Getting lost - My Facebook Home Experience

While waiting for my iPhone 5 in the mail, I decided to make use of my Galaxy Note 2 for one last experiment. I decided to install Facebook Home on my Galaxy Note 2 and check it out. 

Facebook Home is seen by many as a strategic move from Facebook to enter the mobile market. Over the years, Facebook has seen a huge movement in user engagement towards mobile channels rather than the traditional desktop/laptop model. This user evolution has caused panic to some of its investors as Facebook initially looked unprepared for this movement. It had no way of capturing user behaviour thru mobile and also had no way of pushing advertising to its mobile site. It started to feel like Facebook was struggling to keep up with its market. Users were viewing Mobile as the future while Facebook was looking at it as a dead-end. 

The launch of Facebook Home is seen by many as the answer to Facebook's Mobile challenge. There were rumours initially that Facebook was going to launch its own smartphone to solve this problem. Good thing this did not happen. What we got instead was an App or an Android Theme layered over an Android OS. At first, I thought Facebook Home was a great idea until I started using it. 

Design.
The app is beautifully designed from the aesthetics standpoint. Playing with Facebook Home on a giant screen like the Note 2 was beautiful. Images
really popped and the gesture controls for them app were intuitive. Sadly, however that is the only good thing I can say about Facebook Home. It just looks nice and shinny and beautiful.

Feeling grounded at Home

My initial reaction to Facebook Home was that of being grounded. I felt so restricted in terms of what I can do on my phone. The gigantic images of my friends lunch and self-portraits immediately turned into an annoyance. I immediately felt something I thought was not possible- I felt I had too much Facebook. Yes I still have access to my other apps and other Android functions but it is buried under the omnipresent Facebook experience. My phone lost its identity as a phone, rather it got reduced into a dumb brick of randomly generated images of people I slowly did not want to see anymore. Now Facebook has become not only my Social media hub but my portal to the entire world. To answer to a text message I have to get out of Facebook, to call someone I have to get out of Facebook, etc. Everything I used to do on my phone now has an added layer/step to the process- and Facebook became a hindrance. 

Locked out of Facebook

I wanted to vent my frustration about Facebook Home thru Facebook Home to create some sort of poetic irony but I could not figure it out. The main page of your Facebook home has a small bubble of your Profile image, if you tap and slide it up it goes to your Android Apps, if you slide it to the right  it opens your Facebook News Feed, and if you slide to the left it opens your Facebook Messages. Notifications apear in the middle of your screen but disappear right away once you tap anywhere on screen. The main focus of Facebook Home is clear- images. We have seen this focus with the revamped Timeline and News Feed and we are seeing it in Facebook Home. Big images are ok but the images seem to come at random and make no sense. They do not seem to be ranked based on number of likes, comments etc and not even by date posted. After a few minutes of playing around with the app, I felt like Facebook was being dumed down too much. Over the years, Facebook has evolved into a source of information for me, not only as a means to stay connected with friends. I have followed people who are considered experts in certain fields, organizations I care about etc. Facebook home does not give me the ability to stay connected and updated with Pages I have liked and Content being shared by my friends. With Facebook home, it is all about images on my screen, no matter if the images are ugly or are not relevant to me. Facebook Home not only made my smartphone dumber but made Facebook a lot more boring. 

Go Home and re-think this

I believe Facebook is going about their Mobile Challenge the wrong way. If they want a way to capture user behaviour in mobile then they must not hijack the entire mobile experience. If they want to see how users utilize different apps and services on their mobile phone then Facebook should act as a facilitator not as a layer or hindrance to it. I am all for what Facebook is trying to achieve here but sadly Facebook Home is just overkill. I do not think anyone out there is prepared to have Facebook front and center of their mobile life. Facebook's engineers have to figure out a way to turn Facebook Home into a mobile facilitator in the OS user interface. It should not be an ever present application that feels intrusive and forced. There is no wonder Facebook Home only has 2 stars in Google Play Store and I feel like it will only keep going down unless they seriously re-think their move into Mobile. 

My smartphone is still a phone to begin with, the fact that Facebook Home has made it harder for me to make a phone call is a big problem. Facebook needs to find a solution that does not create a problem. 

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