Facebook lost its ability to “move fast and break things” when it switched its apps from HTML5 to native. But it’s got its mojo back. Today it announced a big iOS 7-style app redesign featuring bottom-screen “tab bar” navigation built with an advanced native mobile testing framework. Facebook knew to ditch the pull-out navigation drawer by testing different interfaces in 10 million-user batches.
The new version of Facebook for iOS isn’t just for iOS 7. It’s rolling out to iOS 5 and 6 too, but with a black tab bar for navigation at the bottom of the screen that matches the old iOS style instead of the white tab bar for iOS 7. Facebook has also made the top title bar translucent and redesigned many of its icons like the one for messages to match the line and arc style of Apple’s new mobile operating system. But Facebook didn’t flatten everything, leaving some texture and depth to the feed.
HTML5 Was Slow, But Boy Could It Test
Facebook has never been afraid to try new things and see what sticks. It invented the “Gatekeeper” system to let it simultaneously test thousands of variations of Facebook on the web with subsets of users. It would collect data about usage and performance to inform what to roll out to everyone.
On mobile, it hoped to do the same thing, so it built its iOS and Android apps using a Frankenstein combination of native architecture with HTML5. The latter let it ship code changes and tests to users on the fly without the need for a formal app update. “With HTML5 we’d ship code every single days and be able to switch it on server side”, Facebook product manager Michael Sharon tells me. That meant it could push a News Feed redesign one day to 5% of users, then to everyone a week later, and then fix an bug a few days later.
But beyond testing, HTML5 was a disaster. It made Facebook’s apps sluggish and unresponsive, which hamped engagement, ad views, and their app store ratings. Users hated Slowbook. Mark Zuckerberg would later say on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt that “Our biggest mistake as a company…was betting too much on HTML5″.
So Facebook ditched HTML5 and rebuilt the apps entirely on native infrastructure last Summer. Suddenly their app store ratings shot up, and people read twice as many News Feed stories on average. It was a huge win for Facebook.
Except that it had to sacrifice HTML5′s testing abilities.
“We Use Testing Kind Of Religiously”
Sharon explains “One thing we lost was the ability to do testing. We use testing kind of religiously in both the web and HTML5 apps, and this is something we wanted to get back to as much as possible.
Having to wait until its monthly app update cycle came around to test new versions of its apps was torture for the typically nimble company. It wanted to push changes and get immediate feedback. To solve the problem on Android, Facebook launched a beta tester club in June 2013 that let it use Android’s more permissive stance towards developers to let power users sign up to play with potential new features and catch bugs.
But iOS refuses to sully its simplicity with such beta capabilities. So over the past year Facebook quietly built out a new native mobile app testing framework and sprung it into action in March to build the app update released today.
How it works is that when you download Facebook for iOS, the app actually contains multiple different versions of the interface. However, you’re grouped with a few hundred thousand other users and you all only see one version of the app. This way Facebook can try out tons of variations all at once, without multiple app updates or any confusion for users. We’ve all been guinea pigs in the mobile testing framework since March, but none of us knew it.
Sharon was adamant that these different tests aren’t half-baked betas, saying “We’re not shipping a subpar version of our app. We’re shipping full production-reading versions that could become the main experience”. When added up, Facebook would test major changes with between five and ten million users at a time — more than many apps have total.
It’s first big mission was rethinking how users navigate on mobile. It wondered if there was something better than the navigation drawer that slides out from the side of the app. It used the new testing framework to experiment with dozens of different interface designs, and compared them on metrics including “engagement metrics, satisfaction metrics, revenue metrics, speed metrics, perception of speed metrics” until it found that when looked at holistically, the a row of buttons at the bottom of the feed or main screen was the best design.
That is what’s becoming available today. And that’s how Facebook got its testing groove back.
Facebook's New Mobile Test Framework Births Bottom Tab Bar Navigation Redesign For iOS 5, 6, & 7
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