首先说明我的个人看法： 敏锐的感觉（insight)和决策力是战略性的，战术上和执行上数据还是第一（Data is first)。
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UX Week 2010 Adam Mosseri Data Informed, Not Data Driven
Adam Mosseri
Page 1 of 12
My name is Adam Mosseri. I've been a product designer at Facebook for
about two years
now, and today I'd like to talk about how we at Facebook use data to
inform certain types
of decisions, but how we also are very skeptical of being overly data
driven. This is all
really about decision making and what informs our decisions, so I'd
like to start quickly
by talking about who makes the decisions.
It's important to understand that, at Facebook, we believe in
particularly small teams.
Most projects are about six or seven total. We believe in small teams
because we believe
they are more efficient, and speed is something that's incredibly
important to us. It's also
important to note that decisions are made by those teams.
I'm also a manager. I manage about nine product designers at Facebook.
I don't approve
any of their work. I give them feedback, and participate in feedback
systems, so they get
feedback from other designers as well. But teams, like a Photos team,
for instance, will
make a decision about the Photos product, pending only Mark Zuckerberg
our CEO's
approval, so it's a pretty flat decision-making structure. So I'm
gonna walk you quickly
through our team structure.
There's always a designer. This is Francis. How many of you guys are
designers here?
I'm sort of curious. Okay, so a bunch, nice. Product designers at
Facebook are
responsible for visual design, for interaction design, also for what
we call product design,
which is essentially product strategy, and we even do some front-end
implementation as
well.
There's almost always also a researcher. This is Gabe. Gabe loves Post-
Its, so I wanted
to show this. Do we have a lot of researchers? Not a lot of
researchers. Interesting. A
couple over there.
This wasn't the case two years ago when I started at Facebook.
Researchers were
involved in some projects, only the biggest, but not a lot of them.
But over the past two
years, I've seen us sort of grow to accept the importance of both
qualitative and
quantitative research, so this is now sort of an integral part of our
team.
We also have an engineer, usually between one and four. This is Ola.
He's actually our
most prolific engineer in the entire company, despite the blanket. But
you don't have a
lot of engineers, I don't think.
And then product managers. This is Blake. Blake is actually a director
of product at
Facebook. Product managers at Facebook are responsible not just for
project managing,
not just for making sure things ship on time, that everybody has what
they need, but also
for the quality of the product. They're sort of like mini-CEOs within
their projects
usually.
And, again, like I said, just so you know where I'm coming from, I'm a
designer first and
foremost. My main interest is in ensuring a certain quality of
experience. But today
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we're gonna talk about how these teams use data, and I'll stop at
talking about the ways
we do.
And we do use data. We value it. We store an incredible amount of
data. We have
about 20 people on the data team: 10 engineers, 10 data scientists. We
record about four
terabytes of data a day. We invested a lot in the technology to store
and query all this
data. We have, I believe, about ten petabytes' worth of storage, which
is an incredible
amount. And we believe it's important, but we use it in sort of
certain particular ways.
And the first way I'd like to talk about today is how we use it to
sort of optimize usually
workflows or interactions.
Data helps us understand how users use the product, which then in turn
helps us
understand how to optimize the product. And the most tangible and
recent example I
could think of for today was photo uploading. I've been working on
photos for the past
few months, and we recently, about two months ago, replaced our photo
uploader. To
give you a sense of scale, about – I believe it's – over 200 million
photos are uploaded a
day, and a few weeks ago we hit 50 billion photos in the system.
That's a ton of photos.
But we thought we could do better; we thought there were problems.
Actually, this is
pretty interesting. How many of you guys use Facebook? Nice. How many
of you guys
have struggled uploading photos to Facebook? Yeah, that's about a
third of you. So it's
pretty bad considering we're, I believe, the largest photo site on the
Web.
So we started with a hypothesis, as we usually do. The way we use data
can generally be
divided into two areas. There's hypothesis generation. And that
usually includes sort of
exploratory data analysis: we believe it's difficult to upload photos.
And then there's
hypothesis evaluation: iteration, testing, and that sort of thing.
So the hypothesis was quite simple in this case. It was that users
were having trouble
uploading photos. We knew this anecdotally, from our own experiences,
but also
because, as you can imagine, any time a friend, a relative, a loved
one has trouble
uploading photos, they call us personally.
So I'll walk you quickly through the current upload flow on the site.
You start on the
Photos dashboard. This is what we call the dashboard. It's on the
homepage. You can
also get here through the composer or the profile, and you click on
Upload Photos on the
top right of the page. You then get a form that asks you for some
information about the
album. You fill out some information; you say where it is or what it
was about. You
describe it.
And then you get to this page, which is sort of the start of the
problem. This page has too
many actions. First you select photos, and then you upload 'em. So you
click Select
Photos, then you get an OS dialogue, or an operating system dialogue,
that allows you to
select files. You select them. You hit okay. And then it tells you
you've selected six.
You can change your selection. Then you click Upload, and hopefully
you wait patiently
as it compresses and uploads your photos to Facebook. So this is a lot
of steps.
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Putting this presentation together was sort of – felt sort of like
airing our dirty laundry.
So a few months ago we decided to do a waterfall analysis of the photo-
uploading
experience. A waterfall analysis is simply taking a look at each step
in a flow and seeing
what happens.
So of users per session who try to upload photos now, only 87 percent
reach what we call
the ready state – that means that page you saw where it says Select
Photos, Upload
Photos – and everything's working. We lose some people to – some
people decide not to
upload photos 'cause the page takes too long to load. Some people
don't have the most
recent version of Flash, and we're currently using Flash for photo
uploading. So we lose
a bunch of people right off the bat. This is actually pretty bad.
Only 57 percent of users actually select photos. In this case,
selecting photos means not
only clicking Select Photos but also finding some files and
successfully selecting them.
Fifty-two percent actually upload photos, so that's click the Upload
button, 'cause you can
change your selection. And then 48 percent are actually successful. We
lose 4 percent to
poor load times, bugs, etc. It's pretty bad, but it's actually
significantly better than where
we were.
If you look over the past two months, you can see the photo success
rate has increased
from 34 percent to the mid-40s. Now, this was a new Flash uploader.
I'll talk about the
old Flash – I mean a new photo uploader, and I'll talk about the old
photo uploader in a
little bit. But we're continuously iterating on it, removing bugs,
removing pain points,
removing steps, etc. And we watch this – this is sort of data driven.
This is one of the
types of products that are data driven.
But I wanted to dive into one specific change we made. We found that
85 percent of
users, when we first launched this, were selecting only one photo for
an album, which is
clearly not ideal for us or for them. And we wanted to figure out why,
so we took a look
at the UI that users used to select photos, and they use this.
This is called an operating system file selector. We don't actually
have control over this
interface. This is the Mac OS version; there's a Windows version as
well. But it's very
difficult here to select multiple files. You have to click on one and
hold Option or Shift
and then click on another, and this proved to be very difficult for
the vast majority of our
users.
So we did what we don't like to do: we added another step. After you
click Select
Photos, we gave a little – we showed you a little tip that said "You
can select multiple
photos; this is how you do it." There was a little bit of friction,
but we believed it was
important, 'cause clearly a lot of people were struggling.
This resulted in a drop on the number of people who were uploading
only one photo,
from 85 percent to 40 percent, which was huge. We also only show you
this dialogue
until you successfully select two, and then we never show it to you
again. This meant
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that photos – per attempt. This 90 percent success, this is per
attempt, increased from 3
to 11, which is a big win for us.
This graph is actually interesting. This is photos per upload attempt,
and you can see that
– this is over two months. You can see there's about eight spikes.
Does anybody have
any idea why there's spikes? What was that, weekends? Sundays. People
upload photos
of their interesting weekends on Sundays. We see really interesting
patterns in the data
all the time. It's about 150 percent of the average, every Sunday. So
this was an example
of how we use data to sort of optimize a workflow. We're very
comfortable doing this.
Another type of way we use data which is significantly different is to
sanity check
decisions we make for non-data reasons. So it's a little bit
complicated, but we do things
for all sorts of reasons, and we have key metrics that are very
important to us. And so we
generally sanity check our changes with it, by running A/B tests. At
our size, we can
launch a product to a small percentage of users, like half a percent,
and get statistically
relevant data very quickly, which is really just sort of convenient.
So I wanna talk specifically about what we call the composer. The
composer is what we
call internally the "What's on your mind?" input field that you see at
the top of your
homepage, right above the News Feed. I'll try to show it to you here.
This is the way
that most – not most users. This is the way that a lot of users update
their status. But
once you click on it, you get a few other options: add a photo, post a
link – what was the
other one? Oh, add a video, etc.
But recently, we've started to roll out our Questions product. I think
we've finished
rolling out in the U.S. Do you guys all have the Questions product?
Yes, no, maybe?
Well, anyway, for Questions, it was important for us to surface a
really easy way for you
to just ask a question on the homepage, and this "What's on your
mind?" input field
wasn't gonna cut it. It didn't really afford us that sort of
flexibility.
So we wanted to test moving the composer to more of a selection-based
model, so we
tested a couple options. We tested a version that was just four links
across the top, so we
could add an "ask a question" link. We were worried, though, that this
would decrease
the number of status updates, because the relative prominence of
statuses is less here.
And it did; it decreased status updates by about 1 percent.
We also tested a version here where we tried to incentivize users to
update their status by
showing them their most recent status. The idea would be that stale
content would
motivate you to upload – to update your status. And it worked
marginally. It was about a
.5 percent increase in status updates. That wasn't actually
statistically significant, but we
saw it in the data.
And then we tested a big option. We always test the big option. This
was links and an
input field. This resulted in a 2 percent increase in status updates
and a 2 percent increase
in photo uploads. But the real – the truth at the end of the day and
what we were actually
hoping for – and we actually ran around eight different versions, not
just three that I
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showed you here – was that none of these really significantly moved
our key metrics,
which was what we really wanted, actually. We wanted to make sure that
we could go
with the UI that we thought was the best, and so we went with the
simple one, 'cause the
homepage is very complicated; I'd argue it's significantly too
complicated. It's very
important that News Feed is high up on the page, so we went with the
simplest, lightest
version. This is actually a pretty recent example. This is – I'm not
even sure if it's fully
rolled out.
And the third way I wanna talk about how we do use data, and
comfortably, is to evaluate
retroactively projects. This usually is for small projects. I'm gonna
talk a bit about the
deactivation page. The deactivation page is the page you get when you
decide to leave
Facebook, which we find sad. And Lee Byron, a designer at Facebook,
actually
spearheaded this project. It was his idea. He designed it; he built
it; he ran the tests; and
he shipped it.
And the idea was that the current version of the deactivation page –
this was in mid-2008
– was just a form. We wanted to know why you were leaving, but we
didn't ask you to
stay. We didn't give you a reason to stay. So he thought about being
somewhat
emotionally manipulative, and he did this.
[Audience laughter]
As you can see, it says – there's a picture of my friend Aaron, and it
says, "Aaron will
miss you," and then Kevin, and "Kevin will also miss you"; "Send Wayne
a message."
To just hit that emotional chord, to give you a reason to stay, to
make you feel guilty
about leaving. And it was wildly successful. It reduced deactivations
by 7 percent.
Seven percent at this point is millions and millions of users still on
Facebook, 'cause this
was a year and a half ago and when we were about 70 million users.
And so this project was entirely data driven, but it was in sort of a
mid-size project. This
wasn't a homepage redesign or a new version of Photos or a new version
of Groups, and
so we're comfortable with it in these areas.
But I think it's fair to say that, at Facebook, in product – we call
product "product
management and product design" – that there's a healthy skepticism of
being overly data
driven, maybe even too much so. But I thought a lot about this for
this presentation, and
I tried to articulate why: why we're really so skeptical of overusing
data.
And the most straightforward reason I could think of was that it's
very difficult for a set
of metrics to fully represent what you value. There are a lot of
factors that go into
making any sort of product decision, as I'm sure you guys all know.
Quantitative data is one. We use it, as I've showed you over the past
three examples.
Qualitative data is another. Our researchers run qualitative tests all
the time. We have a
usability lab; an eye tracker, which is pretty amazing, actually, if
you ever get the chance
to use one; etc.
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Strategic interests are another factor we use in making decisions, as
I talked about with
the Questions product. User interests are another: what people
complain about, what can
people ask for.
Network interests, which are actually significantly different.
Competition clearly factors
into our decision making. Regulatory bodies at this point. At our
scale, we have to deal
with privacy advocacy groups. The European Union had a lot to say
about Questions –
oh, no, sorry, about Places. So we deal with them, and we looped 'em
in on decisions.
And business interests. This is actually, on purpose, small because
explicitly we value
revenue generation right now less than growth and engagement, growth
being defined as
how many users come onto the site, engagement being defined as how
often users use the
site. So these are all important factors that we use in making our
decisions.
And so this is sort of implicitly understood at Facebook, and every
once in a while we
experiment with something that's a little bit maybe too data driven,
I'd say. So I'd like to
talk about a pretty recent example, which we called internally the
engagement team.
We've gotten away with a lot of designing for ourselves over the past
six years. And
recently we've decided to really invest in trying to understand why
users use the product
as much as they do and how to sort of motivate them or to persuade
them to use it more.
So we created a team we called the engagement team, which was tasked
with
understanding engagement and increasing it significantly, but also
with quantifying it,
which was sort of the dangerous piece.
And our first attempt at quantifying engagement was RAW, reads and
writes. So what do
I mean by that? We talk a lot about the social graph internally and
externally. The social
graph is the digital representation on Facebook of real-world
entities. Your relationship
with a friend, we call a friendship. You going to a party, we call a –
you are RSVPing to
an event. Your football team is a group. And we believe that – or we
talk about that the
social graph is just objects and connections between objects within
the system that
represent real-life entities. And we talked about what reads and
writes are. Reads are
creations of either objects or connections between objects – sorry,
writes. And what
reads are, are what they sound like: reads of that information.
And so we just decided to treat all writes equal and all reads equal,
and start to try to
optimize for that. We did this over the past few months, and we ended
up with products
like comment liking. Comment liking is what it sounds like. We
produced – we put the
product that allowed you to quickly and easily like a comment. Here,
Saleo said, "Fine,"
and for some reason I liked it. This, actually, biometric was wildly
successful. It
produced an 11 percent, I believe, increase in likes throughout the
entire system. This is
really good for our metric goals.
But there was sort of a feeling within the team or within the company
that this really
might not be the best thing to optimize for. We sort of got what we
asked for. This type
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of write, the fact that you like the comment, is explicitly or
obviously less valuable than
you telling us that you had a baby or that you switched jobs or that
you moved
companies. So clearly, all writes weren't created equal, and we
started to struggle with
this.
We also started to struggle with what we found ourselves optimizing
for. We found that
85 percent of the content in the system was generated by users who log
in more than 25
days a month. That's a lot of users – or, sorry, a lot of days. That's
actually around 20
percent of users in the system.
But we realized that if we start optimizing for this percentage, for
these heavy users, for
these power users, that'll be invariably at the expense of our more
casual users. Casual
users are important to us too; some of 'em become heavy users. There's
no reason why
you can't log into Facebook once a week instead of 25 days a month.
And we realized
that we were over-optimizing for a small user segment at the expense
of the rest.
So what we're doing – and I actually have a brainstorm today back at
the office – is trying
to reevaluate this metric. We created this team; we're committed to
understanding
engagement, but clearly the metric-driven approach isn't working for
us, and specifically
that metric is poor.
So another reason why – to move on – why we are skeptical of data-
driven design is that
we find that overreacting to data often leads to what we call micro-
optimizations. A
micro-optimization is when one interest over-optimizes for itself at
the expense of
another, and this is a very difficult thing for us as we scale.
As we scale, a division of labor becomes invariably sort of more
intense, and you have
different people representing different interests. We have a Photos
team; we have a
growth team; we have an engagement team; we have a News Feed team,
etc. And all of
these teams optimize in good faith for their own interests. But
sometimes these interests
can be sort of opposing or distracting from each other, and sometimes
you can get lost in
the specifics of a decision and sort of miss what we think of as the
big picture.
So I'm gonna give you an example of something that launched that was
core to our
product for a long time, that I think was a poor decision. And it's
what I call the
application menu, or we called internally the application menu.
This was the site in early 2008, and the navigation was on the left.
That's how you
navigated to what we call applications. Applications are photos,
groups, events, notes,
but also platform applications – PackRat, Mafia Wars, FrontierVille,
etc.
And we redesigned the whole site – right when I started at Facebook,
actually – with the
idea that we wanted to move the navigation to the top, explode the
frame, and allow
content on the site to sort of thrive. The application menu moved from
being a list on the
left to a dropdown at the top of the page. And this resulted in a
significant decrease in
traffic to applications, and this was a big problem for developers.
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So we were committed to this though, so we started to explore how can
we increase the
prominence. So we moved it to the bottom of the page, as you can see
it here. Not
particularly prominent, but it increased traffic significantly. We
even tried the "big blue
button" approach. This resulted in a 5x increase in traffic, but we
all hated it, so we
actually didn't launch this, so maybe we didn't do as poorly as we
could've done.
But what we were doing here is we were optimizing for a local maximum.
Within this
framework, there was only so much traffic we could funnel to
applications. And what we
needed was a structural change. Our premise was sort of off. Our
interests were
basically leading us down the wrong path, and we didn't realize it,
and we launched this.
This existed on the site for a year. But it did spawn a few of the
conversations about
navigation and how navigation should operate and persistence and about
platform
navigation versus internal navigation. And it ended up resulting in a
team that designed
this, which is the current crumb – what we call the crumb – the
current navigation of the
site, which was sort of a half-step backwards, to a left nav with a
wider frame and a bit of
a more flexible system.
So we were optimizing for something locally, and we needed to be
somewhat disruptive
to sort of get out of it. And this resulted in an increase in
application traffic, but this was
about a year later.
Another example of a local optimization – or a local maximum where we
got lost chasing
a local maximum is the old photo uploader, the one that existed
temporarily, briefly
before the one I showed you, and it looked like this. And this photo
uploader was
awesome.
Basically, within the context of Facebook, we allowed you to browse
your file system,
see thumbnails of photos, and select what you like. You could select
photos from
different folders. You could click Upload, and you can continue to
navigate the site
while it was uploading. It was a really great experience.
But the problem was, to enable this, to give us access to the file
system, we had to build a
browser plug-in, a downloadable – something you had to download and
execute. In
Safari it looked like this. You got a very scary warning that said,
"An applet from
Facebook is requesting access to your computer." It was actually much
worse in IE. In
Internet Explorer, you got an ActiveX control. If any of you have seen
that, it's a 11-
pixel, tiny yellow thing across the top of the page you're supposed to
find. In certain
browsers, you had to download and install something. A lot of users
actually don't
understand the difference.
And we did a waterfall analysis, and we found that, out of the roughly
1.2 million people
a day that we asked to install the uploader, only 37 percent even
tried to. That means that
63 percent said, "Piss off," like "This sounds like – this is either
spam," or "I don't trust
you," or "I don't know what this is," or "I don't understand," or "I
got lost somewhere in
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the process," and they didn't even try. And only 23 percent were
actually successful.
This is abysmal.
Twenty-three percent is a little bit misleading. Out of the 1.2
million who tried to install,
there was another 600,000 that already had it installed. So the
overall success rate was
around 40, 45 percent, which is about where we've gotten recently, if
you remember this
slide from earlier.
But what we needed to do was start over, really. We had reached our
local maximum,
which was around 40 percent, 45 percent. We had been optimizing for
months. We had
made substantial gains, but we had plateaued, and what we needed is to
move to a
completely new uploader. And we've reached our previous performance,
and we're still
on an upward trajectory 'cause it's still a new project.
But this is somewhat disruptive, which leads nicely I think into my
last point, which is
why – or my last reason why we're pretty wary of being data driven,
which is that we
really believe – and this is a little bit controversial – that real
innovation invariably
involves disruption. And disruption is usually – involves a dip in
metrics.
And this is core to our sort of culture. It's core to our product
beliefs. It's one of the main
reasons why I joined Facebook. I joined in 2008, but I started to try
to join in 2007
because I saw News Feed, and News Feed was an example of a project
that was executed
in lieu of, in spite of, or just oblivious to data.
Does anybody remember this version of the site? This is pretty
awesome.
[Audience laughter]
This is Ezra. Ezra was actually employee No. 6 at Facebook. This is
what it looked like.
And the way people used this site back then is they navigated from
profile to profile,
essentially trolling for interesting information. And we had – we knew
that this wasn't
ideal. It was actually good for the standard metrics at the time for
engagement, i.e., page
views. People loaded a lot of pages in search of something
interesting.
But we thought we could do better. We thought we could surface what
was interesting to
you right there on the homepage, create a custom social newspaper for
you, and we called
it News Feed internally but – yeah, both internally and externally.
And it looked like this
when we first launched it.
And this, if you remember, had a massive backlash. Users hated us. We
got a ton of bad
press. This is one of my favorite quotes: "Generation Facebook is
taking action – against
Facebook" – Time magazine. TechCrunch hit us. There has been an
overwhelmingly
negative public response to Facebook's launch of two new products. The
two new
products were News Feed and Mini-Feed, which is your feed on your
profile.
But we stuck to it. We believed in it. We added some privacy settings.
Mark wrote a
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letter to the entire user base about – explaining what we were doing
and why. And
eventually it ended up becoming the primary driver of traffic and
engagement on the site.
It is probably our greatest success story.
But I think it's only fair, if I'm talking about bold moves in spite
of data that were
successful, is to acknowledge some of our failures.
Beacon was a project where the basic idea was that Facebook shouldn't
just be about
what happens on Facebook. When you go to Facebook, you should see what
your friends
are doing all over the world. And the way that manifested was that we
would allow thirdparty
sites – that is, sites that are not Facebook – to funnel your activity
back to
Facebook. So if you created a review on Yelp, it would come back to
Facebook. If you
wrote a review on Rotten Tomatoes, it would come back to Facebook. And
it looked
somewhat like this. Basically, in your News Feed at the top of your
homepage, we threw
those stories. We created stories about things you were doing off of
Facebook.
But we did this – it was opt-out. We did this implicitly. And the
classic terrible story
was when Christmas was coming up, and you bought your girlfriend a
nice bag on
Amazon. And then she logged into Facebook, and she saw that you bought
a nice bag on
Amazon, and either you had spoiled Christmas by letting her know what
she got
beforehand or she found out that you were buying a bag for somebody
else, and this was
just terrible. It blew up, and we tried to stick to our guns, and
eventually we had to sort
of roll back and make it opt-in – yeah, make it opt-in.
And it's a pain point. It's actually difficult for us to talk about.
But I wanna acknowledge
it. It's real. Along with trying to innovate and trying to make bold
moves comes – you
run the risk of failure, and you have to just understand failure,
acknowledge it, and move
on.
A couple other projects that were made sort of in spite of data or in
lieu of data were
homepage redesigns. We've done this a number of times. I've actually
worked on the
last two, so if you hate them, you can e-mail me later.
This was the homepage in 2009. This was March of 2009 we launched
this. This had
nothing to do with data. The idea here was that we wanted to make the
News Feed
entirely about what your friends were saying. So instead of
algorithmically deciding
what we thought was interesting, we showed you everything your friends
were saying:
the photos they were posting, the status updates they were writing,
etc.
It being all-inclusive also meant that we sort of were focusing on
recency and voice. We
didn't say what your friends were doing, so if your friend RSVP'd to
an event, we didn't
tell you; if your friend joined a group, we didn't tell you. But if
your friend posted a
status, we told you. So the idea was the focus on voice, the focus on
recency – 'cause it
updated in real time 'cause it was all-inclusive – and to focus on
simplicity, determinism.
You knew how News Feed worked.
UX Week 2010 Adam Mosseri Data Informed, Not Data Driven Page 11 of 12
Adam Mosseri
www.verbalink.com Page 11 of 12
It did increase comments significantly, and it did tank wall posts
significantly, but we
were gonna go forward with this no matter what, 'cause we believed in
it for strategic
reasons.
Another one – homepage redesign which we talked about briefly was this
one, which was
about improving and simplifying the navigation on the site. Instead of
the way – the way
before this to get to photos was you had to find a 16-by-16-pixel icon
in the bottom left of
the screen in a gray bar, which was very difficult for a lot of users,
and we knew this was
wrong. This resulted in an increase in traffic to applications, but we
were gonna move
forward with this.
But I do wanna take a moment to acknowledge that when you make these
big changes,
when you don't take baby steps – and I actually do believe in baby
steps – there's a cost.
There's a very real cost.
This is a real group on Facebook called "I automatically hate the new
Facebook
homepage."
[Audience laughter]
This is awesome. This is, like, my favorite group. There's over 23,000
members, and
some of the hate groups had millions of members. Sometimes it was –
you would have a
hate group about one homepage redesign that would then exist until
another homepage
redesign, and people would join that, at which point you had people
who were hating on
both, and so you wanted to go to one or the other. It gets really
complicated. But it's
real, and we need to understand it, and we need to be somewhat
sympathetic.
The way I think about it is that the average user who logs into
Facebook today will spend
about 46 minutes on Facebook. That's crazy. That's a lot of time. Now,
if you spent 45
minutes every night at your desk organizing your photos, writing
letters to your friends,
doing your thing, your social sort of activity, and then I came by
with no provocation,
with no heads-up, and I just rearranged your desk for you, you're
gonna be pissed. It's
gonna happen. I'm messing with your desk. That's real. That's a real
sense of
entitlement, and it's – you can argue with it all you like, but the
truth is we need to
understand that.
So moving forward, we need to understand how to message our
motivations behind our
major decisions better by explaining value add to users better.
There's clearly a lot of
room for improvement. But I do believe that you'll see us continue to
make big changes
that you'll be like, "How is this good for data?" or "How is this good
for anybody?" but
there's a reason behind it. Usually it's either because we believe
that this is where the
market is going, or it enables a product that's gonna come later, or
we're worried about
being stagnant and we wanna continually innovate.
UX Week 2010 Adam Mosseri Data Informed, Not Data Driven Page 12 of 12
Adam Mosseri
www.verbalink.com Page 12 of 12
For us, the greatest risk is really taking no risk at all. That's why
I'm at the company.
That is, like, pervasive from Mark, all the way down through to all of
engineering, all of
product, etc. And I believe in this. I really, really do.
That doesn't mean we can't do better. That doesn't mean I'm not
pushing for us to do
better. But it means that at the end of the day we make decisions
based on common
sense, on interests, on strategic interests. And we use data. We
acknowledge it's
important, but it's really just a small piece of the pie.
So that's actually all I have today. Again, my name is Adam Mosseri.
My e-mail is
Mosseri at Facebook. If you liked this or you thought I'm totally off
base, I'm really
actually open to feedback. But thanks for your time.
[End of Audio]
简单地用中文总结要点如下：
1. Facebook特别信任产品设计团队
“ It's important to understand that, at Facebook, we believe in
particularly small teams. ”
这就如同Scrum开发模式。5，6个人的开发团队往往是思维活跃，易协作，高效率，且易管理的项目组织结构。
团队中一位team leader(project leader)，一位BA/IA，三位工程师。当然外部还是需要一个engineer manager来进行组织方面的支持和管理。
2. 数据帮助我们了解用户如何使用我们的产品，我们因此懂得如何优化我们的产品。
“ Data helps us understand how users use the product, which then in
turn helps us understand how to optimize the product. ”
Facebook庞大的用户访问和交互行为为它带来了海量的用户行为日志数据，分析这些数据，找到改进方案，再结合A/B测试，为不断地优化用户界面和交互提供了基础和方法。
3. Facebook认为产品是产品管理和产品设计组成的，这其中就包含了秉持怀疑的态度来防止过度地数据驱动。
“…at Facebook, in product – we call product "product management and
product design" – that there's a healthy skepticism of being overly
data driven ”
演讲者提到数据怀疑论的三个原因：
一组数据指标很难完整地代表你所重视的价值
影响产品决策的因素很多，除了定量数据，还有定性数据。Facebook的用户研究员会做大量定性研究，如可用性测试、眼动测试等。另外还有战略因素，
用户需求，竞争产品，商业利益因素。
过度依赖于数据，可能导致“微优化”或“局部最大化”
对数据的变化过度敏感，可能导致所谓的“微优化”(micro-optimization)，即过度着重、不断追求某一项指标的提升，而忽略了其他因 素。尤其当Facebook规模不断扩大，各个团队更专一于自己的产品，就可能导致各自只从自己的指标出发，使得整体上出现冲突，没有了全局观。
例如 ，应用菜单的设计几经周折，位置从左边栏换到顶部，又换到底部，由于流量不见大增，还曾考虑使用蓝色大按钮的方案。虽然流量提高了5倍，但由于设计师自己都觉得很难接受，这个方案最终没有被发布。无论如何，直到一年后他们才发现，尽管朝着提高引导到应用的流量这一指标不断优化，却出现停滞不前、 达到局部最大化(local maximization)的瓶颈。最终他们成立了一个菜单项目组，推翻之前的重新开始，设计了目前的版本——而这实际上有一半回归到菜单最初的样子。
另一个例子是相片上传器。相片团队花了好几个月朝着提高上传成功率的数字优化， 虽然数字有提升 ， 但成功率已几乎稳定，不可能有什么新的变化了。如果一直围着这个指标打转，体验并不会有质的变化。
真正的创新通常会导致数据的变差 ， 但这未必是坏事 。
“… real innovation invariably involves disruption. And disruption is usually – involves a dip in metrics ”
Facebook一个核心价值在于打破，甚至扰乱。这往往导致某些指标变差，但这也是创新的意义所在。他们曾经有不少无视民意无视数据的革新，比如新首页，就完全不是根据数据来的。当然，他们的革新有的成功（News Feed和Mini Feed），有的失败（如Beacon，将你在外站行为导入到FB的功能）。失败了，只要理解失败、承认失败，就能继续向前。不可能因为害怕数据变差而拒绝变革。但是， 变革有时候会因为扰乱用户而造成他们的反感，坚持变革，不代表不聆听。如演讲者提到他最喜欢的Facebook group是“我不由自主地讨厌新的Facebook首页”。需要学会如何更好地向用户传达革新的目的和意义。
4. 最大的冒险在于不敢冒险
“For us, the greatest risk is really taking no risk at all… at the end
of the day we make decisions based on common sense, on interests, on strategic interests. And we use data. We acknowledge it's important, but it's really just a small piece of the pie. ”
（ 对我们而言，最大的冒险在于不敢冒险……很多时候，我们最终依靠常识、洞见、战略意义做决策。我们使用数据，数据很重要，但这只是大饼的一小块）
