Ustrategy

Facebook is Taking Over the World, One Trend at a Time

After years of waffling, Facebook appears to have discovered the right direction this year. Along with a focus on operational efficiencies and growing Facebook Ads revenue—Facebook has been working hard to enhance its offering across a number of major consumer technology trends, such as location-based solutions, network noise reduction, user-generated social content, etc.

From the first breath it drew, Facebook’s lifeline was the network itself. today, with over 500 million users worldwide, almost any application or service it launches are bound to be immediately tried, adopted (or criticized), and used because they are already embedded into each user’s network.

With Places, Facebook challenges services like FourSquare and Gowalla—two of the most buzzing companies in the last two years, and easily lets people check in to the place they are visiting and broadcast to their network.

Facebook Groups now helps people filter down their network and reduce the noise of all those “friends,” by giving them a quieter space to discuss their interests, essentially taking small chips at companies that provide interest-based online communities such as Ning.

Facebook Friendship Pages is another attempt to offer a more relevant community experience, this time applying an even thinner sieve, creating a place for one-to-one communication. Evidence of Facebook’s early developmental stage is the fact that users can use the Friendship pages not just for their own relationships, but also to display any relationships between two friends on their network. As Jared Newman from PC World says, it’s “cool but creepy.”

Drop.io was recently acquired to enable users to share documents on Facebook. This, I believe, is an attempt to chip at Google’s set of productivity tools. It remains to be seen whether users will actually move from the robust Google suite.

And, last week Facebook announced it will be adding shopping deals to Places which will connect local merchants with consumers—taking a daring stab at Groupon, the market leader in local merchant group discounts and a company estimated at over 3 billion dollars in value.

Facebook today can afford testing out different initiatives—just like Google has done over the years. Unlike Google however, who relied on a single revenue model in the form of online ads, Facebook is looking to drive revenue from multiple channels. While it is a smart business decision, it often conflicts with delivering user value (as we’ve seen in the Privacy battles of the last few years). As Facebook matures, it will be interesting to see if it will turn into the adult it can be or stay in the all endearing, but often tedious, teenage state.

Facebook Introduces Conversation Thread Feature

Continuing on the theme of a bottoms-up approach in which random feature changes are implemented in search of a larger strategy, Facebook introduced over the weekend a way for users to track conversations within their feeds or wall posts.  Originally, when users posted wall comments (wall-to-wall, post-on-wall), it was hard to follow the thread if you weren't the one posting the comment...the only way to follow the conversation was to click between the two profiles. Now Facebook is solving this issue with a breadcrumb (or thread) feature.

While this feature is great to have, bringing together lose conversation, enhancing Facebook's strength as a dialog platform, it could have been implemented much earlier, as part of execution on a UX requirements document that should have been developed to address user interaction goals which tie into...you guessed it: a strategy!

Facebook Redesign Audited: 5 Key Flaws in the Recent Redesign

By all accounts, the past year must have been a wild ride for Facebook--a company who has been on an unstoppable growth spurt, adding 20 million US users since February alone and posting double-digit growth in Europe and South America.

Today, on ReadWriteWeb, I discuss Facebook’s greatest growth challenge: its ability to execute on its strategy.  This discussion was sparked by the latest redesign--a mix and match of features, cosmetic "enhancments," architectural changes, and attempts at monetization. Some have already been returned to the previous design--some are here to stay.  And whether you love or hate the redesign, there are some key issues with the User Experience (UX), User Interaction (UI), and Information Architecture (IA) of the site. These are basic enough that they should have never made it live.

So what’s exactly wrong with the redesign? Here are but a few basic experience "don'ts"…feel free to add your own:

1. Instead of simplifying, it complicates: It used to be easy to find information. Now there’s new secondary navigation below the main navigation, navigation on the right…navigation on the left…navigation here…navigation there…which makes it awfully hard to find anything. So to help users navigate through the many changes, Facebook now displays a How-To box at the top of pages. This concept worked when Facebook wanted to help users regain their email settings after the company erased them a few months back…but when it’s a redesign that comes with a manual, it may be time to rethink the design…not the users.

2. Elements are used inconsistently: Profile images are square but thumbnails are rounded…then again, if you click to enlarge the thumbnail, it’s square again. For a company battling to demonstrate ROI, it leaves one wondering how this little design endeavor was justified.

3. Navigation is redundant: Did you realize that when you click the Facebook link in the top navigation and the Home link in the top navigation you get exactly the same page…only with different ads? Take a look: On the left is what you see when you click the Facebook page, on the right is what you see when you click Home.

4. More and more (and more) disruptive ads: About 15% of the site real-estate is now ads.  Even on users’ profile pages, Facebook, it seems, wants to sabotage the very thing it built: a personal, relevant, community experience by forcing down its own idea of what users should be looking at.

5. Overloading users: Facebook has thankfully taken this feature off, but you’ll remember that up until a few days ago, each of your friends’ update was followed by your thumbnail and text entry space. On a given page, you could see your own image showing up 10, 12, 20 times. Much too much.

And this brings me also to the things Facebook is doing right. For example, it quickly fixes the features that aggravate users. It is also trying to fix previous re-design snafus which made finding requests, invitations, and events more difficult.

Growing a business is difficult enough: There are physical demands such as for space and resources, market demands, user demands, business model demands, financial targets to hit, etc. It's a never ending job that doesn't stop when Zuckerberg leaves the office at night. A customer-centric design should be the last thing that holds Facebook back…and yet, it does time and time again, making monetization more difficult, slowly eroding the sense of a user-owned community, and creating a perception of a company in trial-and-error mode.

User experience should always come first. A company who is focused on delighting its customers, works to develop strategies around this mission, and executes on these strategies, never goes wrong. Just take a look at Apple, your Moleskine notebook, Disney, and even Amazon.com at one point. Each had one guiding mission: to make users fall in love with its products. Can Facebook do the same?

Facebook Turns Down the Noise on Managing Friend Requests

Facebook released its friend request management feature this week, allowing users to assign new friends to lists at the request level rather than having to manage lists ad-hoc. This is extremely helpful to facebook users who receive friend requests from people they do not know or for those users who want to limit access to sensitive information such as riske photos and updates.

With Facebook's list management feature at the request management level, you can now put to use facebook's blocking features early in the process without having to spend too much time scanning through your friends' list. For Facebook, this will likely result in an even greater network event since users will now add more people, knowing they can manage exposure risk. I predict we'll see an additional 5%-15% network expansion on Facebook in the coming 2 months as a result.

 

Now what about that site redesign we've been hearing about? Looking forward to graduating out of the FrontPage look and to all the goodness resources and web2.0 can bring.

Successful Companies Know: 10 Keys to Creating Excellent User and Customer Experiences

I've talked about the difference between User experience and Customer experience in a recent post. I've also talked plenty about why creating deliberate experiences is key to success that produces measurable advantages. This is so important especially now in these difficult times. Bottom line, without a compelling user experience, your users won't become your customers. Without customers...well--you know how that ends.

There are many (endless, in fact) tactical things you can do to ensure good user and customer experience. Ensure good usability, task flow, give customers a way to reach you and share feedback, etc. But when you start with tactical you also risk becoming reactive--a change here, a change there, per this or that user feedback--and you end up with a bunch of patches and no clear cause-and-effect to speak of. In short- a mess.

So before you get into taking action on creating winning user and customer experiences make sure you have these 10 meta-practices down and go from there:

1. Do you know who your customers are?  Conservatively speaking, at least 80% of the companies I speak with say they know their customers. Then we go down the product benefit list and look at adoption numbers and learn that the Total Addressable Market may be completely different than the company had thought. Before you do anything else--and regardless of how far along you've come--step back and reassess: are you sure you know who your best customer is? The one with most money to spend? The one who needs this the most? The one who can help you spread the word? You'll need to look at your blue sky customers (that huge group of people who will have adopted your product once you've crossed the chasm) and then work your way back to identify your own personal bowling pin model. It takes discipline, focus, careful planning and execution--but without it you risk finding yourself with only a handful of enthusiastic customers having missed a great opportunity to make a large impact.


2. Make sure you know the difference between your users and customers' needs. Your users and your customers may have completely different needs. For example, Blockbuster.com's users browse the site for new releases, recommendations, and general information. They need access to information and ability to quickly move between info bits no strings attached. Blockbuster wants to do this because it builds credibility, and, if done right, gives Blockbuster an opportunity to convert users to customers in little to no effort on their part. When users become customers on Blockbuster.com, they pay a monthly fee for renting movies either through the site or in-store--a brilliant distribution model that gave Netflix a run for its money a when Blockbusters first came out with the plan.  These customers have needs that are similar to Blockbuster's users but are also different. As  customers they demand additional benefits such as more information, a database of movies they've seen, personalized recommendations, and contact with the company.  If Blockbuster messes up that experience, customers will eventually switch.  So you see the importance in nailing the experience requirements of both users and customers and delivering to these flawlessly to both increase customer acquisition and to avoid defection.
   
   
3. Strategize, plan, execute. User and Customer experiences are not random outcomes of having a product out on the market. You need to very deliberately strategize, create a plan, then execute on the plan to create a user and customer experience that tie to and enhance your brand. Are you a free-form, messy, modular, personalized platform for artistic expression? (Go MySpace). Are you an on the spot, no frill, from anywhere broadcasting blog/photo site? (Go Posterous.)  Whatever your brand is, make sure your user and customer experience matches it and plan for growth so that it doesn't get out of whack when all of a sudden your product adoption curve shoots up.
   
    
   
4. There's a reason you have a plan: now stick to it! Avoid random designer-generated "cool to have" features that are out of alignment with your strategy. This if often tough since designers think they're users (they're not). Users also mistakenly think they're designers. (They're not.) If you do--and you should do--customer research, make sure your researcher is one highly skilled--synthesizing user data and deriving meaningful trends and recommendations is part science part art--get the best resources possible for this. You'll end up with a clear feature roadmap that includes absolute must-haves and nice-to-haves across 6-month intervals.
   
   
5. Iterate. Develop your product in iterations and test with users. This will spare you major redesigns and will help build the overall experience with both new and existing customers. Small bites, small changes--when they're framed correctly they lead to big results.
   
   
6. Stay abreast of what your competition is doing. About 3 in 5 companies I speak with don't really know who their competitors are and what they're working on. this sad number was validated by numerous VCs I spoke with. That can be deadly: No one is immune to a competitor coming in and sweeping real or forecast success. It can be an incumbent using scale and infrastructure to derail new startup efforts (just look at what Yelp! is doing in the UK) or an entrant throwing off an incumbent with innovative products that address a real problems in a better way (look at what eTrade did to traditional brokerage firms). So make sure you know who your competitors are--both direct and indirect--run a landscape audit every 3 months, and use all your informal channels to (legally) gather information. It's an important part of your edge.
   
   
7. Be prepared for customers. One of the greatest challenges new companies need to overcome is turning from a stealth garage operation to a real business that has customers. Remember that the moment you start selling your product--or making it available as part of your sales model, your users become your current or potential customers. Make sure you've mapped the optimal customer experience at each interaction and have put in place mechanisms to deliver on that experience. You don't have to do it all at once--just have a plan that you can execute on when the time comes.
   
   
8. Re-evaluate your user experience regularly.  You already know betas can give you great feedback about functionality and general likes/dislikes. But that's not enough. Once your product meets baseline requirements, you need to get down to the subtlety of users' experience. It's those things users don't yet know they want. The things that aren't being said. Did Apple users know they wanted an App store? Probably not. But they knew they wanted to do more things on their phone. Apple invested a great deal of attention and care in understanding what users haven't yet said and designing to it. By evaluating your users experience regularly you make sure you're still doing the right thing and also, if you ask the right questions, you'll learn where you need to take your product next. Eliciting Aha insights plays a huge role in competitive advantage and in your ability to continually delight your users and customers.
   
   
9. Build a relationship with your customers. Once users become your customers they're likely to become more demanding too. It doesn't only cost a company to acquire customers--it also costs your customers: It's expressed in dollars spent, time, or quality of results. This is when you need to run your company like a real business and ask for feedback, implement best practices, utilize industry standards, and regularly communicate to your customers that they're your greatest asset, reinforcing your relationship. As you grow you'll establish industry partnerships, Customer Advisory Boards (CACs) and more.
    
10. Surprise your users. There seems to be an unspoken agreement between startups and their users: You give them a way to be part of something new, or do something differently, and they in turn agree to be treated as "eyeballs" or "wallets" or "shares." Whatever the term de jour might be, it's never all that attractive.  So when you surprise your users with something new, something free, something that delights them even in the smallest of ways, you gain loyalty, trust, and...preference and longevity. Something all startups desperately need especially now. In essence, by doing something outside the expected straight line development, you establish an emotional bond (and get a few Karma points, I might add). Facebook could have charged for its iPhone app but it didn't. I still think it was a costly mistake but it sure got them a lot of points. Amazon and iTunes give users free MP3 downloads; Mufin and TuneStory among other differentiating features, let people download full-length songs to a playlist for free. True, there's a greater objective behind these--but as long as there's added, unexpected (free) value to your users, there's nothing wrong with that.

As you take a look at companies that succeed, you'll notice that they have clear user and customer experience principles. While their development is supported and enabled by technology, their strategies are guided by user and customer experience requirements, expectations, and needs.  They invest a great deal of attention and funds in understanding what their customers expect now (baseline must haves) and what they'll expect over specific milestones relevant for their sector or industry. In the tech startup world, it might be in 3 month intervals; in building machinery it might be 3 years.

To succeed, you too need to think of your users, your customers, how they're different and what makes them the same. Use this knowledge to create truly compelling experiences that can stand the test of time and entrants and continue to delivery experiences that turn users to customers and make it easy for customers to stick with you.

 

Facebook Email Settings Are Lost...And Found?

Some Facebook users noticed over the last couple of days that they no longer receive new email notifications. Just 20 minutes after posting a status update in which I pondered if other people were having the same problem, this is what I saw on my Facebook home page:

 

I'm not quite sure how customers should feel: is it the comfort of knowing Facebook is hearing their voice or the eeriness of having a Big Brother hovering above? Of course, this could be a mere coincidence...all I'm saying is that it's a bit strange.