Staged Troll Outs

Eff your A/B Testing

An increasingly worrying and frustrating trend these days from the perspective of the user is the one towards staged roll outs of software, web services and even enhancements or features that companies show off at their events.

The roll out of the things mentioned above are, in most cases, to hundereds of millions of users (Since large press events are held for them). I am not familiar with software development cycles, but why aren’t those features available the day they announce them, or even on a specific date? With no real reservation system or a virtual line (à la Mailbox) it’s just a long wait to get something you signed up for the day it was announced.

What I’m getting at is the excruciatingly slow roll out of Facebook’s redesigned Newsfeed as the most frustrating experience I’ve had. It’s been well over two months. Why announce a redesign when the company isn’t ready to give it to its billion users? I get a new design for Graph search every other week, too. If anything, it portrays lack of conviction in what they’ve chosen to do. Roll outs of Stickers, Chat Heads,New Timeline for their mobile apps, on the browser, and no apparent pattern in how users get them just adds to the frustration. Even Facebook Home isn’t available to a large number of Android phones (Zuckerberg noted that they didn’t build an Operating System outright so that they’d get a market larger than 30 million users. Downloads so far? About a million to five million) Google has been guilty of this in the past. They still do it, but I don’t use Google Services as much as I use Facebook to guage the turnaround rate for updates to their services. As far as I know, the features they hold an event for get rolled out to users quickly. The blog post ones are rolled out slowly. Fair enough.

Imagine a situation where Apple would “roll out” the latest version of iOS (Or even iCloud) only to a certain number of customers after announcing it. Maps would be an exception, but at least they accepted the fact that it was a large scale screw up. They still got about a 100 million users in just 3 days. They have conviction to go through with something they’d started. Facebook, on the other hand, despite having enough backend support to roll it out, doesn’t seem to have the same level of conviction. It just seems perplexing to me, as an active Facebook user, as to why I haven’t got it yet, along with millions of others.

Companies like Facebook owe it to themselves to serve users better and roll back features if we don’t like them or, ideally, be given a choice, rather than being left in the lurch. We follow developments (it has itself to blame with all it’s emphasis on sharing) and are, to a reasonable extent, impatient. It’s not too much to ask for from a multi-billion dollar company to just give it to us after it’s been announced, or to at least make a commitment. With no particular timeline (no pun intended) announced, it just feels like they’re trolling their users who actively follow and await features. I eagerly anticipated the redesigned Newsfeed to show up, but now I just don’t care. Please, don’t announce features if they aren’t ready for your all or even a large number of your users otherwise— it’s a disservice.