The "new" Facebook -

Last week I was at South by Southwest Interactive and attended a talk by Dave Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook.
Most of the highlights of the presentation you can read here or here. But what struck me in the presentation what the fundamental way that Facebook sees its users and it's overall model of data. This is the first in a few posts of my thoughts on Facebook.

You and Your Connections: At a macro level, Facebook thinks you're connected to people in one of 4 different ways.
1. Friends
2. Family
3. Coworkers
4. Public Figures

As a step for providing some structure its commendable since they lifted the cap on the 5000 friends. However, humans aren't quite as binary as a 01 or a 11. We don't just split our friends into preset groups, it's fluid and changes over time.

For example, there was a talk at SXSWi on Social Engineering: Scam Your Way Into Anything or From Anybody (mp3). If I had that posted on Facebook, some of my friends would commend me for getting to know more about social engineer and others would deride me for learning how to be a scam artist.

This will increasing cause problems across the web with the proliferation of Facebook Connect. The three areas of focus for FB Connect that Morin highlighted were:
1. Identity - Real Name Real Identity
2. Friends - Add social context to filter & highlight content
3. Feed - Publish actions with 3rd parties to show your friends what you're doing

This leads to the fallacy that assumes that your social network provides context to who you are. But a computerized representation can never capture a person's entire identity. So what we're probably going to see in the next few months is Facebook doing semi-targeted link bombing everything across the web as FB Connect makes an assumption that the little information spoors you drop as you surf the web wants to be shown and streamed to everyone in your network. Traffic volumes and links will rise crazily as ad agencies like mine try to game this system and make sure their stuff get the more number of links across the web. Then eventually it will subside as people learn privacy controls and people realise that the value of social linking drops as the signal to noise ratio plummets.
Maybe some new upstart company will come along and unseat Facebook in the meantime. Who knows?

Facebook and Reach

@Silona tweeted about an Economist article that talks about the max number of social connections a human brain can handle is about 150 (the Dunbar number). They interviewed Cameron Marlow, a researcher with Facebook that gave data on the average number of connections a person has on Facebook is 120. However, the people in the high network group are about 500.

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 4 friends

The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 6 friends

The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 17 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 10 friends

The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 16 friends

So what does this mean for campaigns?

If we're looking at doing a branded Facebook application we'd probably see about 1000 users for a moderately successful app. So this lets us serve up 120,000 impressions on the status updates or about 840,000 impressions per week. [Note: As of last year when I checked, Facebook allows applications to send out 7 updates per week].
This level of engagement is pretty low as status update, the number of users that are active in that range is about 5.8% so you're probably getting a number closer to 50,000 real eyeballs on your brand.
So next time you do a media spend, take a look at how much it costs for getting your impressions on to Facebook and maybe the cost will justify doing an application instead.

Skittles: Social Web and the Navigation Takeover

A coworker of mine pointed me to a new campaign site for Skittles. It's a homepage takeover where their home page is replaced by a Twitter search and a navigator that takes you to the Skittles Facebook page and the Skittles YouTube page.

My own quick summary of what I've seen out on the web in comments are:

• Marketers that are asking questions to see if their readers have any opinions
• Social media people who are mostly saying that Skittles "gets it" by going social
• Advertising pundits that are saying how Skittles is ripping off the agency Modernista

From a usability point of view, I'd have to say I hate it. The usefulness of this explorer far degrades the sites that they're pointing to. I get a distracted from my goal of finding out more about skittles because my UI is blocked by their own navigator.

For brand and ad perspective. I think this campaign hits at the perfect time. Twitter usage is quite high and to do a splashy homepage takeover is drawing hundreds of thousands of eye-balls. As the first major brand to do this, they're probably the only ones now since the newness will have worn off. Executionally, it's so so. The creative aspects around this site and the navigator are not very exciting and future agencies will have to wrap this content around better creative to interest and engage their users.

The most interesting thing that I saw is that external groups are already piggy-backing off of this twitter effort to promote their own groups. I saw a tweet about saving Tibet that had the word Skittles to bring it into the tweet search results page. Also another by Jessica Stanell that promoted her own blog.

One of the big risks of opening up your brand to the web is the lack of reputation systems. If I was Wrigley's, I could have a bunch of anonymous users log on and start trashing Skittles on twitter and that would flood the site temporarily. It probably would only need to go on for about 5 minutes in order to get picked up by blogs or the press and bring the lawyers of the Mars Candy corporation to lock the site down. A reputation system could help (not bulletproof) the PR of Skittles against baseless attacks.

Although at the end of the day, being social on the web means you've got to have thick skin and given enough time, everyone will have it and the eyes to ignore all the crazies.

Points of Touch: User Experience in Spore

I came across a post on Boxes and Arrows about a Bolt|Peters user research project on the video game Spore. It happens that one of the sister agencies that I work with also had a side project alongside called Spore Stories.

So that got me thinking to more of an end to end experience of a video game. Total User Experience encompasses much more than just the game itself, in the marketing realm, you have to generate interest and connect to your audience even before the game itself is launched.

As a full service agency typically our process to engage in both media drivers as well as creative experiences to approach potential customers and create a continuous relationship with them in the months leading up to a game's launch.

1. Develop the integrated strategy with the client
- Market research and user research showing where prospective customers will engage with gaming related resources and types of behaviours they have online
- Create a content calendar that mixes in media buys and video content as it will be released up to launch

2. Excite the early adopters
- Video game teasers and trailers tend to have standard release schedules and this content gets presented to video game sites where games in-the-know will go for the latest on a new game
- Enable CRM activities to catch potential customers that want to give you their email address
- A website with social media functions can start the formation of a community as they discuss and guess at the story of the game
- Alternatively other social networks such as facebook or myspace can be used as a social platform instead of building your own

3. Push people into the site
- As the game nears launch and if the demand warrants, you can get some to purchase the game ahead of time
- Media buys with banner ads on targeted sites can have a huge impact on web traffic, if you're really well targeted, you can see a 2-5% clickthrough rate
- Catchy viral sites may get some interests pushing to games to like My Black Valentine. Which pushes to the EA title, Black.

4. Stay with customers through their gaming experience
- Actively manage your community and look for ways to solve pain points of your gamers
- Your most vocal customers will be the gaming review sites, make it known if there are patches or updates that improve the game

Keeping on top of all the ways gamers interact outside the game certainly helps put a nice touch on the game and more importantly helps push the bottom line and set you up for a sequel!

Clip: Search Spending Off 8 Percent In Q4

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Arthur Law <arthur.law@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:14:00 +0000
Subject: Report: Search Spending Off 8 Percent In Q4
To: alaw_viigo <arthur.law@gmail.com>

While search engine marketing has been somewhat more durable during
the recession (to date) than other media, that may not save SEM from
negative growth. The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the latest
Efficient Frontier search marketing report, set to be released
tomorrow. According to the Journal, the report will state that SEM
declined 8 [...]

....

http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/516646581/report-search-spending-off-8-percent-in-q4-16211

--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com

--

"Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le
coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery, Le Petit Prince

--
Sent from my mobile device

"Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le
coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery, Le Petit Prince

Start of the New Year Potluck

Here's the food I'm making for the Pot Luck, just drop down if you can make it and what you're bringing below in the comments!

See you all tomorrow (Saturday)!
6pm for drinks
7pm for dinner

Appetizer:
- Be the first!

Salads:
- Pinenut & Blackberry

Entree:
- Black Bean sauce chicken breast
- Black-eyed peas and spinach
- Whole duck

Starch:
- Coconut sticky rice

Dessert:
- Raspberry Lembic & Ice Cream
- Ginger Cake
- Pie

Drinks:
- Red Stripe

Design by Google (a la Chrome)

Disappointed is what I would say in a word. In learning about Google's design process for their Chrome browser, I was certainly less than impressed at finding out about a fully agile development for software. Google happens to be in a lucky enough environment to have really smart teams and large enough where you can do a big software project that way. However, after having worked in agile environments, I find it causes more headache than help.

Things I learned at this BayChi talk:
1. Google Chrome renders HTML & CSS like Safari
2. There is no revolutionary content model for Chrome. It's an evolution as a faster browser
3. Rapid usability studies really helps in an agile environment if you can spare the resources

Here are my raw notes on the Google Chrome design process:
Designing Google Chrome
- Glenn Murphy

Functionality - Tab Isolation
- Core function, if one tab crashes, the other tabs keep running

Functionality - Omnibox
- Core function, combined Search and location bar

Why?
1. Speed & Reliability
- control their own Google application
- needed a better platform for these applications
- current browsers weren't fast enough so web apps would be 2nd class citizens

2. Better Framework
- Old OS -> Application -> Content
- Current OS -> Browser Application -> Web Application -> Content

Top features used by users in their browsers:
(researched in a one week period)
- Back 85%
- Reload 50%
- Open Bookmark 33%

UX Researcher - Rick Boardman
Cognitive Walkthroughs
Lab based studies
Longitudinal studies

Design Process
- no wireframes
- went to multiple iterations of mock-ups
- designed from final design
- all tabs belonged on the top because information flowed down from them [Arthur: it seems like they didn't really explore other options]
- This overall design was like a tabbed windows explorer. The frame is just glue to stick tabs together
- Thought: What if one of those tabs was iTunes? It should work the same
- Played with 60 types of tab variations and experimented with exact degrees. [Arthur: this was a trial and error and based off of their own judgement]
- Colour of tabs was chosen as something that was neutral but visible separation.

UX - Frame (Graphic designing)
- Frame: Experimented with multi-level tabs, single level would get crowded. Settled on half way between one and two level tabs. [Arthur: Did they test this?]
- Frame: The colour of the frame couldn't use the windows style b/c it would look strange. In research, they found frames in Windows are blue. For something to feel intuitively grabbable, it would have to be blue. Blue also blends into default windows backgrounds (as it should, so you can ignore it)
- Frame: Windows Vista you can ignore that blue b/c they have their own native version.
- Frame Testing: Using a small title bar, people were not able to find out how to drag the frame in user testing. Users aimed for the blue.

UX - Omnibox
- Testing found that users often type URLs into the search bar.
- So they wanted to combine it.
- Hardest to figure out was a single word search.
- One solution was a type-ahead drop down.
- In user studies they found that people didn't follow drop downs. Users look down at their keyboards to type.
- Solution: Search (and try to navigate in the background)
- It takes a while to figure out if that single word URL exists so the check happens in the background.
- Puts a message asking the user if they want to visit the URL www.pie.com
- Autocomplete helps people get to sites that they visit again. Found that users visit 10-15 sites per day.
- The engineers doing the functionality for omnibox was done with rapid iteration. [Arthur: This may be useful for really smart teams but in most cases, you can't iterate that fast]
- Some initial mockups of the type-ahead show more information. e.g. flight detail, snippets of sites, suggested words, history of your search
- They didn't want this list flickering around and typing around. They wanted the user to just finish typing in their query
- Would rather put this on a page so users could see this content and then use the back button

What's next?
- Extensions
- Wants to stop people from adding toolbars so it doesn't look crazy.
- If a user wants to add a toolbar we should let them. But the next exercise is to figure out how to allow the user to not create a mess
- Openness: How do you design in the open?
- Openness: How do we allow users to give feedback to Google yet not put it out in the open web?

Questions
1. Where are the PMs?
- They're scattered throughout
2. How do you QA if no one reads your design docs?
- The QA always watches the code and they design tests as the code gets done
- If an engineer writes code, they let people know it's there and QA catches up
3. Have you tried different graphics on the tabs?
- Yes, we have a large graphics design team
- When they spoke to "people" the angled tabs resonated better.
- Internal to the team, people were into angled tabs, people used to work at NeXT and they were comfortable with angled tabs.
- Chrome was in development at the same time it was designed. The height of the frame above the tabs, they played non-stop for about a year. Kept changing between 15-20 pixels. They would get feedback from people instantly, emails & IMs.
4. If content is new, how do things change with open source. Will it be grassroots change?
- I don't know. There's another team that is in charge of this
5. The Google toolbar is missing from here
- These are the things that belong as extensions
6. How is Blue a grabbable colour?
- We winged it.
- It's what felt natural
- We didn't run user studies
7. You mentioned dropping iTunes into a tab. Is this something you'd keep addressing?
- With the exception of powerpoint, everything i use is online apps
- sometimes I wish I could have tab management
- we're not planning on addressing, but we things tabs are a better way of managing content
8. Rendering
- Go faster on certain benchmarks
- On reliability we track how we crash
- Speed, we think we've met it
9. Render on multiple browsers
- didn't want to add an additional engine
- benchmark against safari
- there will be some pain in the start but we should be compliant with safari and anytime it's not please log a bug against chrome
10. You've put alot of emphasis on tabs. Did you think about the discoverability of tabs?
- Other browsers do an omnibox but don't surface it as much.
- Tab usage is 78% adoption in Chrome
- In firefox, they show 2 tabs on startup
- Some people don't use multiple tabs. People who are curious can find it.
11. Other complicated design issues?
- Users never notice anything you do. You tell them to notice the lock and they never do
- Even if you throw up a screen that says the page you are about to visit isn't the one you think, users will still ignore it.
- Users respond to the full-screen popup
- We're trying to figure out how to keep them safe without annoying people.
- Sometimes there are sites that have malware but I still want to visit them
- We tried to hide the Omnibox and it turns out you do. One of those reasons is for security. Our Google security team jumps on our backs everytime we send out mockups
12. Can you not ask us everytime you restart that you want to restore the tabs? How often were you doing testing?
- Initially we had a mandate to design a browser without any dialogs
- Aza Rafkin says that they're getting rid of it in Firefox 3.1
- Started user testing 1/2 way through the product.
- Testing intensified at the end.
- Cognitive walkthroughs happened anytime there was a question they couldn't answer
- Lab based studies were done at every implementation when they needed questions.
- These weren't new to many of us
- They were useful in settling arguments and they tracked user comments
- The comments they got internally look like comments they get out in the wild.