last version is that Twitter and Facebook feeds were separate. I’ve heard too that in many comments in various forums talking about the recent Facebook changes. “If I wanted Twitter, I’d go use Twitter”.
Fact is, I like Twitter for being Twitter. I like Facebook for being Facebook. I like Friendfeed for being Friendfeed. Having one organization try to do everything causes it to lose focus and lose it’s relevance in it’s core target. I really hope Facebook doesn’t lose it’s relevance, because I really don’t want to go find my friends all over again on a different network…
The key is the ability to predict what people want even though they don’t know they want it. But just merely introducing change is not going to do that. So you have to be willing to redact unsuccessful changes and try again. Of course stagnation = death but so does running in the wrong direction, like toward a cliff.
They are not changing the design. They are enhancing functionality, which they took away with the new design. Nothing wrong with that.
well said. design is a process that should never take all the input and then do the average of that input. that’s how you get average things. Many companies are trying to harness the power of their customers to give feedback and design products, but in the end it is better for their marketing efforts than their actual products to do this. Products and experiences need to be designed, tested and built by professionals. Don’t get me wrong, users are important for feedback – but distilling feedback and making decisions is why people have jobs. A good reference for this too is MyStarbucks Idea http://mystarbu...ce.com/ideaHome
Michael-
I was going to write a post along these lines myself, but you really nailed it. Every time facebook makes a change there are things I don’t like about it, but after a few months I start to realize why its such an improvement.
Baloney. They took away too much of the good about FB with the redesign. I love change but the new Home Page is terrible. The changes they announced tonight are needed. Btw , I’m sure the iPhone was designed by a committee.
Like new Coke?
It’s true that sometimes you have to push forward in spite of protests of change, if only because most people are going to resist change. But there’s also the blindness that comes from being too familiar with your product and not seeing how those on the outside see it.
Facebook has stuck with most of its changes in spite of every one of them being protested, but this last one didn’t make any sense. It was the type of change that only the people behind the product could love. For me, it made Facebook a lot harder to use.
I don’t think it was the people with nothing more to say than, “I hate it! It sucks!”: it was the tech blogs that pointed out it was a bad move that added nothing to the product. Facebook may present the change as “We care what our users think!”, but it was only because a few users had good arguments against it.
I think the real issue is that Facebook is trying to a) combat the rising glory of Twitter, and b) making every attempt possible to monetize their site and justify the $500 M spent on it! Listening to users is important to their further development as a network, and it’s obvious that their current strategy is “We’re the network that listens”
You nailed it.
Having a strategy is one thing and implementing it with right essence is another.
With competition, falling ad rates, cash flow issues, demanding investors and no sight of sustainability in business makes things very complex.
We’re looking at a broader issue. It’s a sign of the times. Despite the fact I agree with Robert Scoble (as I usually do), no one is buying Porsche cars these days.
They’re buying volvos because the bottom line is better. Facebook may be a better class of social networking than Myspace but at the same time, they’re trying to make money in a time when capital is hard to come by (from what I’ve seen).
Facebook has to make a choice whether they start making a crap load of money and keep the doors open or become Ferrari, sell 4 cars a year and eventually close.
I’m not a VC and I don’t have 4 companies under my belt and I’m not a paid analyst but I am a guy that reads every TechCrunch post religiously and sees a Facebook that is in no situation to stare down their users and has to bend sometimes in order to keep those users happy. There’s always another network and a mass exodus from Facebook could happen. It might take 2-3 years but it could still happen eventually.
I love that Facebook is better and knows that it’s better than every other social networking site out there but I think it’s time to cater to the “Myspace kids” just a little bit to survive this recession and live to see another day, week or even year.
just my 2 cents.
PS: where’s my freaking Facebook Vanity URL?!?! J/K.
FWIW, Porsche sold 1,518 vehicles in the U.S. during February, down 11.5% from the same month last year. Volvo sold 3,356 vehicles in the US during February, down 55.3% from the same month last year.
Understand you point, but Ferrari has quite the backlog right now and is still quite profitable. Maybe GM is the company you were looking for?
Michael is only partially right. Ignoring your users much of the time is the path to oblivion for a company. The examples cited about Porsche and the iPhone are examples of survivor bias. There’s probably 100 or 1000 examples for each of those where the idea and/or the company bit the dust.
While I agree with you on the whole, I think that it makes a lot of sense for them to add back in features they removed, such as displaying tagged photos of your friends in the main feed. I would be completely against them reverting to the old design at the whim of their users, though.
I’d also like to add that I whole heartedly love the new Facebook design. I see no problem with it at all. Why I don’t think it will succeed? Well people are putting data into Facebook and it’s not clear how Facebook is going to truly leverage it. Make the data useful. Twitter buying summize was genius and secured one of their future possible business models. Facebook status updates are in, out and gone and buried so deep in the architecture that seeing what someone was up to 3 weeks ago is nearly impossible.
This is why Facebook fails at the status update. I wish they would implement it better but just for the design aspect alone, Meh i kind of like it.
Facebook could leverage some of that data (slightly) by improving its search capabilities. Even as something as a simple as a calendar-based lifestream would help. Can’t tell you how many times I wanted to search for an old posting, link, video, whatever, with no easy way to find it.
Too many cooks (users) in the kitchen (Facebook) can spoil the meal (experience)…
Great insight as usual Mike A.
Great post however their redesign isn’t radical, doesn’t really push the envelope or changes the game all that much. It seems to have only made things a bit more loud and obnoxious. I never realized how many different quizzes there were on what famous person, color, president, song or tree you could be. Some of these notifications are better left in the default ‘off’ position.
either way it would be interesting to visualize their ad imps or some other user activity measures before and after their redesign.
Companies can still push the envelope while making/executing bad decisions too.
That “someone” as you said who “does to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace” could very well be… Facebook.
Oh, yes, because GOD FORBID the pesky users might actually have something valuable to add. You know, if all the so-called “industry leaders”, aka Scoble, Arrington, etc. actually stopped patting each on the back for a minute they might learn something.
sounds like you’ve got some issues to work out.
I must have issues too because I think Wendy’s comment is spot on.
Michael is right… and you sir definitely look like you have issues and so does Wendy. I read a few of her posting before and she has demonstrated she lacks logic and critical thinking.
Michael, this article’s tone is dangerously close to arrogance (hubris?) and actually doesn’t address the core problem users are having with the newest facebook design (others have already explained it fairly eloquently in this thread). While it’s true you shouldn’t fail for a design-by-committee approach, that doesn’t mean you ignore your users. That way madness lies.
popular blog != industry leader
Henry Ford is attribute to saying, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse”! Instead, he went to create the Model T car.
well said sir… it is true that user input should be considered but take for example a painter or artist… if they were to take the input of how to draw or create a paint then it would not be their art, it would not be their vision.
…and equating this new design to an innovation like the Model T is laughable.
Well, lets take a look at that analogy then and see what we can glean from it. Just because a user says I want a faster horse doesnt mean you go and get one. You try and deduce from that statement, that they actually wanted something fast. Now, a follower would go and find a horse, while an innovator would go ahead and do what Ford did. The end result – he still provided his users the feature they asked for – speed.
I think that’s what readers & Arrington need to understand. Don’t listen to your users point blank. Instead, try and understand what the problem is and push the envelope on that.
You make a very good point. Allowing too many users to drive UI decisions simply delays progress. I think FB should still allow users to voice their opinions, but they should exercise their own judgment if they feel their opinions are correct to begin with. FB needs take into account what precedence is going to do for future decision making.
Even though I’m one of "those users" not wild about the redesign. I know Scoble is right. I like Porches
I agree, except in this one case the users are absolutely right.
This version of Facebook sucketh.
And they are not really pushing the envelope. Twitter pushed the envelope, and Facebook grabbed it, read the letter and totally over-reacted to the news that a microblog site was becoming quite popular.
Ignore the user at your peril! There is nothing worse than smarmy know it all designers who often forget that we are not interested in how clever they are but are more interested in function. Rule #1 of good design is ‘Function before form’. The problem with the Facebook design is that Rule #1 has been forgotten. Go and have a look at the result of the complaints and the fact Facebook are going to address the problems users are facing in terms of functionality and then rewrite this stupid article.
The latest Facebook redesign was a lame-duck attempt at defending its position against micro-blogging tools like Twitter by among other things simply ripping off the status update and sticking it right in the middle of the user experience.
Now we’re all for FB blazing new paths and pushing the envelope but as mention the last change was less about evolving the user experience and more about defending their turf
against Twitter.
I’d suggest they do their homework and run a few more user test before putting out their next set of changes.
Is this sarcasm? An early April Fools’ joke?
Couldn’t agree more!
Haven’t the financial institutions just proven that underneath the emperor’s new clothes, there is always the possibility that there could just be a naked man standing there?
Perish the thought….
I don’t understand why there are so few recognizing that!? I’m pretty sure that Facebook will lose some market shares in the near futures.
It may be that they are reacting to poor user metrics from the redesign rather than feedback. But shouldn’t that have been uncovered with testing?
I agree with Reid (”new coke?”), and many others – design is for users, ONLY – but I agree not a committee!
I hope this IS a joke! Otherwise you’re way off track in my opinion! If you’re argument holds any water, than we can just eliminate user testing, test/focus groups, usability testing, A/B split testing, etc, etc then??
If 2% of your users don’t like it – that’s one thing – but if you piss off the majority of your users – than you can’t be right! (I don’t know that’s the case in this example)
But regardless I haven’t spoken to a single person (personally) who likes the new Facebook design – and I pointed out immediately (like many others) that they seem to want to capitalize on the popularity of Twitter – it’s obvious in the new design.
Someone else in another blog comment said
“if I want Twitter – I’ll login to Twitter!”
But as I said to a friend the other day “What d’ya gonna do? Join a FB group to protest the change! What’s that gonna do?”
I agree with your view about designed by committee.
But how can you call it pushing the envelope when all they’re doing is making the site look and feel like Twitter? How is THAT making it better than a Volvo? Looks like they ARE doing it by committee…a committee headed by Twitter.
“Never surrender to your users”… because that’s what Twitter is for?!?!
That’s kinda narrow minded mike, generalizing like that is always silly, every case is diferent, sometimes user input is the way to go, sometimes you just have to ignore the noise and concentrate on what is awesome…
Of course you just need one brilliant guy to make an awesome product or service, but we aren’t talking about a new product, the analogy here is more you have the walkman and you decide to make the new version with automatic sound volume, its way more shinny and sophisticated, it doesn’t kill the product but people get apprehensive about the usefulness to them, user input is essential to any product, and in this case facebook dev’s apparently understood that they gave them a half baked version (i personally think its cool and nice looking, but the feed seems to have less stuff than before), and now they are improving on it, and that’s the way to go… not ignore the users.
… don’t you ask the users for input when you launch a new site or new version of techcrunch? why?
God no. that’s part of the reason why there’s so much friction with us and some of our users, and also why we’ve grown so much over the years.
If you were to design a site base on user input you would have a rainbow of colors on the site interface. User input can be helpful but in no way shape or form should it be the way to create a website or product. We all have bias depending on our experiences, so regardless of user input the end the decision should be made by the creator of the product.
hum? well you cant please everyone mike, and ignoring some users is not the reason why you’ve grown so much, if there was a widespread cry about something on techcrunch, you would for sure think about it before doing something about it (even if it is to say your reasons for doing what you are doing).
http://www.tech...-we-redesigned/ and http://www.tech...evator-pitches/ , almost all the new stuff coming from techcrunch you ask for user input its in the post, now you ask for user input just to ignore?, i don’t think so, you do it because of what i said….
You are confusing the 2 things, cause i’m not talking about designing whatever with everyone’s help (of course you cant, you can never please or work with everybody), the problem here is you talking about ignoring user input after you did whatever you did, totally different thing and the point here regarding facebook (by creating something new they destroyed something people found useful), of course innovation comes from a few, but you ALWAYS have to see the feedback from the people that are going to use it, sometimes its bad, sometimes its good, you just AGAIN have to decide for yourself, but what you are saying is that users (or the masses) are always idiots and that ignoring user input is the only way to innovate, it isn’t, and i’ve seen time and time again when a product was improved or born out of user input.
You missed an important part in this: facebook application use (and this revenue) dropped off by 50%. I’m all for pushing past whiners, but this redesign cut out ease of use, and that is the sign of a bad redesign.
Because after seeing what it’s done to my news feed, I hardly want to spam the hell out of my friends’ feed by using FB apps.
Probably not the end-result FB was going for.
Perhaps Zuckerberg and the FB management team should (re)-read Innovator’s Dilemma.
Remember? Current customers are not the ones to adopt innovations. And, incidentally, where would all these unhappy FB users go anyway? To MySpace?
Not myspace, but you cannot really believe facebook won’t have real comp. forever, do you?
I don’t think any techcrunch reader would be that shocked if a new product does to them what they did to myspace in fewer than 5 years.
Facebook isn’t exactly “cool” anymore.
Great Post. You should listen to the users, but in the process of bending you shouldn’t break your back.
“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”
-Henry Ford
i dont think he gave them a slower horse though….. think about that.
this is an awesome point,well before hear this I usually think consumer is the king,and democracy is “must have to be successful in any kind of business” well thanks to realize me TC,I know now from you,that consumer is not always right ,and they should not “always be the king of the business course.
That is such an interesting concept, because mostly, you think whatever your customers want is what you should do! But, really, where else are these people going to go. You know if you grew up eating pea soup, even though you didn’t like it. When you are al growed up you will wonder where it went, and order it at a restaurant, and it ill never be the same!
Sarah
English Wedding Photo
Panama City Wedding Photographer
Michael, you are so wrong on this one
I’m not sure what your friends do on Facebook but my homepage/news feed is filled with junk and spam. More than 60% is someone answered a pool, taken a quiz, bla bla … rubbish.
The problem is, they hidden their best feature => news feed, yes it’s live now but I can’t see anything of it because of other rubbish.
Disagree, but it’s a well presented opinion. I don’t see Facebook’s relevance anymore, so this seems much to do about nothing.
Maybe Google should keep the feature in search that allows you to move search results.
Mike,
I can’t begin to explain how wrong you are. Apple has made adjustments that the customers asked for. Facebook has listened to users.
By not reverting to the old layout, they are proving that they are moving forward despite what users demand. In other words, doing exactly what you are asking of them.
Your post is good for sparking dialogue but completely inaccurate.
Best,
Nick
Where does facebook say they are reverting back? You make it sound like they’re switching back to the old design in response to user backlash, which is misleading. They’re just iterating on the new design and plan to give users some more control over the feed.
The best thing that could have happened to Twitter.
Facebook is so yesterday…
Some odd statements that weaken this post a great deal. Not sure what Porsche owner (let alone group) would specify those changes…if they want a volvo, it exists, buy a volvo. Bottom line, facebook isn’t the only option, nor is it a necessity. As long as the people “complaining” are complaining as FB users than they haven’t opted for any of the alternatives (leaving or using the competition exclusively) and they are right where Zuckerberg wants them.
I agree 100%
I for one love the changes to Facebook as I find they execute a bit of everything in a neat way, but allow you to customize it to an extent.
When I use to go on, I was bored because I just never could figure anything worth my time to do on my homepage. Now, I see updates from all my friends and I can easily comment on them and quickly post crap I find on the internet to share… For me at least it has increased my user ship of the site.
The rul of thumb of entertainment is to keep things on a 4th grade level and it seems only the 4th graders are the ones complaining.
I originally held the same position as the author of this article. As a designer, I know two things for sure: 1. Design by committee leads to lukewarm poo, and 2. People love to complain and hate change. I thought people would get used to the new design. But I quickly realized that Facebook’s problem wasn’t with the design; it was with functionality. To use the Porsche analogy, It’s not as if they added safety features that slowed it down. Rather, it’s as if they took away features like the manual transmission option and the tight transmission. I think the new Facebook is the Volvo. Fixing the problems will make it the Porsche again.
As for becoming vanilla by succumbing to users desires, someone tell me how the lost functionality benefited Facebook in the long run. What new users would be gained by the lost functionality? Maybe I just don’t get it.
facebook is looking very amateurish every new change they make they do an about face after user feedback
The difference is that the Porsches, Walkmen, etc. are designed before they’re purchased. Facebook changed it’s design on 165 million users. A more apt comparison would be if the car company came to your house overnight and painted your car a different color and moved all the controls on the dashboard around. It might be ergonomic, it might be more popular shade of red, but it’s not something you asked for.
Facebook listens to its users because it is a service-based company. And at the end of the day, it’s nothing without its 165 million whiny little users, and it knows it.
Surrender is bad. Listening is good. The perfect solution is to listen just enough.
Agreed, Louis – and where is ‘just enough’ is the trick.
Well, if TC man wanted to start a debate, he sure put things right.
Guess Michael sees no middle ground, saying ‘don’t listen to your users.’ I’d almost call that inciteful flaming, in Dvorak-style.
React to every user twitch/gripe? No. A million-to-almost zero vote of repulsion at changes that went too far/made little sense deserves, no DEMANDS at least a response, if not… ‘tweaking’
I too disagree. The argument that you dont listen to your customers is only valid when you change and the benefits of the change are clear. The latest FB changes and their reasons are not clear; the UI has been described as ‘hunt and peck’. I dont want…
Louis: the perfect solution is to listen to the right kind of feedback. Feedback that will keep you from moving ahead? Bad. Feedback that will take splinters out of the experience? Good.
I LOOOVE Arrington’s post! and Scoble’s comment…
With that said, I think Facebook would be smart if they created a group called “the Facebook user’s input committee” and let the user’s feel like they had power.
They could have polled for many individual feature changes over the months, then put together the package that they claim the users want. Then people cheer when it comes.
The poll questions just need to be asked in a way to get the desired response.
This would at least solve half the backlash, and the other half would be solved by Mark standing up more like Steve Jobs and saying… “hey, I’m the guy who made it, and now I’ve got a new idea.” end of story. no waffling.
pi lover and name
no, forget the feedback. just live or die by your ideas. easy.
You’re right in that you can’t push into new grounds if you ask everybody if they are happy (comfortable) with what you’re doing.
To be able to go out of your comfort zone aganist the flow is one of the key ingredients of a good entrepreneur. It’s also what gives the ireplacable kick that people get out of doing it.
And it makes you a star if it works and a lonely looser if it doesnt. As you’ve said, live or die …
but facebook didn’t really respond to user concerns. they figured out what the concerns were then released a few features they held back to iron out a few kinks under the pretense they were responses to user requests
Great post! Innovation over accomodation, I rate the redesign highly with the only issue for my usage being that photos I comment on don’t appear in my Wall feed.
I like the iPhone reference ‘change the course of an entire industry’ as that’s a great example of how to excel with a vision
Exactly!
yar!