Power structures in Facebook’s UX design

Richard Gong
Jul 21, 2017 · 6 min read

Facebook used to have a messaging UI in the main app, but decided to make Messenger its own app.

The way Facebook gets you to install the Messenger app is pretty interesting. Anytime anyone messages you, you get notified in the main Facebook app (the regular Newsfeed app). In essence, if you don’t have Messenger installed yet, the main app’s notification badge becomes a very compelling “ad unit” for Messenger.

We all know the Pavlovian addictiveness of clicking on notification badges — to uncover what’s behind it — and to clear it. When you can’t actually clear that notification, nor find out what’s behind it, that becomes a very dissatisfying / anxiety-inducing feeling.

This puts a very real psychological cost — literal mental energy cost — on “not installing Messenger”. It means you’re going to be nagged by the red badge icon all the time. It means your normal mechanism for checking your phone and making sure you haven’t missed any important notifications is suddenly broken.

Thus, the notification badge has a lot of power, due to its psychological share-of-mind — in particular, the place it has in our dopamine reward circuit. Through repeated dopamine hits from consuming social media (and not just from Facebook, but from all apps that use notification badges), we are psychologically conditioned to get some physical arousal and stress whenever we encounter the badge.

So, Facebook literally has control of a physical circuit in your brain to induce a combination of “slight euphoria and stress” — which it can trigger through its control of your phone’s screen real estate. All of which you gave to Facebook because of your dependency on your digital social graph — you need the social graph for staying connected and up-to-date with your family, friends, and acquaintances. Fair trade.

The notification badge’s power means that it is a structure around which Facebook can build functionality to empower Facebook’s goals.

What happens when you click on the red badge? You get this:

So when you click on the “notification badge”, you then get the carrot dangled right in front of you. You see the profile picture of the person who messaged you (real social pressure to act — you might disappoint someone specific with your belated reply), and how many messages they’ve sent (in a very salient notification badge), but zero information on the content of the message.

Facebook could show a preview of the message, couldn’t they?

A preview could resolve:

  • Is this message urgent? What if it’s an emergency? What’s in the goddamn message?!
  • Or, can it wait? Maybe I have more important matters to attend to, than installing Messenger, and opening this message up. Maybe I don’t have good Internet to download Messenger right now. Maybe I’m traveling and I’ve got 4% battery left, and downloading Messenger is going to burn through the rest of my battery juice — and I rather not spend that juice if it’s a trivial message.

But they’re not going to show the message — because that’s something you want. They want to keep you in a state of suspense. And they’re going to keep you in that state, until you do what they want — install Messenger. You may not want to install Messenger, but they have the power, and they know how to use it.

Or you could argue, they really are being nice, by forcing you into adopting the awesomeness that is Messenger — but you really aren’t given a completely free choice — it’s a benevolent dictator kind of nice. Costs are imposed for disobeying the dictator’s will.

The best case assumption is: they know better than the user what’s good for the user. The worst case assumption is: they don’t care about the user’s preferences in this case, they just want to maintain Facebook’s dominance by establishing a firmer foothold in the messaging space — against the remaining incumbents like WeChat and SnapChat that they haven’t acquired.

Now I know designers who philosophically don’t like this type of design, because it forces the user to do something that may be sub-optimal for the user. (For example, Messenger runs in the background, and can drain your battery, and some phones need to conserve all the battery they can.) But the counterargument is that a good designer should know what users want, better than the users themselves.

But who has the power in this situation? The user? The designer’s philosophy? Or the designer’s boss — in this case, business requirements — i.e., KPIs for Messenger adoption?

Zuckerberg explains why they did things this way:

The primary purpose of the Facebook app is News Feed. Messaging was this behavior people were doing more and more. 10 billion messages are sent per day, but in order to get to it you had to wait for the app to load and go to a separate tab. We saw that the top messaging apps people were using were their own app. These apps that are fast and just focused on messaging. You’re probably messaging people 15 times per day. Having to go into an app and take a bunch of steps to get to messaging is a lot of friction.

Messaging is one of the few things people do more than social networking. In some countries 85 percent of people are on Facebook, but 95 percent of people use SMS or messaging. …

Why wouldn’t we let people choose to install the app on their own at their own pace? The reason is that what we’re trying to do is build a service that’s good for everyone. Because Messenger is faster and more focused, if you’re using it, you respond to messages faster, we’ve found.

If your primary concern is KPIs, it means you must systematically exploit your product and your users to accomplish your numerical goals. Sounds sociopathic, but it is very effective for business. This decision increases conversion for adopting Messenger, I guarantee it.

On the other hand, leaving a bad taste in your users’ mouths can have longterm negative effects. Users might not realize this consciously, but subconsciously, they know something “uncomfortable” just happened. You do this enough times, and some minority of people are gonna start boycotting your app. (I feel these people are always gonna remain such a small minority, they don’t have any real power on Facebook’s decisions. But they do become a new niche that can be monopolized by an upstart—a la innovator’s dilemma — a big company is focused on frying the bigger fish, and ignores some subset of users.)

So that’s the tradeoff. I think in this particular case, it makes a lot of sense to enforce Messenger’s adoption. Messaging might be the most important asset someday, might even exceed the NewsFeed in terms of strategic value to Facebook’s business. And Messenger offers a better UX than SMS.

But I dramatized everything in this essay as an exercise in thinking about power as it applies to UX and design.

Sometimes, there’s a tradeoff between design philosophy and business needs. Making the trade might be critical. Sometimes, your survival as a business depends on it. Sometimes, your integrity as a designer depends on it.

Certainly, regardless of what design decision you would make here, being aware and having a critical understanding of the underlying power structures helps you make a better decision — whether your specific goal is business metrics or abiding by your design values. Knowledge and understanding helps you, no matter what side you’re on.

There will always be a difference between what’s best for the user, and what’s best for the company. Assuming users are rational and have the power to choose amongst competition, only companies that align themselves with their users will survive in the longterm. But in this case, Facebook’s a relative monopoly and the lack of market forces ensures that this is a safe decision for Facebook.

P.S. I’m not really a designer, just a developer dabbling in design thinking.

Richard Gong

Written by

Founder @BayLaunch (https://richgong.com)

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