How can designers pinpoint areas of their social application that aren’t working?

Well, first there needs to be agreement on what “working” means. There are lots of ways something can fail to work…but usually it means that the site isn’t doing something that it’s supposed to. And ideally every design team has a list of their most important metrics…those things that really matter to the success of their product/service. I’ve found that without a clear picture of which metrics are important, design teams tend to lose focus over time and fail to continually iterate and improve.

Designers have relied on metrics since the beginning of the web. We first started with metrics such as hit counters that measured the number of hits to the web server. Unfortunately, the hits were typically meaningless because they included hits to pretty much anything, including images, JavaScript, and other files, failing to provide any real insight into what was happening. As time has gone on, however, the metrics we examine have become much more sophisticated.

The latest focus for many design teams is to understand ways to measure user engagement. These metrics include the number of return visits and the average time on site for visitors. These metrics have important implications for your business.

For example, Google wants people to spend as little time as possible each time they interact with their search engine. They want people to come to the site, find what they want, and leave. On the other hand, Facebook wants people to spend more time on their site, so they can gather more data about visitors and expose them to more ads. The time on site success metric is radically different based on the specific site’s business goals.

When building an application, it’s essential for design teams to identify 3-4 core metrics to assess the success of the application and the health of the business. If these metrics go up, it’s a sign your business is healthy.

If you just build interactions without respect to core metrics, you can get into a situation where people use your web site — but not in the way you intended. This is why free applications that were once all the rage are now being downgraded to free trials. Design teams found that so many people were using the applications without paying and it was a huge drain on a business.

In your book, Designing for the Social Web, you recommend that design teams take advantage of the funnel analysis to uncover areas of their social application that aren’t working well. How does this analysis work?

It’s really important to have solid metrics at each stage of the lifecycle to uncover where a site or application has an opportunity to improve. A funnel analysis is a good way to find out what’s broken. It can show you how well your site moves people along the stages of the lifecycle, from Interested to Passionate.

Designers can picture their site as a funnel, where at the top they have everyone who is interested in the application and at the bottom is everyone who is passionate about the software.

For example, of those people who are initially interested in your application, only a subset of them will decide to ever actually use your application for the first time. Of the people who use the application for the first time, only some will use the application regularly. Of those regular users, only a small percentage of visitors will become passionate users. By examining where users drop off in the funnel, you can pinpoint opportunities for improvement on your web site.

However, if you’ve ever done funnel analysis you know that people do all sorts of things besides progress step-by-step through a series of screens. They visit multiple times, they skip around, they email you, they do all sorts of multi-channel communication, etc. This makes it more difficult to determine what’s wrong with your funnel.

As an aside, this is why we’ve built what we’ve built at Performable, which is an events-based analytics tool. Events-based means that the tools analyzes all actions of users, not just the ones that happen in a pre-specified 4-step funnel. This is necessary to truly capture the rich experience that your users are having over time.

Have you found that social applications are evolving over time?

Social applications have definitely been evolving. Over the last few years, I’ve seen that people have really embraced these applications. Users are now used to the concept of social applications. Three years ago, people had no idea what a News Feed was. Now everyone knows what it is.

I’ve seen a lot of changes. For example, many applications are now focusing on location. Location applications, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, are doing some really interesting things. These apps are essentially erasing the difference between being online and offline.

All of the social applications are also going mobile. People are using them everywhere. With devices like the iPad taking off, those trends are only going to accelerate. It’s insane how fast mobile is growing.

So those two trends, social and mobile, have accelerated everything.

MySpace was one of the first really popular social web sites, but has since become less relevant. What happened?

A couple of things happened. MySpace was the first national social network that caught the attention of everyone. We’d hear about it on the news and people started talking about privacy. MySpace really brought social networks to the general public and millions of people were using it.

Then Facebook came along and the momentum shifted. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact reason for the shift, but I think engineering was Facebook’s big win. From an engineering standpoint, Facebook executes extremely well. They roll out changes quickly and the site always seems to work. Facebook’s uptime was excellent, whereas MySpace had a lot of problems.

From a design perspective, Facebook has always been much cleaner and much more consistent than MySpace.

From a social design perspective, it could be argued that MySpace’s themed pages was a good idea because it was offering users a unique identity. Why do you think this approach failed?

While users on MySpace were allowed to theme their pages, I believe this actually hurt the usability of the application’s design because it allowed people to make very difficult to read (and use) pages. Even though it allowed MySpace users to express themselves how they wanted, it wasn’t the best choice for the readers of those profiles.

So yes, theming a profile is important for identity. And I think on some level, this was an important feature for MySpace, at least early on, because people liked to be able to change their profile to reflect their personality. But the ability to personalize MySpace was trumped b/c Facebook rose to prominence and had more momentum…personalization is interesting but unimportant when compared to where your friends are. (And, it should be pointed out that MySpace is still gigantic and has not really failed but rather become the 2nd biggest social network.)

So, why did Facebook rise to prominence? I think the big reason is that they recognized what was most important to people and then out-engineered MySpace in building their platform.

For example, in 2007, Facebook implemented the News Feed, an activity stream. If I had to point to a single feature this would be it (or perhaps photos…) The designers at Facebook realized people were coming for their friend’s content, such as links, messages, and photos and that a stream was a much better way to display these things because it ordered things by time. While MySpace gave users the ability to statically change the background and text of their profiles, there was less sense of immediacy when people made updates. Viewers still had to go and find what was updated on their friends pages. The Facebook News Feed made these changes front and center, and set a new bar in engagement. Thus the themes in MySpace were trumped by Facebook’s realization that content sharing and status updates were much more important to users than profile personalization.

But other social networks are growing. Twitter is adding photos now and this will take them to the next level. And I think in the future more social applications will focus on specialized features for specific activity groups. For example, Dribbble is a social network where designers share what they’re working on. You have services like PatientsLikeMe, which is a social network for people living with diseases, and Ravelry, a social network for folks who knit and crochet. These services have people who are as passionate about some specific activity and are extremely active within that world (maybe moreso than on the big networks), these networks just happen to be smaller populations so they aren’t in the news everyday.

Why is this so? Why is it that Google monetizes so well on Search while having a hard time on social properties? Given an equal amount of views on Google vs. MySpace, shouldn’t they be able to get about the same number of click-throughs and thus ad revenue?

The difference, of course, is that when people go to Google, they’re actively looking for something. That something isn’t on Google. They are performing a search activity. Thus their task will be to click on a link that seems to promise what it is they’re looking for. It may be the organic results, or it may be an ad that seems close to what they want.

When people are on MySpace, the activity they’re doing isn’t search. It’s something akin to “hanging out” or “networking”. Their task is almost the opposite of search. They are already on the site they want to be on. They don’t need to click on links to take them where they want to go.

In other words, the context is entirely different. When you’re in search mode, you are playing by different rules.

Social ads don’t work as well because people are being social, not searching for something.

Advertisements live along a spectrum that goes from “irrelevant and distracting” to “relevant and interesting”. When ads are well-placed, they actually serve to help the user find what they’re looking for, or they’re interesting enough to grab the person’s attention away from whatever else they were doing. It would seem that this is what social ads have to do…they have to be interesting enough to get you away from socializing. Or, perhaps they are simply for brand-building purposes…you see the brand and it has a subconscious effect…you don’t change what you were doing but the brand is somehow strengthened in your mind from the ad impression.

Here’s a question: What if the activity you’re doing actually does determine your willingness to click on ads? This is what is being suggested by the early returns on ads in social networks. If this is so, then we can start by making a list of activities in which it would make sense that people are most accepting of ads.

• Searching
• Shopping
• Traveling

These activities all share something in common. People are on the move, and are actively looking for products and services to help them along their way.

There is a reason why Google wants super short time-per-visit and Facebook wants super long time-per-visit. It’s because the services support two completely different activities. Google wants a tremendous number of incredibly short visits. They want you to find good results immediately and leave the site. Facebook wants you to stay forever.

A fundamental problem with monetizing social sites is that the very reason why they have long time-on-site that makes them less effective places for advertising. They have provided a comfortable third place…people are already where they want to be!

Social network audiences are less like searchers and more like homebodies. The ads that will work best aren’t those where people have to leave the site, but those which allow you to stay and keep hanging out. But trivial things like games and contests can only be novel for so long…

In addition, since we are dealing with social capital as much as economic capital, the advertisements don’t make as much sense. Imagine if every time you talked with your friends they were trying to sell you something. They wouldn’t last long as your friend.

Facebook, in particular, is pushing the envelope here, as well they should, and hopefully learning a lot along the way. I hope, also, that we can learn from what they’re doing. My big takeaway so far is a renewed focus on the activity at hand. What activities people are engaging in says as much about their behavior as their innate constitution.

This might also suggest why Yahoo and Microsoft have a harder time monetizing their ads on their various properties. They’re trying to monetize ads on Mail, Groups, and other places where people are doing non-search activities. That’s why Google continues to rule the roost, because they have the most searchers. People, when they want to search for something, go to Google. Google = Search.

No matter how well Microsoft thinks it can monetize Yahoo’s non-search properties, it won’t be able to do as well as if it had more searchers coming to its site. However, Yahoo does have some interesting travel properties, so those should provide better results. I’m sure that these companies know down to the nano-percentages which types of properties work and which don’t. I would bet that it all depends on the context of use within those properties.

In terms of design, which is our focus, what does this mean? Well, it means that we need to investigate what contexts people are in as they use our web applications. Are they looking for something, or would they use our service as part of the activity of looking for something? Are they primed for ads? If not, then we’re better off providing value in some other way, like increasing productivity, etc.

This simple list also suggests why Google is investing a ton of energy into mobile, because when people are mobile we’re in unfamiliar places with the same old needs. We’re searching not only for our destination, but services that will help us along the way. So that’s why every time you turn around there’s some new quiet feature in Google Maps, because maps and mobile are the future of advertising.

“Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster. Paul Rand’s IBM logo. Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters. Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map. Kyle Cooper’s Seven opening titles. These are only a few landmark projects of our profession. Design solutions that, in their consistent use as exemplary cases of execution, concept and process, don’t even need to be shown anymore and that, for better or worse, (almost) everyone acknowledges as being seminal works that reflect the goals that graphic design strives for: A visual solution that not only enables, but also transcends, the message to become memorable in the eyes and minds of viewers. Whether these projects are indeed as amazing, relevant and enviable as we have built them up to be is cause for a separate discussion but it’s safe to say that, as far as designs recognized around the profession, there are a certain few that invariably make the list, usually without question. Myself, I could list projects in every category from logos, to annual reports, to magazine covers, to packaging, to typefaces, to opening titles that could be considered landmark projects… But when it comes to web sites, I can’t think of a single www that could be comparable – in gravitas, praise, or memorability – as any of the few projects I just mentioned. Could this be?”

Armin then goes and mentions the obvious answer: Google.

But this is not an acceptable answer for him, because…wait for it…the logo sucks.

To talk about Google in terms of its logo has long been a pastime for people who care about logos. For years I’ve heard the same argument from people who want nothing more than to get rid of the “Mickey Mouse” logo, as it is often described.

Armin’s point is that while Google seems to be better than Yahoo, it is still plagued with a bad logo. He’s not “moved or inspired” by the design. Therefore, he reasons, it is not canonical design. Canonical design, in his mind, is one that practitioners of the medium look to as exemplary.

But, frankly, I think Armin has missed his own point. He wants to know what web designers see as canonical, but he’s dismissing the obvious answer because it doesn’t fit into his canonical mold of graphic design. In other words, he’s looking at Google from a graphic design perspective, when web designers necessarily have to look at it from an interaction design perspective.

If Armin were to ask web designers and web development teams what the canonical web designs are, he would get very clear answers.

The first answer would indeed be Google. Google has, for nearly ten years, provided the best search engine on the Web. It is the standard by which all other search engines are compared. In the exact same way that Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map has affected the design of subway maps since, Google has affected the design of search engines. I know design teams that have copied the search results pages of Google almost exactly simply because it was the design that Google used.

I also know a tremendous number of web designers who look to the spartan Google homepage as inspiration that great tools don’t need complex interfaces.

So if a “landmark” or “canonical” design means that it affects all design afterward, then Google certainly fits the bill.

Amazon also fits into that category. Amazon’s checkout process was the standard by which all checkout processes were measured for years. Their product reviews are the standard by which design teams the world over create product reviews. Their tabbed interface set the standard…their recommendation system…etc. Amazon pioneered so many things that seem commonplace now that you would be hard-pressed to find a more influential example.

Talk to web designers, product managers, and other web professionals, and these are the sites they’ll mention. Don’t talk just to people who build brochure sites…all they talk about is graphic design. Your answers will be the same as above. But talk to web designers and developers, and they’ll start talking about when Amazon added that extra row of tabs and quickly realized their mistake. It has become legend.

eBay has set the standard for auction sites. Social network sites are changing the world as we know it. Thousands and thousands of web designers are retooling their arsenal of features, layouts, and screen flows because these sites have completely changed the game.

So if its influence you want, you’ve got it. To borrow Armin’s own words “as far as designs recognized around the profession, there are a certain few that invariably make the list, usually without question”. Google. Amazon. Facebook. eBay. Yahoo. Craigslist. YouTube.

Do they have “gravitas, praise, or memorability”? Yes, they certainly do in the minds of web designers.

Will they be praised by print designers and put into large coffee table books? No, of course not.

You can’t appreciate a web site in the same way you appreciate a logo or a poster. When a logo works, it makes you think certain things. Makes you think about the company, their influence, their reach. It’s about branding. The IBM logo suggests a solidity, the rock that is Big Blue. At this point, after you’ve thought these things, you’re done. There is nothing else to do. Maybe you’ll consider their products in the future.

When a web site works, on the other hand, you’re using it to do something. You might be looking for your next favorite book on Amazon, or searching for a critical piece of information on Google. You’re using the web site…interacting with it, having an experience that, contrary to logos, involves you. You are inputting information, asking questions, getting answers.

So, as a web designer, there is no analog to “look at this logo and see how it stands for a company”. That’s relatively easy for graphic designers because we can quickly appreciate the way a logo graphically depicts some attribute of the company: “solid, blue, Big Blue, trustworthy”. Even if we don’t like the company or if its never done anything good for us, we can make this judgment of the design of the logo.

But in web design, we can’t pass such sophisticated judgment on a design without having an actual experience with the web application itself. Without actually experiencing the value first-hand, we can’t look at a web site and say “hey, that web site is well designed because it represents the company well”. This is the primary disconnect when talking about judging great web design. You’ve got to experience it in a real way to know if it is great.

So while Armin doesn’t want this to be about graphic vs. web design, it has to be at some level because web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.

Graphic designers can judge by looking. Web designers cannot. Web designers must judge by doing (or observing others doing). The problem is that too many people judge web designs without actually using them. Instead, they look. When you use the shortcut of looking, you tend to judge what you’re looking at: the visuals. But when you use something, your relationship to that thing necessarily changes. I wonder how often Armin uses Google.

That’s why web design is different. Peer production, in particular, is extremely different. When I buy a book on Amazon, when you buy a book, we change the way the site works for someone else buying books, which is in turn changed by the reviews we write afterward. Is this not amazing design?

Comparing the best web design with the best graphic design is a fool’s errand because they are celebrated differently by the very people in the profession. Graphic designers tend to memorialize their achievements, make heroes out of the top designers. Its easy to do, since individuals were the ones who actually created the designs. Milton Glaser. Paul Rand. Easy targets for appreciation.

Who do we credit for building Google? Larry and Sergei? How about Amazon? Jeff Bezos? People in the web development community know this is silly…thousands and thousands of people have worked on those sites, tweaking the user experience over many years. There is no single person we can point our accolades to. That’s part of the reason why I can’t make a list like Armin did…specific projects by specific people.

And this brings up another point. When someone is known for doing something good, their future work is colored by it. So all the logos that Paul Rand designed after the IBM logo were put up on a pedestal. Even if they weren’t so good. In web design, there are so many people working on something that it is hard to attribute a success to an individual, and so there are few legendary designers we can point to.

In addition, in web design there is no single design element like a logo we can point to in praise. You never see a product review standing by itself like you do the IBM logo. Web design needs the context of the site to make sense. A logo does not.

The lore of web design is different than the lore of printed design. Print design produces artifacts that do not change. Web design produces applications that do.

Is Google a technical achievement? Absolutely. Does that mean it isn’t a design achievement? No. It’s an astounding design achievement to make Google work the way it does. To enter a query and get a relevant response in under a second while searching the *entire* web is a design achievement that has few equals. Some may say this is simply “engineering” and dismiss it. But engineering takes planning, and that planning is design.

But, you ask, does Google look great? Eh. But at some point we have to ask: how would the experience be different if it did look better? Would it have any affect on the people who use it? (I use it in my browser, so I rarely see the logo in question anyway) Maybe designers would talk about it more, but geez they are already talking about it a lot as it is.

What would the world be like if everything were beautiful? Is that even possible?

My practical side says that whether or not Google moves the aesthetic sensibilities is irrelevant as long as people enjoy using it. That’s the important metric: use. Judging Google on aesthetics is like judging the Great Wall of China on its color of brick. It’s possible…but you’re missing the entire value proposition.

And, it goes without saying that lots of people find Google just fine aesthetically.

So, as a designer, do I worry that Google has a lousy logo? No…and I don’t think many web designers do. Most web designers know that the value of Google is in its utility, not its appearance. Can it still be canonical? Absolutely.

As usual, the crux of this discussion comes down to what we mean when we say “good design”. Do we mean the way something looks, as so many of the people who commented on Armin’s post seem to be saying? Or do we mean the way it affects us over time? Or perhaps how useful something is?

This is not an easy answer, and whatever answer you tend to subscribe to is going to change the way you look at Armin’s problem.

As for me, I tend to follow Steve Jobs on this one when he says “design is how something works”. Granted, this is a broad definition of design, but really, it seems to fit, doesn’t it? When design does what we want it to, we say “it works well”. Google works well. Amazon works well.

And to those folks who say “what Armin is saying is that design might as well look good, too” I say “we’ve already agreed that aesthetics are subjective…we will eventually run out of air for this conversation”.

Khoi Vinh of Subtraction, in reading Armin’s tea leaves, laments that web design is growing boring. After suggesting that too many designers are moving away from actually building things (which I agree with), he says that it is having an adverse affect:

“What that leaves is an enormous and unfulfilled gap in the middle which, while it’s not entirely unoccupied, is sparsely populated. And that’s our problem. We don’t have enough designers who do both (think and design); we have a polarized industry right now, and the result, as Armin tactfully alludes to in his article, is that Web design is really boring. Sorry, but it’s true.”

Web design is anything but boring. Look at what is happening with Facebook right now. They are exploring a new paradigm of social design. Can we build recommendation systems that inform us while not pissing us off? What part of social interaction can we model next? Are there social relationships we can’t model? Shouldn’t model?

If you think logos are interesting, what about the question: “What does it mean to be a fan of a for-profit company?”

These are the design challenges that lay before the web designer and to me are much more interesting than looking for a canonical web design. They are anything but boring.

I daresay these questions are more complicated than anything a graphic designer has ever been challenged with. The reason? They involve the person who is receiving the message and how that person responds. Two-way communication is harder than one-way. The biggest reason why it is harder is that accountability emerges as the conversation progresses…

Later, in the comments, Armin clarifies what he’s looking for:

“I find it a little too stubborn to keep saying that web sites are experiences and as such, not one, can be pinpointed as great or exemplifying of the medium.”

A great experience? How do you think that Google trumped all the other search engines and achieved a majority market share in the face of staggering competition? How do you think Amazon creates such passion in its users? Netflix? eBay? Craigslist?

And exemplifying the medium? Try to think of the Web and not think of Google!

The web is not suffering from a lack of canonical design. It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be.

“our thinking is that if we give people more controls, they can share more information. As people shared more and more information, Facebook found that it creates a more component experience that brings them back to Facebook more often. Page views and traffic went up 50% within weeks of the launch of the news feed.”

Wow, that stat is amazing. A simple interface design feature, thought (by traditional thinking) to decrease page views, actually increased them and fast.

Page Views vs. User Experience

Zuckerberg’s response underlines a real distinction between the old page view approach to the Web and the new user experience approach. The difference lies in what you optimize for.

If you optimize for page views, you’re going to make decisions, both strategic and tactical, that increase page views. This results in things like split-stories on news sites, way too many screens on social networking sites, and perhaps worst of all, an entire approach focused on “keeping people on the site”. The problem with this approach is that it quickly gets out of hand. Instead of providing a single value proposition, the site provides countless propositions, thus diluting the value of each one. In almost all cases of optimizing for page views, the experience of the user takes a back seat. You optimize for the quarterly numbers, not user satisfaction.

If you optimize for the user experience, on the other hand, you have to take a longer approach. Sure, you might not get as much advertising revenue in the short term as the site with more page views, but you’re adding more long-term value. That’s the road that Facebook is taking, at least up until now. They don’t need to be worried about page views because they’re adding users and users are building out their social graphs on the site. (however, Facebook is currently building an advertising platform that could change this).

In other words, if Zuckerberg and Facebook had been stuck in the page view way of thinking, they never would have implemented the news feed feature. It simply makes viewing the activity of others too easy…there is no clicking necessary. But, the insight they had was that giving people better views into information would actually make the service more valuable and thus indirectly do what others fear would have suffered…increasing page views!

The problem with many sites these days is that they’re optimized for the advertiser and thus page views, not the user and their experience. What smart sites like Facebook see is that giving people tools they can really use is the best way forward because it makes them happy customers who will return again and again and over time you’ll get a lot more value out of that than if you optimized for anything else.

How AJAX/DHTML leads to less Advertising

This is the battlefield where interface design smacks head-on into advertising. It has become the 800lb gorilla in the room of many sites who rely on advertising revenue. In many cases, using technology and design to reduce the number of screens (either by simplifying task flows or by using AJAX/DHTML) drastically reduces page views that bring in advertising revenue.

Thus, it has become a very real issue that when designers do their job well, a site will generate less advertising revenue as a result…at least in the short term. Many folks in the advertising business stop at this point and push harder and harder for more page views. It may not always be apparent, but page views are still solidly entrenched in many boardroom strategy talks as the one metric to optimize.

In the long term, however, an enhanced user experience will actually drive more ad revenue because it will make people more successful, the service more valuable, and people will be more willing to share with others. They’ll return more, be happier, and eventually provide more revenue either directly or indirectly as a result of good business.

The question is: are decision-makers willing to adapt to this new way of thinking? Or is it just folks like Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t come from the culture of page views, who can successfully optimize for user experience above all else?

MySpace Invite Screen

The interface for this is pretty straightforward. You can type in the email addresses of all the friends who you would like to invite, separated by a comma. You can also add a message to the invite if you want.

Facebook Invite Screen

You’ll notice one big difference between the Facebook and MySpace invite screens. Facebook allows you to import addresses from various third party email systems. You can grab your contacts from webmail services such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail. You can also import contacts from your desktop mail applications as well.

It is probable that the Facebook invite screen causes more invitations to be sent than the MySpace invite screen. They’ve made it much easier to add large amounts of contacts without having to type in the addresses by hand. Imagine typing more than a couple email addresses in that tiny little window! Also, we have to ask: how many email addresses do we remember anyway? Even if we typed in all that we could remember, we would still have less than is what is in our contacts list. The Facebook interface makes all that hassle a non-issue.

Does Facebook’s design have an effect?

So how much of an effect would this design difference make? Obviously, the Facebook interface allows many more people to be invited more quickly, suggesting that Facebook has the potential to grow faster. Indeed, that does seem to be the case, as evidenced by recent Compete stats.:

However, there are innumerable other factors involved as well. What about the email that gets sent out for the invite? Is it compelling? Does it entice people to click? The complete process of Designing for Word of Mouth has many steps of which the invite screen is only one.

Therefore, we cannot pin Facebook’s growth on this particular invite interface. What we can say, however, is that a consistent focus on issues like these will have a positive effect over time. So while the interface probably isn’t the only reason why Facebook is growing faster, it most likely contributes to it. If many design decisions like this are made throughout a site, they can have a significant effect.

Facebook’s Progressive Disclosure

Additionally, the popup you get on Facebook when you press “Import Email Addresses” is nicely done:

You’ll notice they’ve separated out the two activities (that were one activity in the previous screen). This is an example of progressive disclosure…only providing enough detail as needed at the moment and providing more when the context necessitates it. On the previous screen the “import email address” looked like a single activity. Now, as we progress further it’s actually split into two activities.

Facebook also adds a link for “how to create a contact file”, a nice touch for those folks unfamiliar with how that works.

These invite screens are a good example of different approaches to the same problem. One requires lots of typing…the other requires none.

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

As Danah admits, it’s difficult talking about class. I’m always uncomfortable with it because it’s always a spectrum…there is no clear distinction between this class and that class. Even the “cool” kids class had some people who could cross into the “skater” kids class when I was in high school. Also, talking about class can only reinforce it. To that end I wonder what sorts of things we’re going to learn from this distinction…does talking about class make us any smarter, or simply make us more likely to make class distinctions? (to her credit: Danah makes it clear that she’s having a hard time discussing this).

One way that I think would be interesting to cut up the populations would be activity. Are the people using MySpace for different reasons than Facebook? Are the two services equivalent from a tool standpoint? What about people who use both? It seems that Danah is talking about them equivalently, although in this case that’s not the focus of her piece so I don’t know for sure.

One question I do have: does the design of the site somehow influence who uses it? It’s an interesting question given that the two sites are so dissimilar. Does the clean design of Facebook portray a certain lifestyle while the bazaar of MySpace another?

Boyd mentions this is indeed a factor:

“Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but it is pretty clear to me that aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” – they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.”

Or, perhaps the difference is more tactical. Does the fact that you have to be “friends” with someone in Facebook to see their profile make it a different experience than MySpace? Does the fact that Facebook started in the Ivy Leagues mean anything? Are socio-economic factors out-weighed by tactical aspects of the design itself?

Anyway, as you can see this is causing more questions for me than answers. Same for most of the folks in the comments on Danah’s site. Read through those and you can see why talking about class is such a tough subject.

A story at CNN.com describes how 27 year-old Stacy Snyder was denied a teaching degree because she posted a photo of herself on her MySpace account that the school said “promoted underage drinking”.

The photo, which shows her drinking from a cup with a pirate’s hat on has the caption “drunken pirate” underneath. The picture was taken at a 2005 Halloween Party.

This story highlights several important points about profiles and pictures:

1. Colleagues are probably looking at your MySpace account
   Unless you take steps to make your profile private, then you probably have colleagues and other people you know looking at them. I’m constantly surprised at how often someone I know says “hey, I saw your (social networking) profile”. We should also remember that some people like to snoop…and they might not ever tell you about it.
2. People give undue weight to your profile pictures
   This story clearly shows that the Snyder was judged at least in part because of a single photo on her profile. That’s scary to think about. First of all, it was a Halloween Party, so Snyder’s story that she wasn’t even drunk is completely plausible…it was her costume. But, even if she was drunk, is posting this picture promoting underage drinking? Hardly. The school obviously has no clue how to handle a person’s profile picture.
3. Your profile has offline consequences
   No matter what the story is behind your pictures, your profile has offline consequences. At this point the distinction between offline and online is hardly anything…although while we still use those words there is some difference, I suppose. But think of it this way: what we do online is recorded, and is usually on someone else’s servers!
4. People are wising up to this issue
   As for teens, they seem to be understanding the issues of public profiles more and more. As I wrote about just the other day, a new Pew study suggests that most teens understand this issue and take precautions against it by creating multiple accounts or sufficiently masking certain information in their accounts. Snyder, of course, did not, and I can’t say that I blame her because it is really a harmless party picture.

I wonder if there is more to this case. First of all, this story is a year old, and it’s just being published on CNN.com. Weird. These points just don’t add up. Despite the fact that Snyder was at a Halloween Party, she was not told of her failure to get a degree until the day before graduation in the spring. Talk about under-handed. That is so evil that I wonder if there is something more personal to this story.

As for myself, I’m a little worried that she’s drinking liquid Mr. Goodbar. That can’t be healthy.

It’s too fun to play pundit. When MySpace was growing hugely popular, about the time that it was sold to News Corp. for 580 million dollars, everyone had an opinion about it.

It’s ugly. It’s horribly designed. They got lucky. It’s just perfect timing. The page views are way out of whack. It’s a fluke. Whatever the reason, it was en vogue to trash the site. Very few people who didn’t use the site (other than investors) gave much credit to the amazing growth and success they were enjoying.

The people sharing their opinions …designers, technologists, journalists, weren’t the people who mattered. They (we) didn’t matter because they (we) weren’t using the site.

Then I had a conversation with an actual MySpacer, and I never thought about MySpace the same. Kelli was despondent. I asked her what was wrong, and she brought up MySpace. “My boyfriend…well now my ex-boyfriend…completely deleted me from his MySpace account. I was first on his Top 8 list, and now I’m not on his list and I can’t even view his profile. He un-friended me.”

To her, MySpace wasn’t just a web site, it was an integral part of her social life. What happened there was as real as anything offline. She explained that since all of her friends were also on the site, being removed from a Top 8 List was a form of public punishment. Her boyfriend might just as well have stood up in the school cafeteria and shouted that the relationship was over. It was a statement about social standing, about being accepted as a part of a group, and it affected her emotionally as much as a face-to-face interaction.

That kind of thing happens every day on MySpace: to people who are invested in the site in a way that no pundit ever could be, even if they tried. There are relationships being broken, fixed, and created all the time and people who don’t use the site will never know it until they ask.

So don’t listen to pundits, loud bloggers, or any individual just because they have a large following or can make a lot of noise…especially if they haven’t used the site on a regular basis! Make sure that the sample of people you’re listening to is part of the actual user population. It will completely change your conception of what social software is.

In a fascinating piece on the amazing growth of the photo-sharing site Fotolog, Jason Kottke clearly articulates a growing problem in design:

“Fotolog…relative to Flickr…has changed little in the past couple of years. Fotolog has groups and message boards, but they’re not done as well as Flickr’s and there’s no tags, no APIs, no JavaScript widgets, no “embed this photo on your blog/MySpace”, and no helpful Ajax design elements, all supposedly required elements for a successful site in the Web 2.0 era. Even now, Fotolog’s feature set and design remains planted firmly in Web 1.0 territory.”

How do sites with sub-optimal visual design and technology grow so big and become so successful? How are MySpace, Fotolog, and Craigslist so popular in an age that values stunning visual design and amazing technology above all else? Conversely, how is it that Flickr, full of beauty and Ajax, is being overtaken by a site as boring as Fotolog?

Aye, there’s the rub…a rub that defines the current state of web design.

First off, a little throat-clearing. We’re dealing with Alexa stats here, so there are no guarantees that anything is accurate. Just because Alexa shows that Fotolog gets more traffic than Flickr doesn’t mean that it is…it’s kind of like listening to a reporter who usually covers political news tell us what’s going on in Silicon Valley. Suspect, to say the least. But for the sake of argument let’s assume that the trend is right, and that Fotolog is overtaking Flickr in terms of traffic.

Page views and Ajax…a match made in Hell

Well, one reason why Fotolog might appear so successful is the very technology that Jason mentions: Ajax. Page views are a metric that Alexa uses in its traffic calculation. But when you switch to an Ajax interface, your page views plummet. For example, when people want to add a tag, change a headline, or edit a photo set on Flickr very few page views occur. You’re simply interacting with a single screen that doesn’t refresh, but sends and receives requests in the background. This undoubtedly has a huge effect on the page views on Flickr.

Fotolog, on the other hand, gets a page view anytime a person wants to change anything. Therefore, less efficient bandwidth consumption and server usage actually gets Fotolog much higher traffic numbers…which is pretty damn ironic.

What’s more ironic is that this is an increasing problem on huge advertising sites and few people want to talk about it. What’s at stake? Billions of dollars that are wrapped up in page-view models where money changes hands depending on what “traffic” a site receives. And for years that traffic depends on page requests to a server, which of course happens even when people are doing simple things like changing a photos headline. So while companies realize that using an Ajax interface, when done well, can literally save millions in bandwidth costs and actually provide a faster, easier-to-use interface, they also realize that their advertisers only know one metric: the page view.

I’ve talked to some folks at Yahoo about this, and they say that their discussions on this topic get pretty tense. This is a huge problem for them because so much of their revenue is advertising based but they know that the future of interface design is elegant Ajax. This problem has been known for some time, but we’re still at the start of the huge effort in migrating away from the page view as a valuable metric for anything.

Technology doesn’t a great value make

Jason makes a strong case that technology is over-valued. I think he’s exactly right when he says:

“Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren’t the silver bullets we’ve been led to believe they are. Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don’t think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.”

This is the exact problem I’ve been talking about lately: in some cases visual design and/or technology are trumped by other aspects of design.

In my Social Design talk, which I most recently gave at the Web App Summit, I ask this question: What are the most successful web sites in the world? The answers are the ones you would expect: Google, YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, Craigslist, Amazon, eBay.

But then I ask the question slightly differently: What are the most well-designed web sites in the world? Outside of a minimalist Google, there is no overlap for most folks. None of the others on the list are “well-designed” in their minds…they’re simply successful, poorly-designed sites. They attribute the success of these sites to other factors: being first in the market, having economies of scale, etc.

From a visual design standpoint they might be right: these sites aren’t going to win any visual design contests. But the value of these sites goes so far beyond the visual that to judge them by the way they look is to completely miss the boat. In our testing at UIE, for example, we’ve never had anyone refuse to shop at Amazon because it doesn’t look great…in fact people are most passionate about Amazon because of the value they get from reviews…and the rest of the socially-focused features there. People love Amazon, and it has nothing to do with its visual design!

And people are passionate about the other very successful sites, too. To Jason’s point, the major value of all of the successful sites doesn’t rest on what specific technology they use or whether they have tagging. Instead, the major value rests on social aspects of the design…take away the interaction of the communities on these sites and there is very little value left in them. Take away the reviews from Amazon and you’ll hear a great big sucking sound of folks rushing out to buy their wares on some other site…

Similarly to Amazon, Fotolog relies heavily on social interaction, in their case sharing photos with friends. This is the primary value of the site, not how they do it from a technological standpoint.

The usual red herring: judging a book by its cover

Ignoring visuals and technology (at least temporarily) is a big change for many designers and technologists. Why? Because technology and visuals often get the credit when things go well, but aren’t really talked about when things go contrary to our assumptions. That’s exactly Jason’s point: why is it that Fotolog uses inferior technology and visual design and still succeeds?

I think the answer is that the differentiator on the Web right now isn’t great visual design or technology, although those help out tremendously (don’t get me wrong!). An analogy might be in order here because so many people think I’m trying to denigrate visual design…I’m not! Here’s an analogy:

Every time George Bush makes his State of the Union Address he speaks very clearly, his words are well-chosen and his speechwriters are obviously top-of-the-class. They communicate very well, and for the most part every single person who listens or watches the address knows exactly what George Bush is trying to say. Speechwriters learning the craft would do well to emulate the skill and technique of Bush’s speechwriters. Even so, the address is a bunch of statements that most people disagree with: most people want the U.S. out of Iraq and observe that the efforts there have largely been a failure. Even Bush’s own party is now alienated. But the State of the Union Address itself is well-executed: it’s clear communication…Bush is just sending the wrong message.

(update: several folks are angry with me that I used a political analogy…I’m certainly open to suggestions for future analogies where the communication is clear and well-executed but fails to deliver the right message to the audience)

This is the same with visual design: you can execute beautifully but if the message you’re sending isn’t the one the audience wants to hear then the overall design will be a failure. I believe this is what Jason is talking about with his repeated references to “Web 2.0″. He doesn’t see the value in the majority of so-called Web 2.0 services…they might look great and have interesting technology but if they don’t actually improve our lives…then what good are they?

Visual design is about communicating a message well…getting the point across. The problem comes when the message being communicated isn’t the right one…and that’s exactly what we’re seeing so much of…so many sites have great visual design and great technology but just aren’t sending a valuable message…

Where are all these sites? They’re everywhere: they’re the ones you’re NOT using.

There are two primary aspects of design: communicating the right message. Why is this two aspects? Because one aspect is communicating a message well and the other is making sure it is the right message in the first place. Perhaps this second part is what is called design strategy these days. I don’t know, but I know that one needs the other in each and every design project.

Preventing valueless design

We need a new way of thinking to prevent valueless design. Valueless design is like a George Bush speech: well-executed but wrong. While it may be communicating beautifully on one level, the impact on society may be minimal or, even worse, negative. We need design that provides real value to humans.

The new model as I call it is social design: a focus on the social lives of users, the context of how people live, and the connections they have with their family, friends, and loved ones. It’s about the daily activities that people care about, that make their lives richer, more fulfilling, and that have very little to do with how a piece of software looks or works behind the scenes.

But that’s just how I see it. I’m sure that other ways to get people in the right design mindset. I believe the best designers not only execute technically well, but have the mindset to discover the right design. They’re open to new ideas, passionate about what they do, and focused on the lives of their users in order to prevent sending the wrong message.

There are two parts to this problem.

The first part is that the assailants are misrepresenting themselves on MySpace, taking advantage of MySpace’s lack of foolproof identity controls. They may be misrepresenting their age, race, or name as well as their lifestyle and personality.

In some way MySpace is at fault here because their system cannot clearly identify who is who. However, that goes for any and all web sites, too doesn’t it? The most locked down sites, the ones like Paypal that connect you with a bank account, are still not foolproof.

The second part of the problem is that the girls are agreeing to meet these people who they admittedly don’t know. They’re being taken in by the person online, and then agree to meet them offline, assuming that they’re the same charming person.

This second part, in my opinion, has nothing to do with MySpace. MySpace in no way enables this meeting to happen, nor encourages it. This is interpersonal manipulation, and could happen anywhere.

The third part (which goes without saying) is that the evil encounter takes place. Thankfully, at least some of the assailants are in jail. Hopefully they get what they deserve.

But on a larger level, could this be MySpace’s fault? Should they be held accountable? The suit claims that they were “negligent, reckless, fraudulent, and misrepresentative”. Essentially, the suit is saying that MySpace didn’t take action to head off these types of situations that it must have been aware of.

I’m trying to find an offline equivalent of this. Would it be like going to a bar and meeting someone, being assaulted, and then suing the bar because the assailant used a fake ID to get in? That might be analogous, and the bar might be at fault.

However, I don’t think there is a law saying that you have to represent yourself accurately online. Does anybody know?

The worst part about this is that there are people assaulted all the time by people they know, in situations that they have no control over, simply because the assailant is evil. It’s a horrible, horrible thing. But that’s not what’s happening here. What’s happening here is preventable…teens should know better than to trust people they don’t know. It’s hard enough to trust the people we do know.

No matter where you are, online or offline, agreeing to meet someone you don’t know is a highly risky behavior. My daughter isn’t quite old enough to talk to about this yet, but when she is I’m going to make it clear that if you don’t know who somebody is, be super careful.

The result of this case might be a big deal for the future of social networking sites. If MySpace is held accountable, then we’ll probably see a whole lot of changes in privacy policing.

The question is, can a web site be held accountable for the actions of its members?

“One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.”

He nails the point: “sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression”.

It really isn’t always about the money. Really. Many have characterized this as an unfair game, where the few were taking advantage of the many. But I think this is a better characterization.

However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t huge opportunities for innovators to bring some of that money back into the hands of users.

JPG Magazine and Threadless are two sites in particular that come to mind…they have interesting models that pay out cash to users who submit great stuff. I wrote about that here: Paying People for Voted-on Content

Edgework – Joshua Porter 59MB MP3

“>More details on Brian’s site. Also, check out Brian’s Edgework podcast feed, loaded with some excellent interviews about designing on the Edge…what’s next in the world of design.

Yuki Noguchi, explaining a recent downward trend in how much time teens spend on MySpace and other social networking sites, suggests that they leave because they’re just fickle:

Such is the social life of teens on the Internet: Powerful but fickle. Within several months’ time, a site can garner tens of millions of users who, just as quickly, might flock to the next place, making it hard for corporate America to make lasting investments in whatever’s hot now.”

Some people are fickle. Some people make decisions on a whim. Teenagers, who nobody can understand fully, seem to fit into this category. Some teens, when presented with a choice for which there is no good reason to make, make it anyway. Just for the hell of it.

But most people, teenagers included, don’t act this way. Instead of acting willy-nilly, they often have very good reasons for doing what they do, even if others don’t understand it. All people make perfect sense to themselves, and most, if given the opportunity to explain their reasoning, actually make sense to others as well.

But Noguchi, citing fickleness, thinks that teens just want what’s new.

“Young audiences search for innovative and new features. They’re constantly looking for new ways to communicate and share content they find or create, and because of that group mentality, friends shift from service to service in blocs.”

But notice the reasons why kids switched that Noguchi points to.

Security Reasons

“Over the summer, Birnbaum’s friend Chrissy Quantrille discovered an impostor had taken her photos off her MySpace profile, set up a fake page and even used it to establish a romantic virtual relationship with a boy in California.

“It was creepy,” said Quantrille, who tried to contact the offender — “What are you doing?” — and sent a message to the duped boyfriend. She and her friends filed a form asking MySpace to take down the fake page, which it did within two days.”

Snooping by Parents and Schoolfolks

“Dell’Aria said teachers at her previous high school started logging onto MySpace and reading students’ profiles, apparently monitoring the pages for signs of alcohol or drug abuse.

“I was shocked and kind of annoyed, and it was kind of an invasion of privacy,” she said. Although no one got in trouble, word spread like wildfire, and many of her classmates reset their privacy settings to block unapproved users from accessing their pages, she said.”

Social Pressure

“Liana Castro, a junior in the literary media department of Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, said having an online social life intesified the drama in her real life.

She routinely heard from people who complained they weren’t designated as one of her top eight friends. “People would be like, ‘why am I not in your top eight?’ ” With 279 online friends, Castro caught so much grief she changed the site so it only listed four family members.”

That’s Where Their Friend’s Are

“Madeline Dell’Aria, another high school junior, has fallen in and out of love with a number of sites. In middle school she started avidly blogging on Xanga. Last year, after most of her friends abandoned Xanga and migrated to MySpace, she followed. “No one was using Xanga anymore,” she said.”

Real Reasons to Switch

It is clear from these examples that there are very real reasons why people are switching from MySpace. Reasons that are concrete, reasonable, and in some cases preventable. Fickleness is just part of the story.

When I think of the word “video”, I immediately think of Youtube. When people want to upload “video”, they immediately think of YouTube. When people talk about where they saw the latest episode of the Daily Show, they talk about YouTube. When advertisers think of “video”, it’s all YouTube.

YouTube is what people think about when they think of the word “video”.

And because YouTube has top-of-mind, it means that people are not thinking about all the competing services out there. Google Video, Yahoo Whatever, or Microsoft Whatever, and the countless other video startups that want even a sliver of that ridiculous pie. Those services have very little top-of-mind share for the word video. (for the record, it’s MSN Soapbox and simply Yahoo Video).

Top-of-mind share is really interesting because it has the potential to be so transient, yet isn’t. We’re talking about what web site comes to mind when you think video, and right now that site is YouTube. Couldn’t that change in an instant? Couldn’t some other service easily eclipse that overnight, and tomorrow everyone will simply have another site in mind when the word video pops up?

Google doesn’t think so. That’s why they spent an unimaginable amount of money on a site who they compete with directly with their own video service. Google already has much of the technology. It’s not like they’re just blindly entering the video game…they’ve been trying! And in one year YouTube has rebuffed their attempt!

Google is making a huge bet that YouTube will stay top-of-mind for a long time to come, at least long enough to gain much of their money back on advertising and search-related ventures.

Google, of course, has top-of-mind for the word “Search”. They have for several years now, and probably will for several more. Even in an age where Microsoft can redirect you to their search engine simply because you’re using their crappy browser, Google has conquered the Search top-of-mind. So, even if other companies come up with better search than Google, it will still take years before they wrest away top-of-mind.

The importance of top-of-mind cannot be understated. If a web site has top-of-mind, it is the first thing people talk about. Like MySpace in social networking, Netflix in movie rentals, Microsoft in monopolies, Macintosh in fine computing.

And now YouTube in video. Even the founders of YouTube realize this. Check out Chad and Steve’s personal message about the announcement. They acknowledge their dominance in video, saying that “two kings have gotten together, the King of Search and the King of Video”.

Susan Mernit has a great piece on the YouTube deal. She’s looking at it from the perspective of what Google Didn’t Buy. And what Google could have bought but didn’t, in her estimation, is a little company called the New York Times. She points to the staggering implications of this, and what it means for social media:

“The point here–just to kick it a little harder–is that this is yet more evidence how social media platforms that are shifting the paradigms in a profound way–Not only does YouTube have a mass market, it’s video on the web appeal that the more high-brow Times will never have (Is YouTube the next MTV?). Furthermore, it’s a platform that gives Google the opportunity to morph into a multimedia MySpace ecosystem, way beyond what Orkut could ever be–and most cruelly, it’s something that teens and twenty-somethings care about, which may no longer be the case for The New York Times.”