Facebook News Feed Is Being Held Hostage.
There is no question that all of us are very sensitive to changes when it comes to products we use daily. Imagine waking up in the morning and discovering that your favorite toothpaste was switched to a different flavor, then getting into your car and finding all the mirrors and seats readjusted. Sure you’ll still manage to brush your teeth and get to work, but the routine will be no doubt a more annoying and frustrating experience.
For over 7 years Facebook has been training us to make checking our News Feed a daily ritual and has been very successful at developing this habit for hundreds of millions of users. So it will come as no surprise that even the most minute changes are noticed, discussed and are often complained about.
It’s been years since we have seen any meaningful updates to what we see in our feed, the biggest ones going back to design changes and introduction of “like” in 2009 and additional stories with actions through Open Graph in 2010. There have been plenty of algorithm and performance changes on the back-end, but this is still quite a while for a consumer product to go through virtually no user facing updates.
So the news came as no surprise when earlier last year Facebook announced that the News Feed was going to get a substantial redesign with a smaller collapsed rail, spacious design, larger photos and an overall cleaner look with a lot of focus on stories in the feed.
That was 10 months ago…
Unfortunately this is what can happen when a public company, with a product that’s being actively used by 1.2 billion users every month, tries to innovate but is trapped by its own previous successes. Even while there are valid general concerns about the future of the News Feed as a product, it’s a tough call to bring back such a major product change to the drawing board (especially after publicly announcing it, which is a cautionary tale of its own).
The story goes that the new design is being killed off due to unfavorable user feedback, but there’s more in play here and the News Feed is likely being held hostage by multiple parties.
The Publishers
Any changes to the look and feel of the page are going to shift distribution of clicks. The new design put a lot of emphasis on bringing the focus back to your friends and keeping content consumption in the feed. Facebook is a huge traffic driver for the rest of the web and outbound clicks is a metric the company must be very sensitive to. Upsetting the content providers who create a large portion of what users share on the service is a tough sell.
The Advertisers
While the initial feedback from the advertisers seemed to be positive and enthusiastic, it’s possible that ads actually ended up generating less activity since they have become very obvious due to huge increase in size and emphasis on creative. Sure “more pixels = more clicks” has worked in the past, but this also puts Facebook at the mercy of their advertisers creative department, and these are the guys who for years have been working on cramming the sell into tiny images and short copy.
The Shareholders
At this point any kind of negative feedback from users, publishers or advertisers will result in immediate response from the market. Coupled with the already existing concerns of increased competition from mobile messaging applications and unbundled social apps, this could set off a variety of unwanted conversations and coverage about Facebooks inability to move forward and continue to dominate the space.
And of course the Users
Even if the changes did end up being an improvement, and resulted in greater user satisfaction over time, initial feedback on redesign is rarely that of high praise. Most users get annoyed by not finding things in the places they are used to, having to readjust how they change the type of content they see with new filters and a hundred other complaints that a company opens the door to by making hundreds of changes.
Where does this leave Facebook? Hopefully not just stuck changing fonts around. Initial News Feed launch was also pretty rough and along with spawning large discussions about privacy, a lot of users actually questioned the need for the News Feed, a feature most of us can’t imagine Facebook without.
This is a big moment for the company where the fear of change could result in a bleak future similar to other giants who reached scale and were then trapped by being too cautious and trying to satisfy everyone. Hopefully they will continue to take bigger risks and releasing product updates that transform how we connect and stay in touch with each other. Right now the pace doesn’t quite fit the profile of a company who’s motto is “Move Fast And Break Things”.
