Cory Watilo

Update: After some retweets about this issue, my domain is finally unblocked. (More details at the end of this post.)

Facebook censorship has effectively barred my business from their platform and is materially impacting the livelihood of my customers.

For the past decade, I’ve run an online portfolio business on the side called FolioHD. (You get a subdomain on the platform to host your portfolio, like mine at watilo.foliohd.com.) The entire foliohd.com domain has been banned from Facebook and Instagram because someone shared something that Facebook didn't like.

Unfortunately I have no insight into the offending content, and the offending content can be anything from a nipple to now apparently even a MAGA hat.

Now I am personally blocked on Instagram from liking photos or sending DMs. I can’t sign into my company Instagram account. And Facebook has reached into my Page’s support inbox, removed private message between myself and customers, and has blocked my website's integrations to import photos from Facebook's and Instagram's APIs.

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App designers are always trying to stay on-trend. The problem is that sometimes these trends tend to take design backwards from a usability perspective.

The last horrible design trend (2013)

A few years back when Apple decided to change iOS icons from filled in to outlined (in iOS 7), many believed this to be a step in the wrong direction, as outlined icons increase cognitive load.

The image and quote below are from Aubrey Johnson's analysis of the change:

Take a look at the example above. The red lines indicate areas where cognitive load is occurring. Your brain traces the shapes on the first row an average of twice as much. Your eye scans the outside shape and then scans the inner line to determine if there is value in the “hollow” section.

Forcing users to spend more time to decipher an icon is never a good thing, and unfortunately, many designers have followed this trend "because Apple did it", which is a horrible justification.

The latest horrible design trend

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The vast majority of the hip, cool Silicon Valley-based startups have products that work decently well.

The one outlier in this category is Postmates. I have no idea what they're doing over there, but every time I try to use it - between errors, poor UX decisions and outright bugs - the whole experience is a disaster. And this is from a company that has raised over $326 million!

So in an effort to improve the internet and not just complain, here's a free UX review for Postmates:

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