Hey Glenn Veugen I definitely don’t have FB’s data. I think we all wish we had so we can learn.
In regards to the location of the bottom middle button I have two main things I rely on.
- Ergonomically — It’s proven to be the best place. Based on the grip the device it’s the most comfortable area.
- Best practices — This is why home buttons are there on the iPhone / Android home button / Camera apps / almost every creation based app in the world (Snapchat, Dropbox, Evernote). This is based on the fact that when you want to create you’d probably want to do it as fast as possible while keeping the canvas clean.
This doesn’t include apps the are not used for creation. So for example in Gmail you’d be reading more than you’d be writing new emails. And once you are inside an email Reply would be the whole center area at the button (again creation)
To the rest of the points: it is known statistically that people have an average of 300 FB friends. 50% of which are generated on the first week from creating a new profile. Based on the average of 20 minute per day of Facebook usage it means barely anyone is adding friends / receiving friend requests every day. The most active tabs are Notifications and Feed (home). Again I don’t know how many people use the Market tab, I do know what’s the supply of new posts I see, and how much I’ve heard from friends. It doesn’t look like anyone is using it (at least in the UK).
In some apps Hierarchy is definitely LTR — Facebook Messages (even on version 2.0)/ Instagram. But it’s no like this in WhatsApp and Facebook.
In regards to consistency. I do expect Facebook to coordinate their brand in the same way like Google / Apple do. I understand we are not there yet.
I’m not trying to represent users. I am trying to professionally express my opinion. When I do that I am moving between my opinions which are based on my understanding and the length of exposure I have to relevant statistics. I do the math with the provided data and I might be wrong :)
