Out of curiosity I just opened up Facebook on my iPhone (mentioned in the article as a good example).
The tab bar has 5 items: News Feed, Requests, Messages, Notifications, and More. I'm in the News Feed 99% of the time. Requests and Notifications are pretty much redundant (since requests become notifications) and could easily be put somewhere else - maybe nav/title bar. Messages is completely useless - just shows me a button to install a different app that I don't care about (of course that's "better for metrics", but not better for users). And "More"... well that's a standard hamburger menu, and frankly the only thing that needs to be there in my opinion.
Maybe I'm an atypical user, but that experience seems to be the case in a lot of tabbed apps.
Yes, you are an atypical user. You also don't work for Facebook, so you don't have insight into all their priorities.
Facebook is a data-driven company. They've publicly discussed the process that resulted in the current tab bar design. In initial tests, they saw a drop in newsfeed views; they solved it by badging the newsfeed tab when new content arrives.
Requests get their own tab because adding friends to your network is probably a critical priority, and if you really want a user to do something, you give it a top-level navigation item.
No argument here about Facebook's priorities or being data-driven. I don't doubt any of what you're saying.
Still, as a user I don't care if data suggests that it's in Facebook's best interest to require a separate app for messages (and keeping around a tab that does absolutely nothing in the current app). I'm sure that is better for their business, at least in the short run. But from a user experience design perspective, I'll probably never see that as better design.
Littering your app with ads may be great for business, but I wouldn't consider ads in an app to be "great design" in general. I fully understand that design is meant to serve a purpose - usually the interests of a business, but I'd draw a line when it comes at the expense of frustrating your users (and no, I'm not atypical in my frustration with Facebook).
That philosophy is at the core of what's killing Facebook. My opinion, as always, so take it or leave it.
It's beyond me why they made the choice to move out Messages to a different app. Not only is it incredibly frustrating when I accidentally click the messages tab bar, and the entire FB app closes and another app opens, with no easy way to quickly go back (on iOS), but it also eliminated one of the very few reasons I ever needed to open FB app in the first place, to chat with people. Before, when I would open the FB app to chat with people, I would inevitably quickly look through the feed, and be exposed to one or two of their crappy ads. Now I can just open the FB Chat client and never bother with the main app. A win for me, perhaps. But a win for FB?
