Is it possible that Facebook Home has fallen flat on Android because it was designed by iPhone users? That’s certainly possible. But more likely, it seems to me, is that Facebook Home is just a bad idea. As I said last week, it’s a well-designed implementation of an idea no one wants.
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One of the themes that came up a lot was the idea of the growth team finding a leading indicator of a user who would turn into an engaged user later on. The growth team would then focus on optimizing for that metric. […]
Characteristics of leading indicator metrics
The various leading indicators fit into three categories:
• Network density: friend or following connections made in a time frame
• Content added: files added to a Dropbox folder
• Visit frequency: D1 retention[…]
Chamath Palihapitiya, who used to run Facebook’s growth team, spoke about how his growth team discovered the “7 friends in 10 days” leading indicator. He said that they looked at cohorts of users that became engaged, and cohorts of users that did not become engaged, and the pattern that emerged was that the engaged cohorts had hit at least 7 friends within 10 days of signing up.
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Facebook’s iPhone and Android apps were hybrids: They packaged the nascent mobile-web language inside Apple- and Android-specific programming. The problem was that apps built explicitly for iOS and Android were much handsomer and cooler than Facebook’s hybrids. […]
Ondrejka and some colleagues also added discipline to the production cycle for mobile products. On the web making updates and rolling back mistakes is easy and fast, and as a result engineers were encouraged to take chances and move quickly. Mobile platforms work very differently. For one, Apple and Google, as operating system owners, vet changes to apps, which can take time. Consumers also need to remember to update their apps, and that can be an infrequent occurrence. If a developer makes a mistake, it takes a lot longer to fix. Rather than a few minutes, a Facebook user may live with that error for a few weeks.
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You don’t design something like Facebook Home using Photoshop. […]
It’s no secret that many of us on the Facebook Design team are avid users of QuartzComposer, a visual prototyping tool that lets you create hi-fidelity demos that look and feel like exactly what you want the end product to be. […] Not only does QC make working with engineers much easier, it’s also incredibly effective at telling the story of a design.
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Facebook Home … was a project with a strong vision put forth by Mark to “make the content that people want to see—new messages and notifications and updates about the people around you—as accessible as possible.” Eventually, this came to mean “a news feed-like experience on the lock screen” and “the lock screen and the home screen are one and the same.”
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There were periods when the vision seemed to demand too much, seemed to place too many constraints on the design.
But then again, that’s also the sign of a powerful vision. -
The tax that comes with introducing any new feature into your product is high […] once your new feature is out there, it’s out there. […] the fact of its existence will inevitably create more work for you. You will get user requests and bugs about it. You will spend time thinking idly about ways to make it better. It will likely pop up in the context of your next redesign or code rearchitecture. […]
Here are two ideas for thinking about how to add new features to your product:
1. Define a green light criterion, and test a small launch against it.
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At Facebook, this is pretty standard practice. We test many different interesting ideas that come out of hackathons or team brainstorms […]2. Define a sunset criterion.
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At Facebook, this is the approach we took with the virtual gifts feature launched back in 2007. Three years later, the business of virtual gifts had not taken off in the way we had hoped, and in order to better focus on other things, the virtual gift shop was closed and the team moved onto other projects. -
Marco helped the Home team understand the expectations people might have for the product and identify potential interaction issues. He collected and analyzed feedback through interviews, diary studies, surveys and discussion groups. […]
Anything that changes the deep relationship people have with their device is really challenging to design for. You can’t predict what people will expect and how they’ll react.” […]
“We acted quickly and used quite a few different research methods and approaches to mitigate not only the fact that the phone is so personal, but also that we wanted to cover different contexts and situations of use. Doing this also allowed us to gather data and feedback at different paces, and to have a solid sense of patterns of behavior from an early stage.”
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250 million monthly active users play games, amounting to one-fifth of all the people who visit Facebook each day
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… “Our end goal was to create a great user experience for the people that use Facebook.”
This goal was reinforced by a television screen at one of end of the room that provided a live feed of user testing. “Every day or two we got to watch people in the labs using the product,” Morris says. “It always blew my mind that you could be sitting there, at a computer, working on a design for a product and turn your head and be able to watch people really using the product, or at least prototypes of it. It was really exciting, because you always learn more from people using your designs than you ever can by just reading books or trying to understand philosophies behind what you’re doing.”
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the first major redesign of its popular News Feed … was the culmination of one long year of work by 70 engineers and designers.
[…]The social network surveyed hundreds of thousands of users, and many responded with the same request.
Jane Justice Leibrock and her team of researchers also conducted dozens of face to face interviews on the Facebook campus to get feedback from users.
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The heart of the research took place in a lab at the Facebook offices here. Hidden behind one-way glass, team members watched users playing with different versions of a search engine and filled notebooks with observations. On occasion, the engineers tore out their hair.
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We’ve never had a social graph last >10 years at scale. Facebook looks like the best chance to do this but we already see questions about their brand attractiveness to teens. Each new group of kids come of age wanting a space they can discover together and call their own.
— Trying to be the one true social graph is like trying to hold water in your fist
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Building on a wealth of formative research done on Graph Search over the last year, Carter and Ruth started testing the product with real users in Facebook’s onsite research lab.
“So much comes up when we have people use the product in front of us,” says Ruth. “Maybe we find out little things like it’s difficult for them to understand that this is a search field, or that we’re reusing an icon and it’s confusing. We also get a much better sense of the higher level stuff, like how quickly people can learn the language of Graph Search and if they really grasp the power of the tool.”
Even more importantly, the team gets a first-hand look at the sorts of things people might look up—like the tester who used her time to search for photos of an ex-boyfriend with various strippers. “When you see that kind of thing, you realize the emotions that are wrapped up in a product, and how people are going to be using it,” says Carter.
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Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have done an excellent job at making news that is responsive … What makes social media networks so efficient at publishing news?
1. Whoever publishes news in social media channels does so not only expecting a response, he also acknowledges a certain personal responsiveness as a publisher. Being ready to discuss what you say is the media appropriate mindset for whoever publishes in a two way medium.
2. Social media users do not only find news through their network, they also comment, save, and redistribute the information they read. In essence, 99% of all news sites still follow the authoritarian I-say-you-hear model.
— Oliver Reichenstein: “News design is not just how news looks, it is how news works”
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When I first joined Facebook, one of the engineering managers jokingly said: “in the end, we’re all just pawns in a game of designers.” After more experience, I found this to be somewhat true although it’s ultimately a good thing.
— Russ Heddleston’s answer to: Facebook Inc. (company): What does a Product Manager at Facebook do?
