Before the dislike button; Three Features That Facebook Should Implement ASAP
Like any other one in seven people on this planet, I rely heavily on the suite of products that Facebook provides. Yet, there are a few features that I constantly require and keep on wondering why doesn’t Facebook implement them in their products. As a product guy, I decided to take on the challenge and show how a simple change can make a huge difference in our lives. I hope that this will reach a listening ear and might solve my first world problems.
Night Mode
Almost every other day, I scroll upon an article with a judging title, telling me, YOU SHOULDN’T USE YOUR SMARTPHONE IN BED. OK, got it, don’t use the device in bed.
If you haven’t read one of these articles before, here’s the cliffnote: exposure to blue light before you go to bed significantly affects your sleep quality because it prevents your body from releasing melatonin, a chemical that helps you sleep.
Unfortunately, my social media addiction is stronger than my health conscience mind. In bed after a long day, I can’t resist the urge to numb down my brain with some random bits of information.
With over a gazillion people a day using Facebook, I believe that they could make a bit of an effort to allow us some good night sleep. Just imagine how a slight change in colors could help the world sleep better, wake up better, and feel a more natural environment process while trying to fall asleep. Yes, I do change my brightness to minimum (sometimes even using the inverted colors option), but it is not enough.
Imagine Facebook adding a small moon icon. Clicking this icon simply toggles between day and night themes. This would allow us less exposure to blue-light, helping the world get a better night’s rest.
Instagram Star List
Instagram is by far my favorite social network out there. The simplicity, the story telling, the variety of options to follow… Just wow. Having said that, not everyone that I follow is equal in my interest to the other.
For example, following @natgeo is fascinating. I enjoy greatly their constant supply of quality photographs from all around the world. Yet they post between 10–15 photos every single day. That’s just one example — most popular publications follow the same posting schedule.
Just by following 10 popular quality publications, my Instagram feed reaches about 100 photos a day. There is no chance I can view all of them. That’s acceptable, I don’t need to see it all. What happens, though, is the pictures of my loved ones, friends and family, get buried inside this constant stream of photos.
My loved ones’ photos are the photos that interest me the most. They are the ones that I would like to like and comment on. Due to an overwhelming amount of posts, I tend to miss most of these posts. An average person won’t post 10 photos a day, he would probably post just once a week or so. Which means I miss out on all of the Instagram fun.
To add to the frustration, I need to constantly search for the people I love. Giving me the odd stalker feeling.
I understand that Facebook might fear the list building complication. After all, it is quite a tedious process and it seems to have failed on Facebook. Though, I do believe it’s possible with a tiny change to the UI to allow a starred list option within my feed. Essentially dividing my feed to all of the people I follow and the ones that I choose to star. Similar to the Close Friends list on Facebook.
This way I can handle my feed easily and be sure that my stars don’t get missed as often as they do today.
WhatsApp High Quality Photo Sharing
I rely quite heavily on my WhatsApp. So do 900 million people around the world. I often find it the most common way that people are sharing pictures with each other.
The frustrating part of this is that most people sharing their photos on WhatsApp are not aware of how bad quality the pictures are when shared through the app. Pictures are reduced by 60–80% of quality (8MP will be reduced down to 2MP). This is great for network congestion, data plans and generally delivering a faster experience.
Sometimes, though, there’s a good picture you want to have in high quality for maybe using it later. Yet the process of sending the picture through email and selecting the quality is too much of a nuisance for most people. Let alone, most don’t even know about this at all. Which leads to the need of explaining this tedious task. Tedious today, has become more than 3 touches on the screen.
If only WhatsApp would allow the option of choosing the quality of an image before sending. They could even hide the feature in one of the top buttons so that the majority will still just click send, while those who do care about the quality will have the easy, one tap, option to send the pic at a better quality.
Hi! I’m Roy Pessis, CTO @ allmyfaves (Wibki, allmyfaves, 17Liulan). For the past 7 months I have been nomading around South America, working on a new education related project. I recently opened a new Instagram account, honoring the workers of South America, Join me. @WorkersOfSouthAmerica
If you found one of the features I mentioned useful, please hit the recommend button and maybe, just maybe, Facebook will add them soon.
