Facebook Paper and the Irony of the Digital Hoity Toity
Many have remarked that Facebook Paper is out-of-touch with the experience of the "average Facebook user". I think Paper is actually targeted at the very people who are making those remarks.
When the Facebook Paper product demo video first hit the interwebs, one of the common observations was how distant this product seemed from the average Facebook user's daily experience.
Facebook still doesn't quite seem to get that most of us do not have beautiful friends who take beautiful photos with great cameras
— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) January 30, 2014
Facebook product demos portray every user as a twee artisan, ignoring their core: god fearing racists, babies and tanked college students.
— Jake McGraw (@jakemcgraw) January 30, 2014
I’ve mocked up the reality of Facebook Paper for most people. pic.twitter.com/SEkfVd1A2l— James Young (@welcomebrand) January 30, 2014
Criticizing the demo for being too pristine, or maybe overly aspirational, is like criticizing a high-end fashion show for being too out of touch with the average shopper. It's not what that thing is for.
A lack of comfort
I really like the idea of an app being comfortable. Comfortable means always knowing where you are. It means not worrying about making a mistake.
Paper is everything but "comfortable". I'm a fairly advanced app user, and I can barely remember where to swipe and how to navigate back-and-forth. Yet still there's a lot to like. Some interactions in Paper are so cool that I want to learn them and hope that they become so widely adopted that the gestures become second nature. When that happens we'll break out of the nav-bar-driven paradigm we're stuck in.
Good on Facebook for experimenting, for pushing the envelope. It might not result in the next great Facebook app, but the discussion around it benefits us all as app makers. As for Facebook, they can take the best interaction elements of Paper to make a better flagship Facebook app of tomorrow.
Welcome to the Lab
Whenever a company appends a "Labs" label to its brand, it communicates, "Don't fault us if this product stinks because it's just an experiment" and "We're not banking on the success of this product". We might have judged Facebook Home less harshly if it came under the "Labs" banner. It's a low-risk, high-reward approach.
And by releasing an ambitious app like Paper under the banner of "Labs" and not watering it down for the masses, Facebook gets to recruit an incredible array of participants in its experiment: fussy, thoughtful artisans of the app world who are more than happy to share their opinion with whoever will listen. Just as I am right now.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯