How Facebook Instant Articles Improves Your UX

Last year, Facebook opened Instant Articles to all publishers and now it’s getting a third of all link clicks on Facebook. 

One-third of all link clicks on Facebook is a pretty big share considering Instant Articles has been publicly available for less than 24 months.

One would ask, what is driving this growth?

How long before it’s getting 60% or even 90%?

If you’ve ever clicked and read an Instant Article, the answer would be pretty obvious.

Facebook Instant Articles is like Google AMP‘s speed coupled with Medium‘s aesthetic.

Instant Articles takes the click through, reading, and overall user experience to a whole new level.

Here’s How:

1. Faster Loading

Instant Articles load up to 10x faster than mobile optimized sites. Facebook achieves this by eliminating all elements that aren’t important for the reading itself like third-party plugins.

As a result, instant articles load almost instantaneously.

This means your readers no longer have to wait for a few seconds for a page to load.

2. Improved Reading Experience

The minimalistic approach applied by Facebook to design of the Instant Articles template makes reading a pleasure.

The mainly black and white template doesn’t provide any option to change font size, color or font-family.

This ensures uniformity across all articles which greatly improves readability.

Also, there are no banners, pop ups or sign up forms as common on most websites. This leads to a distraction-free reading.

3. Less Abandonment

More often than not, whilst browsing our social feeds, we tend to abandon pages if they take a few seconds more than usual to load. This leads to a high abandonment rate for websites.

With Instant Articles, because pages load almost instantly, readers are less likely to abandon your page once they click through.

In fact, Facebook estimates Instant Articles reduces abandonment rate by as much as 70%.

4. Easier Sharing

According to uxdesign.cc, Instant Articles are 30% more likely to get shared than mobile web articles.

This is because Facebook has made it very easy to share Instant Articles, prioritizing Facebook’s own platform of course.

The sharing button stays on the top right of the article the whole time and also under all images within the article.

Would you be implementing Instant Articles for your blog?