When was the last time you accessed Facebook through the web (laptop / desktop)? I’m sure it’s been quite some time for most of you. A lot of us probably don’t even remember our Facebook password because we are just always logged in to the Facebook app through our phones and just don’t feel the need of logging in through the web. However, on those rare occasions when you do have to login through the web, the user experience totally puts you off. It feels like it’s just been quickly put together by someone in no time and is there just for the sake of it. There is no way it looks like a product with 16 years worth of rich UX data and insights. In my opinion, the Facebook Web user experience is dead. It’s not just “not good”, it’s bad.

Facebook’s web page can be broken down into 5 major components – 

• Left Sidebar – Primarily provides Navigation Menu for different sections of Facebook
• Feed – Showing Status updates, Photos, Videos, Posts, Stories, Rooms, News, Ads etc..
• Right Sidebar – Primarily showing birthdays, trending and sometimes ads
• Chat Sidebar – Showing list of all your contacts and their online status
• Borders and empty space between the above containers

A quick analysis through the page inspect (Right click -> Inspect) shows the below distribution of the page width – 

• Left Sidebar – 12.5%
• Feed – 35%
• Right Sidebar – 22%
• Chat Sidebar – 14%
• Border and empty space – 16.5%

Issues

• 16.5% of the page is just blank. That’s just a lot of real estate wasted for a platform that receives ~25 billion visits per month (for Web and mobile Web).
• Moreover, 3 out of the 4 content containers (Left Sidebar, Right Sidecar, Chat Sidebar) are fixed. Mostly they don’t have enough data to have a scroll in them. There is no way to collapse them. They are just sitting there, visible to you all the time, staring at you for no reason. What if I don’t want to continuously keep looking at my contact list?
• The only relevant part of the page is the feed which is just 35% of the page. So when you scroll then only 35% of the page is scrolled. Isn’t that weird?
• The 3 dot menu next to each post in the feed has a “More Options” menu item at the end. One would expect that clicking it will open few more menu items. But no, clicking it just shows the “Show in Tab”. Why can’t you just put the “Show in Tab” menu item instead of “More Options”?
• Hashtags are not auto-suggested as you type. Usually with any social media platform, when you type “#” and type anything after that it suggests you the trending hashtags matching as per your entered keyword, but on Facebook nothing happens. You are just supposed to guess what the trending hashtags are.

These are just some of the many issues.

But then I wonder, isn’t Facebook smart enough to figure all this out by themselves. They for sure must be aware of all this. But then why are they not fixing it? It’s not like they are limited by resources (human or financial).

The explanation probably lies in the data. Below is the distribution of Facebook users across devices as of July 2020.

• 98.3% of users accessed Facebook through some kind of mobile phone. Wow, that’s insane.
• 20.8% of users access Facebook Web and out of that only 1.7% access FB exclusively through Web.
• There is no clear data on “For the 19.1% users who are accessing FB through both Mobile and Web, which is the more dominant choice?”.  However, 19% is a sizeable number. My hunch is that if a good portion of these users were actively using web, then Facebook would have already done something about improving the web user experience. These users would have accessed Facebook web just occasionally and thus were recorded in this segment. Thus, the actual users of Facebook web is ~2%.

So, prima facie, you can say that investing development effort and cost for just 2% of the user base may not have been at the top of priority list for Facebook.

However, Facebook is not just any other company. With monthly active users (MAU) of 2.7B, even 2% of users mean ~55 million users accessing Facebook exclusively through Web. That’s more than the lifetime users of many platforms. I think if these users are just outright being ignored by Facebook, then that’s a big mistake.

Moreover, when you reach the levels of Facebook, then it’s also about maintaining a certain level of quality and credibility, irrespective of the cost benefit analysis. Facebook should definitely relook at its web user experience and improve/fix it asap.

P.S. Since we are talking about user experience, also checkout our analysis of UX gaps in Gmail