Facebook Implements Changes In The Way Their Employees Experience Tech, To Create Better Products For End-Users

In spite of the naysayers “prophesying” Facebook’s demise from Day 1 a whole 11 years ago, the company is still up, running, and expanding like mad. Anyone who has been online since the era of MySpace and Friendster will understand how operating a social networking website is tantamount to running stocks for a bunch of fickle trophy wives. The user base is fickle at best, and at any point, a bigger, better, social network may replace the social network du jour. This is what happened when Facebook cannibalized MySpace and Friendster’s user base years ago. However, no new social networking hottie, not even Google’s supposed “Facebook Killer,” Google Plus, managed to dethrone the billion-user-strong giant, just yet.

This 2015, everyone, from tech pundit to casual user alike, has been treated to a front-row view of Facebook’s quick decisions and speedy developments. Aside from announcing the creation of a human-curated digital virtual assistant within Facebook Messenger, Facebook’s moves to expand connectivity to less fortunate and unwired countries around the world, Facebook has also been working overtime to improve its apps and the desktop portal.

Aside from integrating changes into its core offering, the Facebook website itself, and even on its mobile apps, Facebook is also implementing changes to how they work, as a company. For one, Facebook has started to impose certain tech lifestyle changes on its employees. The company’s rationale is that, the employees have to constantly tweak the users’ experience of their services, so the employees must know what it feels like to use their apps and their website.

These tech lifestyle changes include “2G Tuesdays,” and the imposition that Facebook employees use Androids, for the most part. These moves are based on the aforementioned rationale for Facebook employees to be able to have a better grasp of what a Facebook user from a developing nation must feel like, using their services.

“2G Tuesdays”

In a time when 5G internet connectivity is on trial in the US, Facebook’s employees have an option to switch to using 2G networks on Tuesdays. This corporate decision comes close on the heels of the company’s release of a “Lite” version of its mobile app, which is targeted at saving data and using less bandwidth. According to a report via PC Mag, in order to conserve bandwidth, Facebook’s Lite and lower-bandwidth versions will show News Feed items that consume less broadband and Internet data. Users on 2G will be able to see more text-based items and statuses, while videos and other rich media will be kept off their feeds. Facebook has since released a statement expanding on their rationale for this move.

To view the statement and other details, here is PC Mag Asia on Facebook’s 2G Tuesdays: https://asia.pcmag.com/internet-products/7166/news/could-you-survive-facebooks-2g-tuesdays

Move To Android

According to an interview with Wired, reposted on IBTimes.co.uk, Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox is pushing for his team and other Facebook employees to adopt Androids and ditch their iPhones. Chris Cox has admitted that left to decide on their own, Facebook employees will choose to use iPhones instead of Androids.

The full rationale behind the device imposition is on these two reports:

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/facebook-insists-employees-use-android-phones-over-iphones-1526648

https://www.wired.com/2015/10/facebook-workers-ditch-iphones-in-push-for-world-conquest/

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With these two new moves, Facebook is also looking to improve and tweak the way audiences from emerging markets will see their ads. This means that ad experience on Facebook will increasingly be viewable to those on slower networks, aside from being optimized for users’ preferences.

Indeed, empathy is the starting point of the ability to design products that matter, products that remain relevant. Facebook has been on track and on the money at identifying that emerging markets are going to be their source of the next billions of users. Judging from these company changes, the company wants their developers, engineers, and other employees to be able to understand and empathize with their target markets even better.

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