Feeds are the most common way to design a recommender system (that’s a fancy term for software that uses machine learning to predict what users are most interested in seeing.) Feeds either link to more content, or allow the user to consume content without leaving the interface. Feed length varies from product to product, but they are almost always designed to facilitate scrolling, sometimes to infinity!

Feeds were designed to solve a noble and important problem: information overload. Ninety percent of the information in the world today was created in the last two years alone. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of new content get added to the noise. How is anyone supposed to find what they need without drowning in all that!?

Enter machine learning. It promises to sort through all that information so you don’t have to. For Google or other search engine products, that means finding the content that most likely relates to your search query. For Instagram and Facebook, it means finding posts from people you care most about. For Spotify, it’s music. For Netflix, it’s movies. For Goodreads, it’s books. For Steam, it’s video games.

Machine learning is almost ubiquitous in digital products these days. Anytime a user has to sort through a lot of information, machine learning is usually there, working quietly in the background. And anytime machine learning is working quietly in the background, it almost always shows up as a feed in the front-end design.

Anytime machine learning is working quietly in the background, it almost always shows up as a feed in the front-end design.

At Shopify, I work on one of our machine learning products called Shopify Home. And, you guessed it, it’s a feed:

Shopify Home is a feed of cards with insights and tips for how to grow your business.

But the longer I’ve spent working on Shopify Home, the more I’ve realized that feeds create user experience problems too. Machine learning is evolving and becoming more powerful everyday, but the way we design machine learning interfaces is stuck in 2006 — the year Facebook first launched News Feed.

Why feeds are bad design patterns

Technology should speed up or eliminate mundane, tedious, or repetitive tasks so we have more time for things that really matter. At Shopify, this means helping our users manage their business more efficiently, so they can focus on the kind of work that makes entrepreneurship feel great — like inventing new products or building meaningful relationships with their customers.

But I’m increasingly skeptical that feeds actually save anyone time. Have you ever logged in to Facebook to look up the address of the party you’re going to tonight, only to lose 20 minutes scrolling through the News Feed before you realize what you’re doing?

Even though the address of the party is arguably the most important thing for Facebook to show you, it never shows up at the top of your News Feed! As Tristan Harris (a former product philosopher at Google) explains, this happens because, “Facebook wants to convert every reason you have for using Facebook into their reason, which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things.”

This means that feeds often pull users into content consumption and away from the task they’re trying to accomplish. That’s fine if they’re on the bus to work or if they’re just chilling on the couch, but if your product exists to help users get shit done, then feeds can actually get in the way of helping them to complete their tasks.