That’s what Julie Zhou the coordinator of product design at Facebook hopes you will say one day if the ads were to disappear from your news feed. That may be her end goal, but I don’t think she’s there just yet. The premise according to Zhou is that making money does not have to be at odds with a great experience, and I personally could not agree more! We often find ourselves trying to balance the user experience with conversion tools, but the reality is that IF we are properly placing conversion tools on sites then they SHOULD add to the end user’s experience.
As you scrolled past the various Turkey Trot selfies and declarations of gratefulness on Facebook this week, did you notice the ads? If so, what did you think of them?
Facebook envisions a day in which you’d miss them if they were gone.
That’s the grand plan that Julie Zhou, codirector of product design, recently outlined atInVision’s product design conference in San Francisco.
“We want to one day show you a News Feed that doesn’t have ads and show you one that doeshave ads and have everyone say, ‘The News Feed with ads was better,'” Zhou says.
She said that Facebook has posters hanging around its headquarters that say “Ads as good as organic.” The company wants to be able to understand your interests so well that it can tailor its ads so that they genuinely help you out on a regular basis.
“I don’t think making money is at odds with a great experience,” Zhou said. “We’re all consumers. We buy things. We want to know about things like deals. We’ve all seen #advertising that has been inspiring and entertaining and useful. And that should be the bar for how we build a great ads product.”
