Facebook Messenger on Android – The bad just got worse
Youngsters love complex toolbox designs because they have all the time in the world to explore and toy around. If they figure out how an app, like the notoriously badly designed Snapchat works, it’s their little secret that no one else gets. Indeed. No one else gets it. Mark Zuckerberg, when asked, failed to explain why the messenger is such a mess. Still Facebook is a dominant force, just like Apple devices, driving User Experience in a new era of toolboxes and irrational interaction.
When December 2012 Facebook released the stand-alone Messenger for Android it was a shockingly bad experience: a stand alone application making users switch between the core Facebook application and their messages, with a different graphic look and feel, those annoying talking heads, the small sounds for every single action, the numerous available options for a single message and the all but intuitive iconography.
The only conventional part of messenger was the call initiation part, which was a direct copy of the Yes /No style of Skype. Now you can say goodbye to that and hello to this
More options, smaller buttons, positioning out of reach, proximity that makes everything look detached. There is no reason or why. Someone just felt like experimenting. Well, the bad just got worse…
