BrokenSnowGlobe will periodically feature product bugs that come up within the scope of using in our day-to-day lives
Description: The user rapidly clicks the back button in the Facebook iPhone app ends up launching the camera
Severity: 4 (medium-low) (1 to 5 scale)
Priority: 1 (high) (1 to 5 scale)
“Fuck. I just launched the camera.”
“Fuck. I just launched the camera.”
“Fuck. I just launched the camera.”
“Fuck. I just launched the camera.”
“Fuck. I just launched the camera.”
I seem to say that that a lot these days.
My mom expressed the same thing to me recently. I reassured her that she did nothing wrong.
The question is why did Facebook Product Management decide to put the camera button in the same place as the back button?
I assume they wanted to feature some of their new filters for photos so they wanted to put it in a prominent location. With limited real estate, the top left corner is very visible and gets the feature the prominence they likely want for their younger audience. They are competing with SnapChat and any other number of apps that are being used by younger generations so certainly they are always thinking about how to stay relevant. They’ve mostly done a good job with that.
The thing is with this issue, it is not a small mistake to recover from. It makes me hate Facebook more and more every time it happens. And it happens a lot. Launching the camera is a hardware intensive operation on your phone. It takes a few seconds to fully load and then back out and that is as someone who is extremely comfortable with software and swiping.
It happens while reading news stories mostly, which is a large use case for users these days. But it also happens elsewhere in the app. Anytime you are backing out from particular feature, it is far too easy to end up in the camera.
It sucks for me and I’d consider myself an expert with using the app. For my mom who is not that comfortable with software in general, it is difficult for her to figure out how to exit the camera and get back to what she was doing. It makes her think she did something wrong.
She didn’t.
Facebook did.
It sucks for people who are experts with their phones. It sucks for people who are not experts. And they really should fucking fix it.
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