Many of you may have heard that the new Facebook
Home app for Android has been a dud. Here are a couple of articles by SFGate and Business Insider.
The San Francisco Gate article caught my
attention as it talked about a theory raised by Josh Constine from TechCrunch as
to why this may have happened. Lack of “droidfooding". The Android app
was essentially created by iOS developers who didn’t understand how Android
devices work and did not realize how "important
widgets, docks, and app folders were to Android users, and that leaving them
out of Home was a huge mistake".
If that is true, then it
makes me wonder how the Facebook’s product management and testing (including
Usability/UX testing) works. Despite the fact that most of the Facebook
employees are reported as iPhone users it's quite possible that some folks from the
in-house Android UX experts and test teams voiced their opinion about obvious
differences between Android and iPhone devices interfaces and the potential
impact on the users and business. The sad part about this story is that I can
relate to what happened. I too was in a situation when I worked on a native app
project that looked like a web site. My reasonings and sentiments were shared
by others. Decision makers on the project took all the UX feedback
and research information into consideration but moved forward with the release
of the app without incorporating much of the feedback. Results were similar
to the Facebook app. It hurt but there was little I could do.