The economy has reached those of us working on the Web. I think we were insulated for a while, since building software is so important for business these days, even when your business isn’t doing that well. Many people even see building a great interface to their product as a way out of the downturn…if they can provide a fantastic user experience then they can increase market share during the recession and be stronger coming out of it.

So over the past few days I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I started counting all of the conversations I had about how to deal with these tough times. There were a lot! Even well-known web designers with large audiences are feeling a slowdown…and so everyone must be.

In response to this, I’ve changed the topic of the talk I’m giving tonight at Refresh Boston. I was originally going to talk about Designing for Virality, but instead I’m going to talk about ways to cope with the recession if you’re a practicing web designer or someone in a related field. I think this is a very important topic, and while I won’t have all the answers I’m hoping that we can start a discussion in which we can all share what’s been working and what hasn’t so that those who are truly passionate about web design won’t have to worry as much going forward.

Here is my talk description:

Designing in a Recession: How to stand out when many are falling down.

Times are not easy for web designers. Great projects are rare, clients are slower with payments, and project sizes are shrinking. Yes, indeed, the down economy has reached the Web and the professionals who work there.

In this talk Joshua Porter will share tips & hints on how can you stand out when most are falling down. He will talk about his own experiences getting bokardo.com off the ground as well as stories about those who have both had great success and suffered more than they should. You’ll learn tips like how to network even if you’re shy and how to design a solid portfolio. You’ll come away with real-world tactics to get more design work in these trying times.

Here is the upcoming page for tonight’s event. Hope to see you there!

Thankfully, the conference coverage was excellent. Jeremy Keith wrote up a great set of notes (including notes for my talk). Two attendees created tweet tracker called A Feed Apart and another person created a great visualization called A Seat Apart. Yes, it was that kind of conference.

So here are my slides. I’ll probably give a similar talk going forward, so if you have any feedback I would love to hear.

Also, I have had several requests for a reading list…here it is.

(You can also grab the slide deck over at slideshare)

Joshua Porter at Webstock 09 from Webstock on Vimeo.

In case the video streaming is choppy, you can download the video from the Webstock web site in several formats.

Andrew Chen, who writes the excellent blog Futuristic Play, has a nice post explaining exit points, those point in which people decide to leave your product/service/app: 25 Reasons People Stop Using your Product

Exit points really resonate with me because they are clearly part of the Usage Lifecycle, the lifecycle that users go through as they use your product or service. What makes the lifecycle useful is that it focuses us (the designers) on the major hurdles of use such as sign up, getting started, and ongoing engagement.

Going down another specificity level from hurdles are exit points. As Andrew explains:

“In the customer lifecycle perspective, you look at the product from the perspective of a user that has a series of experiences starting from newbie and going into an advanced role. In addition to looking at the success cases, looking at the failure cases is informative too – you want to analyze your product for potential exit points and relate them to both quantitative and qualitative measures.”

Here are some examples of exit points:

• “I don’t understand how this is valuable to me”
• “I don’t have any friends here”
• “I only use this site to manage contacts, not do anything productive”
• “This site is too distracting”
• “I keep getting messages from people I don’t know”
• “It’s not worth the effort”

Exit points don’t get enough attention. In my experience they’re remarkably stable across a population for a given service. In other words, there will be common exit points that your users have…there will be clear trends that you can design to prevent. The problem is that these exit points aren’t always visible, and here’s the key issue: exit points often don’t happen while someone is using your software. In fact, exit points can occur when someone is far away from your product.

While they’re relatively stable within a product, exit points are different for every product. And they are very specific, having to do with the context of use. Additionally, exit points are different depending on what stage of the lifecycle someone is in. If they are using an application for the first time, for example, they are going to have different exit points than when they’re a long-time user. Other things to note about exit points:

• These trouble spots aren’t necessarily interface design issues
• They can happen away from the service, merely in the mind of users
• They happen because of the behavior of others
• They are sometimes a decision based on lots of interactions, not a single one
• Sometimes they’re nothing more than passing fancy

Some exit points are vague and difficult to design for (”It’s not worth the effort”). You might need to get more information before knowing what to do design-wise. But others are easier to design for (”I don’t have any friends here”).

Do you know what your exit points are? Are you keeping track, watching trends, and designing to prevent them?

I remember the first time I realized how much even the smallest copy can matter in an interface. It was on an e-commerce project at UIE for which I had created a checkout form asking for billing information. I had coded up a system to notify me when an error occurred (even if people can overcome the error it was very helpful to know when one occurred). I kept getting notifications of billing address errors…it turns out that transactions were failing because the address people were entering didn’t match the one on their credit card.

So I ended up adding the copy “Be sure to enter the billing address associated with your credit card” at the top of the form. And just like that, the errors went away. It was clear the right copy meant I didn’t have to worry about that problem anymore, thus saving support time and increasing revenue on the improved conversion.

Ironically, the smallest bits of copy, microcopy, can have the biggest impact.

Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size…judge it on its effectiveness.

Here’s another example. On the purchase page of Mark Boulton’s wonderful book Designing for the Web, he’s written a bit of microcopy that is crucial for people considering purchase. The copy is “Transactions are handled through paypal but you don’t need a paypal account to buy this book“. This turns out to be a huge question of would-be purchasers (I’ve seen it in several projects). People see the Paypal logo and they assume that they need to have an account…and everyone knows how annoying it is to create an account simply to purchase a single item. Actually, for a long time you did need an account to purchase something with Paypal. Only more recently did they change that. In this example, Mark has written half a sentence that communicates this fact and eases the fears of would-be customers.

Update Reader David Yeiser points out another good example of microcopy on Tumblr. When users are about to sign up, they’re asked to choose a sub-domain name for their site. This seems like a big deal, as you’re defining the URL at which you’ll be found by others. In order to reduce the stress of making a big decision that could affect the future of your blog, Tumblr gently reminds you that “You can change this at any time”. Done. No more worries about choosing the wrong sub-domain name…just choose one and start posting.

Microcopy is extremely contextual…that’s why it’s so valuable. It answers a very specific question people have and speaks to their concerns right on the spot. And because its so contextual, microcopy isn’t always obvious. Sometimes you have to hunt to find the right words. (or create an error notification service like I did) How to discover these hurdles? Talk to people! Why aren’t they adopting your software? What concerns do they have? What are they worried about? Successful salesmen know the power of these small turns of phrase. They have an arsenal of them for every situation.

Here are some other examples:

• When signing up for a newsletter, say “this low-volume newsletter”
• When people add their emails, say “we hate spam as much as you do”
• When subscribing for something free, say “you can always unsubscribe at any time”
• When selling an paid-for web application, be sure to let people know if you have a free trial.
• When storing customer’s information, say “You can export your information at any time”
• If offering optional account creation, say “If you create an account, you’ll be able to track your package”

All of these microcopy examples have one thing in common: they help to alleviate concerns of would-be customers. They help to reduce commitment by speaking directly to the thoughts in people’s heads. That’s why this copy can be so short yet so powerful.

Don’t be deceived by the size of microcopy. It can make or break an interface.

But really, who doesn’t at least notice how many followers they have? And, if you were honest, wouldn’t you say that if you had to choose, you would probably want more rather than less followers?

Here’s a question: how would Twitter change for you if you didn’t know how many followers you have? What if the designers at Twitter removed the number from all screens/APIs and forced you to rely on replies or retweets to let you know what was going on? Would that be OK with you? How would it change your behavior?

Humans are hard-wired for attention. My newborn girl, for example, cries when she’s not getting attention. My 3 year old, who isn’t used to not having attention, is going through a major psychological shift in her life because she’s realizing that she isn’t the only child in the universe…she now has a sister who will be getting attention as well. Attention is a core human issue for all of us. As designers we need to keep this in mind.

I use follower numbers in several ways to judge the type of person who is on the other end. If I’m followed by someone who has very low following/follower numbers, then I know they’re probably new to Twitter. If someone has really high following/follower numbers, then I know they’re probably an auto-follower, which suggests they might not focus on quality conversation as much as attention. If someone has high follower numbers and low following numbers, then I know they have an audience for some reason (it might not be a good reason). Obviously, these numbers don’t tell you everything…but I use them to give me an idea. When metadata is available…humans will look at it.

We don’t just collect attention, of course. We collect lots of things. Most video games are built entirely around the premise of collecting things. The more you collect the higher your score. The more coins that Mario and Luigi collect, the better they do. It’s a causal relationship. We understand when playing these games that collection is the way to achieve success. For more on the psychology behind gaming and collecting, read The Psychology Behind Item Collecting And Achievement Hoarding.

Of course, games did not instill the collecting behavior in humans. Gaming merely exploits it. We haven’t become collectors because of technology. We use technology to help us collect things. We’ve been collecting objects forever…art, seashells, books, firewood, paper clips. A core human behavior is collecting things, real and virtual.

As designers we must remember that behavior comes first. Always. The quirky, the obscure, the vain, the annoying, the wonderful. We need to observe human behavior if we are to support it in design. If people collect things, how can we support that? If people are vain…how does that affect the design? Will it kill some interesting behavior…or will it help drive adoption of the service?

You’ll find that many successful social software products/services focus on the collection of social objects such as photos, bookmarks, friends, vampires. This is no accident…people collect things as a natural matter of course. Software that supports the behavior will naturally be more successful.

We also have the opposite case…when we have nothing. This is particularly relevant when talking about people new to a service…when you just join a social network, for example. So the scenario is this: you sign up, you land on a dashboard of some sort, and you have nothing. No friends, no posts, no pictures, no bookmarks, nothing of any kind. It’s not a good feeling…and its a great way to drive people away.

It’s like we’re saying: “Hey you, the one with the collecting behavior…yeah you’ve got nothing!…you better start collecting!”

So as designers we can actually satisfy the collecting behavior at the same time we’re helping people get started with software. Do what MySpace did and give everyone at least one friend to start with (when you join MySpace you are automatically friends with Tom) Or, you can provide a sample post to let people know what a post is and how it works. Or, if you’re building an activity stream why not seed it with a few items so that people know what that’s like? It’s kind of like giving people a place to sit when they move into a brand new home.

So, back to behavior. Some behaviors that drive us nuts are core to the human experience:

1. We want attention.
2. We collect things.
3. We want status.
4. We are vain.
5. We make judgments accordingly.

These behaviors aren’t going away anytime soon. So instead of decrying such behavior, we need to embrace it! We need to figure out how it fits within the context of what we’re building. Sometimes it won’t. But we can’t dismiss it. If we are really serious about designing great software then we have to at least give this type of behavior some thought, considering whether we should or whether we can damp it or amplify it.

And, from time to time, possibly even take advantage of it.

For some folks, however, getting and giving feedback is not part of their normal routine. (even though it should be) Therefore, instilling a sense of trust around the service is crucial, even for users who might already work together. So when someone gets a request email from a Rypple user asking for personal feedback, they aren’t always sure if the email is legit or if it’s some sort of SPAM.

In working through this design problem, the folks at Rypple have found that avatars are very helpful in gaining initial trust with a feedback request. After Rypple added avatars to emails, response rate improved between 15 and 20%. Just like that. The simple addition of a picture increases interest/trust a significant amount.

That’s some food for thought…there aren’t many ways to increase response rates that much that easily…this also adds another data point to the importance of avatars in social design.

Also, another recommendation: always include names next to avatars. In case avatars aren’t clear pictures of the person in question, the receiver might not have any idea of who it is. Use avatars, but don’t trust them to be instantly recognizable…

Here is the copy from the service description page:

Description of Service

Our interface evaluation is a fast, economical way to get concrete design recommendations for improving your web application. We start by talking with you about your business priorities and how design makes (or can make) your business successful. Then we conduct an in-depth evaluation your web application to make sure that your design is working effectively to do that. We evaluate your design on many criteria, including:

• Usability Heuristics
  Does your copy reflect the language of your users? Does the system provide appropriate error recovery?
• Interface Design Best Practices
  Are calls to action clear? Do interactions involving multiple screens flow smoothly?
• Social Design Best Practices
  Is the reputation system appropriate? Are you taking advantage of social proof?

Our evaluation doesn’t just point out problems. We’ll deliver a concrete, prioritized list of recommended changes that your design team can implement immediately. For each recommendation, we’ll provide rationale along with examples of existing designs to model after (or avoid).

Who is this service for?

This service is for folks who:

• Have complicated social interactions at the core of their web application.
• Have a business whose success is directly related to the effectiveness of their web application.
• Need to improve conversion numbers on crucial screen interactions.
• Need to ensure their web application doesn’t frustrate users and is easy to use.
• Aren’t sure how to make effective changes (and quickly, too).

Timeline & Pricing

You get the results of the interface evaluation fast: either a one week or two week turnaround. The start and end date are agreed upon beforehand, so you’ll know exactly when you can expect the results of the evaluation.

What You Get

You get actionable design recommendations that your team can implement immediately. The deliverable includes the following:

• Detailed list of issues
  We’ll illuminate the issues that are stifling the effectiveness of your current design.
• Prioritized list of changes
  We’ll deliver a concrete set of recommendations for change that your team can implement immediately. We’ll provide rationale behind these changes so that you know exactly why we’re making them.
• Examples of best practices
  We’ll point your team to design elements from other applications that exemplify best practices.

Deliverables

We’ll deliver these recommendations in a written report as well as in a follow-up phone call with your design team, ensuring that each recommendation is clearly understood and able to be acted upon.

Find out more

If you’re interested in getting your interface evaluated or if you want to know more about the service, simply fill out the contact form, drop an email to , or give me a call at 508-954-1896.

In one post Brad Feld describes his decision to switch back to a normal photo avatar after changing to a cartoon avatar for a while, deciding that real photos were better:

“…the power of the photo matters. I’m happier when I see Amy’s picture pop up on my phone. Or, when my partner Jason calls me, I remember our great dinner at Uchi in Austin a few months ago (his photo was taken in front of the sign late at night.) When I ponder the rise of Facebook and Twitter, and reflect on the early coolness of MyBlogLog, the power of the photo seems very real.”

I agree with Brad’s sentiment. I made a decision several years ago to use the same avatar everywhere, for everything. It’s a picture of me that looks mostly how I look, and seems to work well as a first introduction to my face. I have had many people come up to me and recognize me at conferences and events simply because they recognize me from this photo. It’s been very useful.

In another post Kevin Marks made the important point that avatars call the trust code in our brains:

“Trying to model these trust relationships in the computer is fraught with hubris and failure, but what we can do is associate information with people, and display the information form people we know, with their pictures (and names) next to it. Then, our brains can apply the subtle modelling of trust relationships that they have evolved to do so well.”

Trust is a crucial byproduct of avatars that we can leverage in design. In one of my current consulting projects we’re working on what you might call “time to first known avatar”. That is, we are trying to speed up the time it takes for someone new to the service to see a familiar face…the faster they see the face the faster they’ll get comfortable with the software. If the time it takes for them to see a familiar face is too long, then they might very well give up because it doesn’t feel as welcoming. But if we can instill a sense of presence of friends early on, we’ll have tilted the cards in our favor.

A sense of presence in an important principle of human behavior:

The mere presence of others dramatically changes our behavior.

While we can’t literally get people into the same room with software (yet), we can approximate the experience. Showing avatars of people gets us further along this spectrum, and we act differently as a result.

I want to be able to sink my mind around a couple of problems and work through them. For example, many professionals still don’t understand how LinkedIn can be valuable on a daily or weekly basis”

Another way you could phrase this is: “people don’t use LinkedIn everyday…we need to figure out how to change that”.

The fact is that LinkedIn, in its current incarnation, is not an everyday app. An everyday app is one that is used every day (or most days) by its users. This means that each and every day they do something with the app. Maybe they’re communicating with coworkers, or creating wireframes, or sharing what they ate for breakfast. Everyday apps in theory are as plentiful as bees in a blossoming apple tree. In practice, however, everyday apps are exceedingly rare.

(my friend Dave Lifson says that the folks at Amazon call returning to the site daily the “daily habit”)

So how many everyday apps are there? Well, it’s hard to tell, but probably not many. Check out the following slide from a study of teens and technology done by MTV Asia (hat tip: M. Arauz).

This study suggests that teens in the U.S. only visit 7 sites regularly, while the numbers in other countries aren’t much higher. That’s not many!

In general, most people think they’re building an everyday app, but they’re not. When the actual use patterns are discovered, most apps will be used every few days or less. Designers have to ask themselves a very hard question: “How often are people really going to use our web application?”. The answer is important…it will even help drive design decisions. Whether or not you have an everyday app affects the entire design of what you’re building, including the screens, notifications, and frequency of the service. For example, only everyday apps really need to use real-time technology to update streams. If you find out that you’re not building an everyday app, you probably don’t need to invest in making it real-time. But…you might invest in a notifications system that can alert users to when something very interesting happens.

You don’t have to be an everyday app to be successful. Netflix, for example, is not an everyday app. It’s an every-few-days app. Most people go back every few days to update their queue. There is really no need to go back more often. Another example is Freshbooks, which is not an everyday app for independents (it’s probably an everyday app for companies with a dedicated finance person). As an independent, you only use Freshbooks when you need to send an invoice or send estimates. But, Freshbooks did realize that if they added time tracking, then it became an everyday app…

Falsely believing that one has an everyday app is partially why advertising has failed to support so many entrepreneurs who envisioned financing their app that way. When people do the math and try to figure out how much engagement they’ll need to make a profit off the ads run on their site, they too often assume that they’re building an everyday app. They calculate the number of users times the number of days, when in fact they should be calculating a fraction of that. When it becomes clear that people aren’t using their app everyday, their advertising strategy falls to the ground…hard.

LinkedIn is not used every day by most of the people who use it. Many of the 38 million registered users use it infrequently. Personally, I only use it to respond to requests for connections or some other email notification I receive (sad but true). Other than pruning it as a weak-ties network, LinkedIn really isn’t that useful for me. A lot of folks I’ve talked to share this sentiment…it’s basically used as a souped-up contacts manager.

Now, there may be a subset of folks who use LinkedIn everyday, like people looking for a job or headhunters trying to find good candidates. But once people find a job they stop using it so much. They then become like the majority of professionals who have jobs (even in this economy) and don’t have time to actively look for new opportunities.

So contrast engagement on LinkedIn with the crazy engagement of Twitter and Facebook. Those sites are just waiting in the wings to start eating LinkedIn’s lunch. And they already might be. Most of the folks I talk with on Twitter are using it for professional purposes in one way or another…purposes which LinkedIn could in theory be well-positioned to help out on.

I’ve long wondered about this problem with LinkedIn. How can they increase engagement when they are often used (for better or worse) as a job hunting application? I think its an interesting problem because they certainly have enough users to play with…it’s just a matter of finding out what features can be valuable enough to get those folks coming more often.

Here are a couple thoughts:

• LinkedIn seems to weigh social value over personal value. They focus on connecting people more than providing value regardless of connection. I will say that their Answers feature is one good exception to this, but in general the messaging I get from LinkedIn is all about who is connected to whom. The emails in particular make me cringe…I don’t care who my contacts are connected to unless I know how that other person can benefit me. My Inbox and network updates are filled with connection information…as if I want to spend time managing this stuff.
• To be the world’s best professional app you need to make people better at their profession! This is straight out of Kathy Sierra’s School of Passionate Use. The best way to make people passionate about your business is to make them better at what they’re already passionate about. In other words, users will get passionate about LinkedIn if LinkedIn can help them do their work better. Now, LinkedIn knows what I do because I’ve told them. Why isn’t their goal to make me a better freelance consultant/interface designer? Give me some tools to do my business better, give me great content that helps me do my work better. There are places to find great content around this…it’s just a matter of curating it and publishing it.

Now, it’s possible that LinkedIn shouldn’t be an everyday app but I doubt that is the case. People are busy being professionals every day so why couldn’t an app that makes them be better professionals be a part of that? But at the present moment it still feels like LinkedIn is too focused on the connection part and not enough on the profession part.

Until LinkedIn can make us better at our profession, it won’t be an everyday app.

I remember it very clearly. Four of us were getting together for breakfast last year at SXSW. We were waiting for a cab, and we started sharing our Twitter stories.

Each of us had one…mine was that I had used Twitter to find a room to share. Someone else had used it to find a ride from Dallas to Austin. Yet someone else had used Twitter to plan this very breakfast. We had used Twitter in ways that it was never imagined to be used, getting real value from it.

It was at that point that I started to think about Twitter as something other than a fun little SMS tool. It had real use, and the ability to shoot messages out to a larger audience was extremely valuable. I also started to wonder if Twitter might be the game-changer that finally put some heat on Google…the favorite conjecture of recent times is “Who is the next Google killer?”.

Well, I think I figured out how Google will be “killed”. Or, more precisely, their dominance will be eroded by Twitter and Facebook.

First off, Google won’t be beaten in search. That’s clear. They have the best, most capable search team on the planet. It is where most of their R&D goes, it’s where the best and brightest search wizards go, it is their bread & butter. Brynn Evans wrote an insightful piece in which she explained why social search won’t topple Google anytime soon, explaining how social search doesn’t have nearly the depth of traditional search. I think Brynn is right: the depth of the web-wide search will never be replicated by social search.

But traditional search isn’t the game going forward. The game is attention. And the attention game is becoming dominated by two players: Twitter and Facebook. That two-pronged sword will eventually be Google’s undoing.

One side is that Twitter will erode real-time searches. As Brynn explains, Twitter can’t compete in the broad search game, but the fact that people are always on Twitter means that’s where they’ll start. Instead of starting at Google, they’ll start at Twitter. So the question is: how many searches are real-time searches? 10%? 20% 30%? It’s very hard to know, but whatever percent it is is a threat to Google. And in a game where Google focuses on the tiniest design advantage to eke out another .001%, even 10% of searches being real-time searches is enormous.

The other side is Facebook. Facebook won’t compete with Google in search either, but they’ll compete hard with them in advertising because they have enormous engagement. They have enormous attention. Facebook is slowly improving their advertising and eventually they’ll hit a threshold in which it will start to really work. At that point advertisers, not searchers, will turn their attention to Facebook first. Then Google will be in real trouble…because advertisers are the folks who pay Google money.

So Google will be feeling it from both sides…Twitter (and Facebook) will erode real-time search. Facebook (and Twitter) will erode advertisers.

Thus the real problem for Google is attention. People are increasingly giving their attention to Twitter, Facebook, and other social software, and thus (indirectly) giving it less to Google. Also notice that services have traditionally been happy to give Google their search traffic, but neither Twitter nor Facebook are doing that.

So while Google continues to increase its search market share, and folks look at that and say “Google is only getting better”, what they don’t necessarily see is how much the social sites are sucking up more attention. And eventually that attention will be so strong that Google will begin to suffer.

Advertisers will probably still use Google for a long time. But where will they go first? They’ll go first to where there is the most attention, and I think social networks will eventually claim that lead.

Also, Google is competing in the social space. They’ve rolled out tools that let site owners put avatar widgets on their sites, but so far I haven’t seen anything that Twitter or Facebook should be afraid of. Perhaps Kevin Marks can school me on what they’re doing there, but it hasn’t seemed compelling as of yet. It still feels like a bunch of engineers got together and hacked something up. If Google wants to really enter the social space, they either need to buy their way into it or really light a fire under their social software projects. This is the classic innovator’s dilemma…Google is so good at search that their first inclination is to keep their resources focused there.

So in conclusion I see Google’s dominance being eroded by the social networks. It won’t be a direct assault on search, just as Google didn’t directly assault Microsoft by trying to build a better OS or a better Office suite. It will be a direct assault on attention. You don’t kill the incumbent at their own game. You change the game, and then beat them at that one.

Further reading: Mark Cuban: How Twitter and Facebook now compete with Google

Update: The June 2009 Comcast numbers suggest there may be some weight to this idea…Craigslist and Facebook had larger share gains that the so-called “regular” search engines. Read more: Who’s Really Winning the Search Race?

In addition, Facebook redesigned their Pages feature. The pages feature is “a customizable presence for an organization, product, or public personality to join the conversation with Facebook users”. The pages feature will now become more like a personal profile, with status updates from a Page showing up in people’s news feeds. For example, if someone from the New York Times updates the status of the NYT Page, then a corresponding notification will show up on the news feed of all the Facebookers who have identified themselves as “fans” of the NYT Page. In this way entities with Pages (organizations, products, & public personalities) can essentially broadcast messages to their fan base.

This, of course, is how Twitter works. The difference is that on Twitter this is the default behavior for everyone, not just special entities. And on Twitter the term is “following”, not “fan”.

Relationship Symmetry

In general, there are two ways to model human relationships in software. An “asymmetric” model is how Twitter currently works. You can “follow” someone else without them following you back. It’s a one-way relationship that may or may not be mutual.

Facebook, on the other hand, has always used a “symmetric” model, where each time you add someone as a friend they have to add you as a friend as well. This is a two-way relationship, and it is required to have any relationship at all. So as a Facebook user there is always a 1-1 relationship among your friends. Everyone who you have claimed as a friend has also claimed you as a friend.

Andrew Chen recently described one advantage of the Twitter model. It allows 4 types of relationships, while Facebook only allows for two. The two relationships of Facebook are “friend and Not Friend”. The four relationships of Twitter are:

1. People who follow you, but you don’t follow back
2. People who don’t follow you, but you follow them
3. You both follow each other (Friends!)
4. Neither of you follow each other

Attention Inequality & the Power of Asymmetry

As Andrew points out, an asymmetric model allows for more types of relationships. I think the benefits go further than that. I think that the asymmetric model better mimics how real attention works…and how it has always worked. Any person using Twitter can have a larger number of followers than followees, effectively giving them more attention than they give. This attention inequality is the foundation of the Twitter service…

Note that this is a structural concern of the software, not just a philosophical leaning. The information architecture (IA) of the Twitter service was designed in such a way to do this from the start. The IA of Facebook does not allow this. In a similar way the structure of a building determines the activity of those who enter it, the structure of social networking software determines the activity of those who use it. And from these initial, structural decisions the future of the services are, at least partially, determined.

As I noted above, for some entities on Facebook the relationship is asymmetric. But for the vast majority of “regular” people using the service (i.e. You and Me), it is not. Facebook has designed a service that forces you to keep track of your friends, whether you want to or not.

Facebook’s stated goal is to model the social graph. By this they mean that they want to model the relationships between all people. If you have a friend in meat space, they want to model it in software. But it has become increasingly clear that Facebook is modeling personal relationships, not relationships based on attention. That’s the crucial difference between Facebook and Twitter at the moment.

I have approximately twenty times more Twitter followers than I do Facebook friends (Me on Twitter | Facebook). I doubt I could ever have as many friends on Facebook as followers on Twitter, because if I did I would have to pay attention to all of them, all of the time. On Twitter I don’t even try to follow everyone because I don’t have enough attention to do so (I tend to follow people I’ve met). Similarly, many of the people I follow don’t follow me back. Why would they?

For the most part, if you use Twitter you accept this discrepancy. This is how attention works. Imagine if the musician John Mayer had to pay attention to all of the 422,877+ people who follow him on Twitter (he currently follows 20). He would immediately be overwhelmed. Seriously, if an full-blooded American male can’t even pay attention to Jennifer Aniston, we see how dire this entire situation has become.

We understand that attention is often one-way. While we would be angry if our friends ignored us…we are mostly fine with the fact that Tina Fey doesn’t return our dozens of phone calls.

Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric

I predict Facebook will soon go fully asymmetric, allowing all users of the system (not just celebrities or companies) to have “follower” relationships that don’t require reciprocation. I believe they will once again follow in Twitter’s footsteps and people will be able to have follower lists that are much bigger than the number of people they follow.

I don’t know how they’ll do this, my guess is they’ll attempt to keep both systems intact. They’ll keep the friends designation for symmetric relationships, but also add another asymmetric capability. It would probably be best to use the term “follow” for this, but they may continue to keep the term “fan”, even though being a fan of another individual sounds a bit silly…the term “follower” is better.

Facebook will announce this publicly in their common way, by saying their goal is to help you connect to your friends and family better. They’ll say they’ve realized that there are many relationships that aren’t as strong as mutual friends but are nonetheless important…and therefore they’ve hit upon this wonderful new functionality for you…and they’ll somehow recast it as “Open” in some way…and blah blah blah. Pundits will point out how they’re copying Twitter. Robert Scoble will say it’s brilliant and remind us Zuck just doesn’t care what people think. Users will revolt by creating a “Facebook Users Against Fan Designation” group and it will quickly grow to 1 million members. The actual design of the system will hardly come up. Ev Williams will probably tweet something completely unrelated. You know. The usual.

The real reasons why Facebook will go asymmetric are reach (growth) and data.

Facebook will grow their service by allowing people to accrue attention in a way they can’t currently in the system. People will realize the same benefits they currently do on Twitter…you can actually start to have an audience that is larger than your current friends list. In other words, this will allow members of Facebook to have a much larger reach than they could before…thus giving Facebook a larger reach as well. This will be the next big growth spurt for Facebook, who has executed so well on almost everything they’ve done so far…but at the present moment the structure of the system prevents this from happening.

In short, Facebook will improve the ability of its members to accrue social capital within the system. And, if you aren’t familiar with this notion, check out Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, which lays out in excellent detail why social capital is the wealth of networks. He also describes the way humans have trouble with exchanging social capital with economic capital. (this exchange is the nut Facebook and other social networks are trying to crack)

The second reason Facebook will go asymmetric is that this will mean more data. While personal relationship data must be extremely valuable, this additional attention data is being left on the table. As Tim O’Reilly foresaw in his 2005 What is Web 2.0 post, and what huge players Google and Amazon know intimately, is that data is an increasingly important asset.

I would guess that this is why Twitter isn’t too worried about building revenue quite yet…they know how important people’s followers are to them. Hearken back to the few days last fall when follower numbers were going wonky…twitterers were up in arms! The attention Twitterers have accrued in their followers is worth serious cash. Imagine the effort of rebuilding your follower list. For example, it would take me 20 times as long to build my Twitter list as it would rebuild my Facebook friends list! That’s worth money. A lot of money.

What of Other Networks?

My good friend Christina Wodtke and I discussed this a lot at the recent IA Summit. Christina works for LinkedIn, whose relationship model is symmetric like Facebook’s. She told me that LinkedIn are *always* thinking about these issues; they obsess over the ability of their users to connect and improve relations with others. There is probably similar obsession over at MySpace, and Bebo, and well…just about any social network. My guess is that all players in this space have to be looking at the Twitter model and thinking about how they might adopt it in some way.

Where is your money?

Given their recent attempt to buy Twitter, their not-so-subtle copying of the Twitter interface, and the tweaks to the Pages feature, my money is on Facebook moving to a asymmetric relationship model in the very near future. I think their current structure has served them well, but when they look at Twitter’s growth curve, they can’t help but wonder what an asymmetric structure would do to improve their own.

Further Reading:

• Adina Levin of Socialtext adds some interesting thoughts on why asymmetry scales better.
• James Governor has a nice post on the asymmetric relationship pattern.
• Om Malik suggests that Facebook is facing an identity crisis

Interaction Designer Robert Fabricant recently gave a talk called Behavior is our Medium at the 2009 IxDA conference. In his talk he makes the assertion interactive designers are, at the most fundamental level, concerned with behavior.

We design to change, guide, support, elicit, constrict, and control behavior. The products and screens we create are about getting others to do something, using or buying or donating or otherwise taking some real-world action. Good design elicits the right behavior, poor design does not.

Note: Several folks have pushed back on the term elicit above. I mean it in the weaker sense…that we design to support certain behaviors and if users perform those behaviors through our software then we’ve been successful. I realize that elicit can feel nasty…like we’re getting people to do something they maybe shouldn’t do, but that’s not exactly what I mean…even though design certainly has that potential.

Here’s the video of his talk:

Robert Fabricant – Behavior is our Medium from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Surprisingly, Robert’s assertion was not as obvious to all those in attendance as he had hoped. He got pushback on the idea that designers traffic in behavior. In a follow-up post he writes:

“There is universal acceptance of a holistic approach to human centered design within this community – generally referred to as ‘experience design’ (not my preferred term). This approach considers all of the contexts surrounding use and then tries to build a unified interaction model to support user needs over time, across these contexts. It focuses not just on expressed needs but on those that are unexpressed: the emotions, motivations, and desires that shape user engagement over time. In fact, more and more of our clients are looking for our help in identifying these latent, unmet needs. So, it is interesting to find designers who are very comfortable, in fact insistent, on this holistic approach and yet spooked by the idea that we are in the ‘behavior business’.”

I have to admit that I’m also quite shocked that some interaction designers don’t see what they do as influencing behavior. If you’re not influencing behavior…then what is it you’re doing?

This topic came up at the IA Summit as well, usually enrobed in discussion about getting more respect and communicating our values as interaction designers. On a side note the discussions about getting more respect really worry me…I think if we focused more on doing great work then we wouldn’t need to talk about getting more respect.

Here is how I explain what I do as an interaction designer, and it usually comes up very early in my discussion with new clients.

I ask them: “What do people have to do in order for you to be successful?”.

Simple question. Now, the answer might be that people need to click on ads or install software or create/save social objects or buy a product. Each one of these answers is fine, but it often takes a little bit of digging to find out the real actions that people need to take. For example, if the initial answer is “click on ads” then I have to dig deeper to find out why someone might be on the site/app in the first place…people just don’t randomly visit to click on ads.

But the resulting behavior is what I design for. That’s it…once I know what needs to happen for my client to be successful my only focus is on eliciting that behavior.

It really is as simple as that. Don’t get me wrong…it’s not always easy to do…sometimes we have to figure out why someone would do that, what the key motivators are (are they social?), or what is currently stopping them from doing so, but the process is rather straight-forward. We investigate why the behavior isn’t happening, and work to make it happen.

This isn’t magic or mysterious, but it’s always about behavior. It also, importantly, isn’t about me. I used to get bogged down into worrying about what I was doing, my ego was getting in the way. Once I started framing design problems in terms of real-world activity that others did, with my role being to elicit that activity, then most of my navel-gazing habits seemed to go away. Mostly.

This also helps to demystify design…really talk about it in plain terms. I think that if it takes more than a sentence or two to explain what you’re doing then you’re probably complicating it. This is extremely important when dealing with clients…you have to make your case coherently and fast. If you can’t explain in one breath what you do or how you can help them, then you risk losing their interest.

I began to think about this as I was putting together notes on a talk about designing for virality for the upcoming one-day MeshU workshop in Toronto. The problem with virality is that it’s a chain of behavior…there are several parts to it. One is creating the pathways for it to happen, to create the ways in which your customers can spread what it is you offer. But another part is even more important, designing the motivating mechanisms for doing so…in almost all cases it needs to be a win-win situation. In other words, the people who are going to spread your product virally (the behavior you want) have to be getting as much out of it as you are. This is why referral programs work so well in some cases…people are getting paid to send others your way.

So I really do see interaction design as designing to elicit certain behavior…even if you were to describe interaction design as “screen design” it’s not even a small leap to then ask: “what is the goal of the screen?”.

And the answer, invariably: “to elicit a certain behavior”.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Pop!Tech is an annual conference held in Camden, Maine showcasing some of the biggest thinkers from around the world. Their about page and site has all the details.

Now let me tell you why I’m so excited about personal informatics. Simply put, they empower people. By monitoring and displaying information about our daily activities, we are able to see trends and opportunities for change that we would otherwise miss. Our daily activity envelops us in a context that makes it difficult for us to see a larger picture. Some of the opportunities of personal informatics are low-hanging fruit. For example, if you begin to monitor your home energy use and realize that you leave lights and appliances on much more than you need to, you can immediately change your behavior and save money at the same time. (and, perhaps the world)

While there are also downsides, like more information piled on top of an existing mountain of information, I think that the upsides are much bigger. And interface design is the key to all of this. What personal informatics interfaces will help us change the world? This is one of the questions I’m thinking about these days.

I hope to continue writing for the Pop!Tech blog, and I’ll put some of the more geeky interface design bits here on Bokardo. Please let me know what you think!

The Rise of Personal Informatics

Designing for the Social Web with Joshua Porter

screenshot hosted on flickr

WARNING I did not wear any makeup for this interview. The producer people seemed to want me to put some on, and I said “Can I not?”. They weren’t pleased about that…but I wanted the world to see me in my natural state, you know? Next thing you know I’ll be Dove-transformed into Matthew McConaughey.

Anyway, it’s an interview in which I explain a couple high-level ideas from my book Designing for the Social Web. We talk about:

• The Usage Lifecycle
• What newspapers can do to get more readers
• The problem of sign-up
• Having authentic conversations with your audience

There is also a part 2, in which I talk a bit about optimizing for Google, but I can tell you it all right here: write unique, interesting content.

These videos are part of the nice Peachpit Video library, which include videos from speakers that I enjoy learning from such as Jeremy Keith, Molly Holzschlag, Robert Hoekman Jr., Nathan Shedroff, Gene Smith…and well you get the idea.