Hi everybody, thanks for coming early in the morning.
Thank you to the committee for inviting me.
It's certainly a privilege to be here.
I work in a team at Facebook called Creative Solutions.
And basically, our job is to try and help the world's
leading brands and agencies understand social design,
understand social behavior, the basic tenets
of social behavior, understand the big shifts that
are happening in the world around this movement
towards this idea of social, mobile.
I'm going to talk about information, which is that
are big shifts that we see.
So my job is to help all those guys.
What I want to go through this morning is basically things
that I've learned, kind of things we've figured out
or picked up, mostly through making a ton of mistakes
along the way, and basically give you guys some
actual patterns that I hope will reframe how you think
about social experiences and help you kind of design
better things.
So I'm going to start by talking about two, oh, we might
have a clicker issue.
Hang on a sec.
All right, this doesn't seem to work.
All right, I'm going to re-jigger this a little bit.
Hang on.
I'm trying not to stand behind the podium.
OK, I'm going to stand behind the podium.
All right.
Usually, I walk around a lot.
Do you want to have to do that?
See if you can get that clicker working.
Oh, we didn't plug it in.
All right.
OK, for now.
So two things.
And I apologize to those of you guys who drank a lot last
night, because I'm getting deep pretty fast.
There's basically two, oh, hang on.
There's two truths about humanity.
The first, oh, hang on.
All right, we're back.
The first is that people want to feel unique.
This is true for everybody here.
You want to feel that you have a unique place in the world,
that you're different, that you're special,
that you're an individual, and that being in the world
is a really important thing for you personally
and for the people that you interact with.
And the second thing is that people
want to feel connected, that they're connected to something
larger, that are part of a meaningful group.
These two things can be a paradox.
All of us want both of these things.
We want to feel unique and personal,
and we want to feel connected to something deeper, something
more meaningful.
And these two things drive a lot of the ways in which we
think about designing social experiences.
Being able to feel unique and project that to the world
and being part of a group, and that group can be of any size,
but to feel you're connected to the rest of the 7 billion
people on Earth.
So one of the most common questions that I get asked
is, help me understand this social thing.
And I use the word social.
Like this morning, I'm talking about social experiences
and social design, but I think that's
going to go away.
Because talking about social behavior in the abstract
is actually pretty weird.
It's not like we're talking to our friends,
but organizing a party for the weekend and say,
hey, you know, it's going to be a good party on Friday night.
I've got a bunch of people coming.
We don't turn to them and say, hey, can you make it social?
That's not what we say, I hope.
Yet that is what the briefs we get say.
That is the types of conversations
that we have in design meetings.
And the second thing that I get asked a lot is,
how do I make people share my stuff?
Sharing is this big deal.
And again, sharing is a weird word.
Like sharing is a means to an end.
Nobody turns to each other and says,
what were you doing last night?
And they turn and say, I was sharing.
Nobody says that.
Yet that is the way we describe these things.
And they're the kind of predominant things
that we talk about.
So this idea that social behavior is actually
inherent in all of us and is so fundamental to humanity
that this term is going to go away.
Or the social web will be the web.
Social business will be business.
Social experiences will be experiences.
It's so fundamental to us that actually it's
changing the structure of the web.
So I've spent the last four years in Silicon Valley,
working at Google, working at Facebook,
talking to a lot of startups and a lot of new companies.
And now I talk to a lot of people who
are building our platform.
And you can see this shift.
It's really, really huge.
We're moving away from this world of this kind of beta period.
I like to call it for the web, which is content.
We have this idea that people go online,
look at different types of content.
It's all linked together.
We have things like information architecture,
trying to figure out how it works.
And that's basically disappearing.
Or we certainly will disappear in the next few years.
And move towards something that looks much more like this,
which is basically every time you're served data,
whether that's in a phone, in an app, on a website,
every single time, it'll be personalized.
And it's already happening to a huge degree.
And people don't even realize it.
And most people don't even realize it.
What you see in Google search results
is different to what other people see.
Obviously, your Facebook experience
is completely different to other people
because they have different friends.
They follow and like different things.
So basically, every time you will bring with you
your friends, your interests, and your friends' interests.
And you'll decide whether or not you're
going to share that data with whatever company
you're interacting with.
And that will totally change the experience.
The big deal for us, I think, in this industry,
in interaction design, is understanding
that we are no longer designing destinations.
That is how we used to think about things.
That's not the way to think about them for the future.
We're designing systems.
We're designing things that aggregate content in real time,
totally different kind of way of thinking about stuff.
And this is basically how we think about Facebook.
If you talk to people who are designing Facebook
and building Facebook, the last thing you'll hear
is someone describe it as a website.
It's not a website.
It's a system.
And it looks like this.
And thankfully, I'm not expecting you
to try and internalize this.
This is basically, you don't need to worry about the details.
This is basically what I whiteboard for a lot of people,
when I'm trying to describe what Facebook is to them.
It's basically all these different components.
And I'll describe this in more detail later.
All these components, they're all interacting with each other.
It's a system.
When you do one thing over here, things happen over here.
And all the times that we're designing stuff,
we're trying to figure out all the different things that
are at play at the same time.
It's very different to designing any kind of destination
that has a linear sequence through it.
So that's social.
The second term that I hate, I'm trying
to change people's perceptions of, is mobile.
So mostly, when you talk about mobile,
you very quickly get into things about tablets versus phones,
versus screen size, resolution, gestures.
How do we make this so people can swipe this way, swipe that way?
New interaction patterns for screen mobile tablet-based
design.
I think thinking about technology as a primary way
of thinking about mobile is the wrong path.
Or actually, you're off in a kind of deep corner of the forest
when there's much, much bigger things happening.
And the best way I have to describe this big change
in mobile is to steal an analogy from Ben Horowitz,
who's an investor in Silicon Valley, who I heard say this
at Web 2.0 a few years ago.
And I'm basically just, I've stolen and slightly adapted it.
He basically described how mobile is basically
are very similar to the time when a car was invented.
So at the time, people are literally
looking at this thing going, it's not a horse.
Like, I know that much.
Like, what is it?
So they were obsessing about steam coming off.
It's not a steam engine.
They're obsessing about the technology.
How works?
How does it get from A to B without like, it's not a horse?
And mobile is very similar.
We are obsessed with the technology,
but new types of devices, iPhone 5s, iOS 6, Android,
we're like really deep into the technology.
And there are way bigger things happening.
So mobile, in many ways, will do to our society
what the car did.
The car completely changed how we live.
Suburbia did not exist before the car was invented.
It totally changed the dynamics of neighborhoods
and people interacting with one another.
The car also changed commerce.
It completely changed the economics of buying and selling.
Because suddenly, people could basically
build big, huge warehouses on the edge of town,
pack it full of stuff for way cheaper than being
in the center of town.
People could just drive out and buy stuff for cheap.
So suddenly, local retailers, local businessmen,
business people who've been in years,
through families for generations, could no longer compete.
And mobile is going to do the same thing.
It is going to fundamentally change our society in ways
we can't predict.
And it's going to fundamentally change commerce.
And I have no idea how or why.
And I hope a lot of you guys know better than I,
and will go ahead and make these things.
What I do know is that if in a world where you can get
information in your pocket in a split second about anything,
any brand, who bought this?
Did my friends buy it?
Did they like it?
How much did it cost?
Is it cheaper down the road?
Who else bought it?
Are they cool?
Are they like me?
Do I want to aspire to be like them?
Is this thing trending?
Is it going up?
Is it going down?
Is it going in a fashion, out of fashion?
All these things, they're like off the top of my head.
There's hundreds of permutations,
those questions that will totally change how people decide
what to buy.
So mobile is a really, really big deal.
And it's not about tablets, or phones.
It's about commerce and society.
The other thing that I remind people about mobile
is that 4.5 billion people on Earth
have never used the internet.
We don't think about that.
We think about our world, where we all have smart phones
and super fast connections.
These people, in a small number of years,
will have access to the internet,
but they will not know what a mouse is.
They will not know what a kind of Windows-type environment is.
And Microsoft are adapting to this change.
This is a really, really big deal.
Mobile is going to totally change
how our global society works.
So is that deep enough for a Wednesday morning hungover?
All right.
So the third thing, social mobile.
And the reason I'm talking about these things
is because I don't think you can talk about designing
social experiences without talking
about mobile and information.
So the third thing is information.
This is also pretty mind-blowing.
The amount of information that's being published
is increasing exponentially.
So we have things like Wikipedia.
There are over 1,000 articles added to Wikipedia
every single day.
That's on top of all the existing edits
to all the existing articles.
With phones, people are publishing more and more stuff
all the time.
Where we've been, what we've listened to,
what we're eating, which I have no idea why there's
so many pictures of food on the internet, but there are,
what we're eating, who we're with.
We're just publishing more and more and more content.
And it's going up exponentially.
The second thing is that we've accessed all that
exponentially-increasing information.
So when I grew up, we had 24 encyclopedias in my house.
And how many of you guys had a set of 24 encyclopedias?
So all of our parents bought them,
and no one ever read them.
But at least we looked good when the neighbor's called around.
And that was the boundary.
You could go to the library, maybe.
That was the boundary of information.
That's totally changing.
We have all this exponentially-increasing information,
and we've accessed to it anywhere.
Take out your phone.
You can get access to this stuff in real time,
anywhere in the world.
You can be in, this is a photo from a remote jungle.
You can be in remote parts of Earth.
You have phone signals, and people
can access this information.
So accessing this exponentially-increasing
information anywhere and anytime.
The final thing is that to filter all of this,
huge, massive bulk volume of information,
people are turning to their friends.
We're seeing this.
Lots of academics are seeing it.
I think the reason why is pretty obvious.
It's basically what evolution has taught us to do.
For thousands of years in society,
we basically turned to one another
to share information because it helped us survive.
We're to plant crops.
We're not to plant crops.
If those guys in the next village over are angry or not,
friendly, can we go talk to them,
all these things helped our species survive.
So people are turning to their friends.
I love this quote by William Gibson.
The future is already here.
It's just not evenly distributed.
We are going to see in our lifetime, probably
within this generation, we are going
to see the biggest changes to society
since the Industrial Revolution.
This is a really, really big deal.
I hope this is exciting for you guys.
It's exciting for me.
I think we are very lucky to be alive at this period of time.
We have an amazing opportunity in front of us.
So this future that I think is already here
is a network of information about anyone and anything
available anywhere and anytime.
And it's ours to decide what to do with it.
So let me talk about social design.
That's kind of the big picture.
Let me talk about social design.
So you can make social design really complicated
or really simple.
And I've decided to make it really simple,
to make my life easier, maybe because I'm slightly lazy.
But because it's pragmatic, you can get bogged down.
And I have done many times in social science conversations,
really deep, pretty academic conversations
about things like identity and relationships and so on.
Or you can make it really simple.
So you can go and design and build stuff
and put it out in the world and see if it works
and if it doesn't change it.
And this is a framework that I use.
Me, us, and everyone.
Which basically means identity, groups, and connections.
But I prefer saying me, us, and everyone
because that's how real people talk.
Like if you go talk to people about their sense of self,
they don't even use that term sense of self.
They look at you like glassy eyed.
They don't even really use the word identity.
Or identity is a very weird word to most people.
But they can talk about me and their life
and kind of are themselves and their life
and what they care about.
So I like this framework a lot.
Me basically means help people tell the story of their lives.
Everybody wants to do this.
Us means help people build relationships
with people that they know.
If you ask, I've done a lot of research
in a lot of different countries in the world.
In Asia, in the US, in Europe, with all generations,
young people, old people, if you ask anyone,
what is the most important thing in your life?
Almost every single person, regardless of age, culture,
gender, will say, my closest friends and family.
That is a universal truth about humanity.
So help people do that.
That's us.
And the third thing is everyone.
Help people connect with new people.
And if you look at all the social products
that are in existence today, the ones that are successful,
they either do, typically they do one or two
of these things really, really well.
Very few of them do all three very well,
because suddenly you're into a lot of complexity,
trying to design for people's sense of self, plus groups,
plus connecting with everybody in the world.
It gets complicated quickly.
But I mean, I could basically, I won't stop here.
I could stop here.
Like this to me, if you can design against these three
things, you'll start seeing things getting better fast.
And if you're trying to build social experiences
and not addressing any of these three things,
I think you're going to find it very hard
to see growth and engagement.
So I'm going to dive into these in a little bit of detail.
And I hope you'll have time for Q&A.
You can guys ask me questions about this.
So me, so basically there's kind of one pattern
about identity that I think is lots, but one that's really
important.
People have a sense of personal identity
and a sense of social identity.
And these are different.
So personal identity is what makes us feel unique.
Customization, personalization, all those kind of things.
Social identity is what makes us feel the same as others.
We like to be part of a community, part of a group.
And remember that when people are born,
they're not born with a neutral identity.
They're born with a very strong social identity
into a certain society with specific values.
And social identity drives so much of our behavior.
So these two things are different.
And designing for them is different,
which I'll cover in a sec.
Then we're on to us.
So it is me and you.
Everyone has a unique relationship with every other single
person in the world.
We are closer to some people than others.
It's pretty obvious.
We also have an inner circle.
So if you talk to most people, they typically
have about five people that they would often
describe it as a circle of trust.
And then I always say this, but everyone
talks about Robert De Niro movies with circles of trust.
But we basically have this inner circle of five people.
It's people who we would go to if we needed money,
people who we trust really deeply.
We then have a bigger circle of close friends and family.
It's not that big.
It's typically 15, 20 people, still pretty small.
What's interesting, or to me, one of the most interesting
things about close friends and family is that all of those
people are incredibly similar.
This is called homophily.
I'm sure many of you guys have studied homophily.
It's one of the most established principles
in social science.
It's been observed across many different types of environments,
cultures, societies, and so on.
This is incredibly profound.
It basically means that when we go out and talk to people,
we end up being friends with people like ourselves.
And the best example for me is university.
When you go to university, you could
be friends with 60,000 people.
But the conversations, you always have what everybody
are the same when you've never met them before.
By the way, me describing all this stuff
makes you feel incredibly awkward later when you go and talk
to new people.
Sorry about that.
But you will say things like, hey, I'm Paul.
I'm from Ireland.
I lived in San Francisco.
Just moved back to Ireland.
Like, oh, where are you from?
Where did you grow up?
Where did you go to school?
Oh, do you went to school there?
Oh, I know somebody there.
And straight away, after the basics,
you're then looking for common ground.
Because when you have common ground with somebody,
it's really easy to talk to them about stuff.
Like, oh, you're from Sligo in Ireland.
Oh, my god, I know.
I went to Sligo, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We talk about beaches and pubs and everything.
It's really easy to start talking to people.
When you don't have things in common with people,
it's really hard.
You start going like, oh, you're from Sligo.
I don't know where that is.
Where is Ireland?
Is that in the United Kingdom?
I don't even know.
And it gets awkward.
And suddenly you're like, oh, oh, my god, there's John.
I haven't seen him.
He's a really old friend of mine.
But I'll be back in a minute.
Off you go.
And you guys know this.
This happens all day, every day.
So we end up talking with people that are like us,
because it was easier to build relationships
from the beginning.
The thing about all this, if you look at people and networks
and how we're all connected, what's really interesting to me
is that we're basically many, many, many small groups all
connected together.
Basically, evolution is we're hired wired to form groups.
And there's tons and tons of research.
You can go into a lot of detail about this.
What's interesting is that these groups are independent.
So my family, and this is true for all of you guys,
you probably have about four between four and six groups.
And those groups typically have a line of eight, 10 people
at the most.
But those groups are independent.
So for me, for example, I'm a good example.
I have my family, obviously.
I lived in London.
I have London friends.
I lived in Dublin.
I have Dublin friends.
And I lived in San Francisco.
And I have San Francisco friends.
Those groups of people, although I know all of them,
do not know each other.
And that has profound implications
for how messages spread, how content spreads,
and how people interact with one another.
When my San Francisco friends see my Dublin friends
and don't know who they are, we need
to build in things into experiences
to make it easy for those people to interact.
Or if we don't want them to interact, which is often the case
as well, we want to build things to keep them apart.
So these groups typically form on a life stage.
So family, if you lived somewhere for a while,
I mean, these are pretty class examples, hobbies, and so on.
So beyond that, we have all the people we're connected to.
And there's this kind of myth, people often talk about young
people and say, oh my god, they have 800 Facebook friends.
They have 1,000 Facebook friends.
The youth of today is totally different to my generation.
That's all a myth.
We have limits in terms of physiology in how many people
we can remember.
For most people, it's about 500 people.
And then once you go beyond 500, you
start getting the really awkward experience of walking
on the street, and someone's coming towards you, and you're
like, oh my god, I know them, but I can't remember how.
And I'm sure they'll remember me.
And so I need to make a disappearing act super fast
to avoid this embarrassing situation.
So people have limits.
It's about 500.
So 500 connections, four to six groups of four to 10 people,
a close friend set of about 15, an inner circle of about five.
This is basically what we're designing around.
This is, for most people, the social construct
in which we need to build experiences for them.
OK, so then you wonder, how did this come to be?
How did we end up in this situation
with these certain sets of friends
who don't know each other, the fact
that we love some people more than others,
and the fact that some people are connected to them
we may not even like necessarily,
but there are reasons why we need to stay connected to them.
How did all this come about?
And for the most part, it came through very lightweight
conversations.
And the way I like to describe this
is many lightweight interactions over time.
That's how people get to know each other.
It's like, I say, we meet for the first time,
like a bit of chit chat from me, chit chat from you, back
from me, back from you.
Like, it's two-way.
It's very fast.
If you look at all the conversations
that happen on Facebook in terms of comments,
it's very fast, very short, numbers of words, less than 10
words, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
And that's how people build relations with one another.
You guys all know that when you're at the party
and someone starts talking to you and they launch into the
monologue of them or even anything, but they just keep
talking and keep talking and keep talking, you're like,
there's so much more going on in this party,
I don't want to listen to you anymore.
So you build relationships through these many lightweight
interactions over time.
And this is a really, really important idea in terms of
design, because it is, in my experience, from looking at all
the stuff that's being designed in the social space, not what
people are doing.
They're giving people the tools to make things that are more
heavyweight, or if they're building experiences for
companies, especially, I do a lot of work in the branding and
marketing and advertising space now, building experiences for
brands, they're really heavyweight.
They're really heavyweight experiences.
They're like, we're going to create this amazing, immersive
thing that people are going to get lost in and discover the
brand, and it's going to be brilliant.
And it's supposed to be in some kind of social framework.
And it's like, that is not how people interact with each other.
That is not how people talk to each other.
And people aren't going to change.
Human beings change very, very slowly over thousands of years,
like people interact with many lightweight interactions
over time.
So that, to me, is the principle that you guys should be
thinking about.
And the second thing is when you look at what people talk
about, so if you think about how they talk, they talk in
terms of many lightweight interactions, what they talk
about, they talk about feelings and not facts.
And again, this is contrary to a lot of companies and a lot
of brands, especially, who want them to talk about facts.
My car is faster, our engine is bigger, our product has this,
their product doesn't.
These are all factual things.
This is not what people talk about.
People talk about feelings.
They talk about things that generate emotional reaction,
visceral reaction, like awe, or anger, or surprise.
One of the best examples was if you look at all the things
that were shared on Facebook in 2011, the most commonly
shared item in 2011, actually, there's a list.
And in the talk, OK, let's go back a bit.
In 2011, things happened.
Osamban Laden was captured and killed.
There was all the stuff that happened across northern Africa
and the Middle East.
If you look at the top things that were shared on Facebook,
those things do not feature.
They're factual.
People didn't talk about those.
If you ever wonder why cats are so popular on the internet,
this isn't a joke.
This is why.
It's because they generate visceral emotional reactions
from people, and that's what people talk about.
It's just the way we're wired.
So the most shared thing on Facebook in 2011 was
about the tsunami in Japan, and the earthquake and tsunami
that happened in Japan.
What was shared was nothing factual,
not where it was, what the magnitude was,
stuff about the nuclear reactor, none of that stuff.
What was shared, and I'm sure you guys saw this,
was the before and after photographs.
Remember those, like the town before, the town after,
like this bridge and river before, bridge and river after.
That's what was shared the most.
And the reason was because when people saw that,
they went, I'm not sure if I'm going to curse,
but they went, holy shit.
It was just like, oh my god, look at that.
It generated this huge emotional reaction.
So that's what people talk about.
And if you want people to talk about your stuff,
or want people to interact and engage with your content,
it's got to be about feelings, and it's
got to be about emotion, and not about facts.
Obviously, there are exceptions.
I talk a lot in generalizations, but generally speaking,
it should be about feeling.
OK, so that was me and us.
So then you have everyone.
I think you have everyone in the world.
We're all potentially connected to anyone else in the world.
You hear a lot about this stuff.
We have six degrees of separation.
You have the Kevin Bacon effect, which
I'm sure some of you guys have heard of.
We've done some studies on this, and on Facebook,
we think that everyone on Facebook, over a billion people,
are connected through between four and five other people.
So that getting across the network
is actually very easy, in one sense,
in a short number of steps.
It's also very hard, because you don't actually
know who knows who.
It's just so hard to comprehend.
This, though, by the way, is a huge, huge product opportunity.
Connecting with people that you don't know,
that have things in common with you.
It's a huge, huge product opportunity.
People who like fly fishing, people who have had lung cancer,
people who believe in God, people who've been to Tanzania,
people who are widowed, people who have twin babies like me.
People I need help by the way.
If you've got twin babies, please come talk to me.
People in Toronto who play soccer,
people who like this restaurant, these are all things.
There's lots of people in the world
that we could be connected to, and it is a huge opportunity
to connect people about things that they like.
So the key to doing this, I think,
the key to doing this successfully
is to understand that beyond the kind of 7 billion people,
underneath that is an invisible network.
That invisible network, it's like,
how do we get from 7 billion to everyone
being connected in four, five, or six steps?
And it's because there's an invisible network underneath it.
And that's basically that invisible network
is many groups of small friends connected
to other many groups of small friends,
or lots of small groups all connected together
in this really big web.
And it's really hard to get your head around.
It's really hard to comprehend.
It took me a long time
to really fully understand how to talk about this.
This is one example.
On average, it's changed, actually, it's a bit higher now,
but on average, when I made this,
150 friends is the average number of friends on Facebook.
That means that those people are connected
to 10,000 friends of friends.
And it means they're connected to over a million,
these numbers are incredibly conservative, by the way.
It's probably much higher.
Over a million friends of friends of friends.
So just in a couple of steps,
you, all of you, are connected to millions
and millions of people.
And I try to visualize this.
It's incredibly hard to visualize
because it's kind of three-dimensional.
But if you take your five closest friends,
just think about your own life, your five closest friends,
what you kind of fail to see is that,
like here's James, my friend,
James and I are friends,
we went to college, went to university together.
And so we have a bunch of mutual friends in university,
really good friends of mine.
But like, he has his family that I kind of know,
but don't, you know, I met them at his wedding, right?
He has his friends from this,
like this other city that he lived in.
He has his friends from work, right?
He has these other independent groups that I don't know.
We're only friends through one mutual group.
So I never think about those people, right?
Because I don't know them, right?
So there's James and there's his group of the people
he's closest to.
Here's another friend of mine,
they're groups of friends.
Here's another, they're groups of friends.
So that's my five closest friends, just five,
and they're closest groups of friends, right?
It's already incomprehensible.
Like I don't know how to make head and tail of this thing.
This is my 10 closest friends and they're friends.
And this is my 20 closest friends and they're friends, right?
That's just 20 people in my life and they're friends.
So it's, we can't understand it.
It's just too hard, right?
So we need kind of other ways of thinking about it.
So this invisible network exists.
It underlies all of the things.
So if you want to think about connecting people,
and I'll give you tips in a second,
there are very specific ways to do that,
because human beings cannot comprehend it.
You can't expect people to reach out to people
and know who to talk to or know who to connect with,
or look for people, or search for them and find them,
because they can't see the network.
It's too hard.
Hope this makes sense.
Okay, so I'm gonna get really concrete,
give you guys seven design tips,
and then I'll talk a tiny bit about process,
and hopefully we'll have some time for Q and A.
So design tips, right?
So the first one is explicitly designed
for personal identity or social identity, right?
You can do both, and some products
do a reasonably good job of both,
but I think you're usually better served focusing on one.
So timeline, for example, there's,
you guys are supposed to go like, oh my God, all right.
Oh, God, you guys are hard work.
That's like the best photograph I've ever taken
of my babies, and I've taken like 500.
Okay, so timeline does a pretty good job,
but it's mostly for both,
but it's mostly about personal identity, right?
It's mostly me telling the story of my life, right?
That is what timeline is all about.
So if you think specifically about babies for a second,
I've spent a lot of time in the last six months
thinking about design for babies, so I apologize.
If you were to design a product in that space, right?
If you focus on personal identity,
you would design something like a product
that helps new parents catalog and share
the first year of their baby's life.
That is all about personal identity,
a little bit like what timeline is doing, right?
Helping people tell the story of their life.
If you focus on social identity,
you would say, well, actually it should be a product
that helps new parents connect and get advice
from each other, from other new parents, right?
So it's actually about people feeling a sense of self
and importance around a group, right?
So social identity and personal identity.
So just thinking about these things,
you end up in two different product spaces.
And what I see a lot is people then go,
well, let's just do both, let's just combine them
and make it like a thing that catalogs your life
and you can reach out to other new parents.
And basically you end up in like horrible and complicated,
can't forget head and tail of what's going on
or what it's for, right?
And people just disengage because the effort required
to figure it out is way higher than any benefit
they perceive to get from it.
This is a good example of social identity.
This is my profile, if you like, on Nike Plus, right?
So this is not about me telling the story
of me going running.
This is like, hey, you run,
and so do some people in your network.
Like this is me and the other people in my network who run.
So there's a leaderboard, there's a lot of competition,
a lot of banter, right?
So this to me is a good idea.
Like I don't think Nike should be going down
the personal identity route.
Like nobody really cares if I'm pacing faster
than yesterday or tomorrow.
Like, you know, nobody cares about that.
But they do care about these things
because we all go running, we're all in this together.
So that's the first tip, social or personal identity.
The second one is to show people things
they have in common with others.
Which sounds dead simple,
but a lot of people just don't do it, right?
This is a really good example.
So here's me and my brother.
So basically it's like, hey, mutual likes, here's things.
Now I don't struggle to talk to my brother thankfully, right?
So this maybe isn't the best example.
But if this was somebody that I don't know that well,
maybe we're connected on Facebook
or maybe it's someone I'm not connected to,
a friend or a friend.
If I surfaced, or if you guys surf build things
that surfaced things we have in common,
then suddenly it's easy for me to talk to them.
Oh, you like Bombay Bicycle Club?
Me too, love that band.
Like other playing in town, like we should go.
Or that is an easy conversation to have
when you know somebody likes the same thing as you do.
And you'll see over in the right,
here's all the other people.
We call this a face pile because it's basically
a pile of faces, which is very inventive.
You know, it says like Declan Kennedy
and 15 other friends like this,
Kennedy, three other friends like this.
We're basically surfacing the things
that people have in common with others.
Right, this is an incredibly powerful design technique.
The third one is to design lightweight ways
for people to interact.
So remember I was saying many lightweight interactions
over time, I said people talk to one another.
So that's what you should be designing, lightweight ways.
The obvious example of this is the like button
or the comment box in Facebook.
These things are incredibly successful.
The like button is phenomenally successful.
And the reason is because it's so natural
and so lightweight.
It is so easy to just go, yeah, like, it's so easy, right?
And if you think, you know, my proxy,
when I try and evaluate social design,
my proxy is always, does this happen in the real world?
Is this something that people would say in the real world?
Like, what should we call somebody putting their hand up
and giving some positive feedback to somebody else?
Well, like is a pretty good word
because people go, yeah, like that, that's cool, right?
So like is incredibly powerful.
Comment is also pretty powerful.
And the box is pretty small, right?
A Ford's small, lightweight, quick things interact.
It's not a big, giant form field.
It's not like, hey, write an essay back to your friend.
A second example, and I like this example a lot
because it's from, it's a project with Lays
who sell crisps or chips here in North America.
These guys made a really, really successful,
designed a really successful social experience.
And I feel like if they can do it, then most people can, right?
Because they got people really deeply engaging around crisps.
I'm gonna call them crisps.
So what's interesting is,
as part of this product that they built,
they had an I'd eat that button.
So basically the idea here was,
it was a crowdsourced competition,
like the next flavor of Lays, it was called do us a flavor.
Next flavor of Lays is gonna be crowdsourced
and we're gonna put it out in the world
and you can get a share of the profits, right?
So people kind of pile in, make flavors,
and then they had this I'd eat that button.
This is incredibly powerful because A, it was lightweight,
and B, it was so natural, right?
We have people making these kind of crazy flavors.
And the reason that people created flavors,
and they created so many people created flavors,
we had like, I'm trying to remember
like what figures I should give you guys.
We had about 2 million active users, right?
About 2 million people, it was just in North America,
created flavors.
That generated hundreds of millions
of unique news feed stories.
Like this thing was just, the scale was absolutely huge.
And people did it because it was kind of easy, it was quick,
and it was fun.
Or it said something about their identity.
It was like, here's JP, and like,
so Ben down the back who's on the organizing committee
knows JP as well, and he'll probably know this very well.
JP's flavor that he made was called Last Call, right?
JP's English, he likes making cocktails a lot,
and so this said something about his identity.
And anyone who knew JP could know, oh my God,
that's, you know, part of who he is.
It's kind of funny, there's a bit of banter,
and a bit of kind of jokery around that.
And then you can go, I'd eat that.
And I created stories in news feed of people going,
oh my God, you would eat that, that is disgusting, right?
But this is what people talk about in real life.
They're like, oh my God, I'd eat that, I would eat that,
that is absolutely delicious, I would like that,
and I'm sure you guys are looking at these going,
I would like these crisps right now.
Very powerful, very lightweight interaction.
So the fourth thing is to design for feelings and not facts.
So earlier on we saw that people share and talk
about content that is generating
this emotional, visceral reaction.
So again, you guys think I'm probably obsessed with Lays
here and obsessed with crisps, I am slightly a little bit.
These are the news feed stories that were generated
by this app that they built.
And they're all about feelings, right?
It's like, Mark has created a flavor,
Kevin commented on a flavor,
Alyssa would eat nine flavors.
Like these are all kind of generating visceral emotional
reactions around whether or not you'd eat that as well,
or what you think of that person as a result of these
kind of really weird and random flavors that they've created.
So the fifth tip is, and I have seven of these,
the fifth is give suggestions for who to communicate with.
And again, this is something that sounds really obvious,
but not a lot of people do it.
Like people cannot comprehend their network,
even when you think they can,
even when you think people should know who to talk to,
or should know who to invite, or who to add, they can't.
It's too hard, it's too hard to remember.
All of, you're like, oh my God,
like one of the, a pretty funny thing,
I used to do this research exercise when I worked at Google,
which was to get people to lay out their social network,
right?
So they basically, one person on a post-it note,
they would lay out all the people, you know,
group them, and we learned a lot about social interaction
and group behavior, and how people thought about their
social network in the real world.
So just post notes on people.
And so many times, people would like be laying it all out,
and they'd get like 30 minutes into it,
and be like, oh my God, I forgot my wife, right?
Like shh, and like write it down, put her in the middle,
like, okay, yeah, okay, oh God, I'm glad she didn't walk in.
Right, it's like people forget,
it's too hard to comprehend your network, right?
So you need to give people suggestions.
There's lots of examples on Facebook,
people you may know, here's Tom, somebody you may know,
right, that's a suggestion you can add or you can exit.
For a lists product, here's like lists suggestions,
hey, you made this list, you put those people on it,
here's a bunch of other people we think
that should be on it, or you know, here's a list,
oh, it's about running, here's friends of yours who run.
So like, do you wanna add them, right?
You can X them, nope, they're not appropriate
to be on the list, or yes, I can add them.
Like pretty simple, pretty easy, but very, very powerful.
The sixth thing is to design the feed story first.
So when I say feed, you know,
specifically I guess for Facebook, that's news feed,
but almost every single social product these days
seems to have a feed of some sort, right?
It's become a kind of pretty stable design pattern.
Twitter is a feed, Pinterest actually is pretty interesting,
it's kind of a feed, it's obviously horizontal and visual,
but it's still a feed of some sort, right?
Something you scroll down through.
So often what we see is, especially because I work with
a lot of brands and agencies for buildings on Facebook,
I see these heavyweight apps, these really rich immersive,
basically micro sites, right?
They're basically building destinations on Facebook,
and earlier I said, stop building destinations,
you need to build systems.
So remember this, right?
Basically what we do, the first exercise,
design exercise, or creative exercise we do,
is design the story first, right?
Because the story is a thing that shows in news feed,
and that is the thing that most people experience
most often, right?
That is the thing, that is how they will
first experience this thing, right?
They're not going to these destinations
that you're building.
That's not how the web is evolving, right?
It's aggregations, real-time aggregations
of all of these tiny little snippets, right?
And to me, it's no coincidence that these things are small,
they're short, because that's how people interact
with each other, lightweight interaction.
So design the story first, and then reverse engineer
whatever system you need to make it happen.
So we will design the story, and then figure out
what the best story is, and then decide
whether we need an app or not,
or we can do it in a different way.
Examples of stories, you know, so we basically
start sketching these, not high fidelity obviously,
we'll start sketching these, you know, Paul went on a run
using Nike, Paul likes a photo on Instagram,
like these are the types of stories, right?
That is the best possible story that we want to tell,
that we want to create, and then we'll figure out
how to make that thing appear.
So the seventh and last thing is design
the friend's experience.
So typically, you know, classic user-centered
design methodology is that we only ever focus
on the user, a single person, right?
What are personas, what is that person's experience,
what are their goals, that's designed for that?
But that is, to me, that's actually slightly ridiculous
because nobody in this world exists
in isolation of other people.
We are surrounded by other people all day, every day.
So we should actually be thinking about what is,
okay, well if this is experience for Paul,
what's Paul's friend's experience?
Because they're part of it too.
What's Paul's friends are friends experience?
So we actually design these three things in tandem,
and because it's a system, they're all impacting each other,
right, we're trying to figure out what's the optimal solution
for, you know, the friend's experience
and the friend's, the friend's experience
as much as for Paul's experience.
Okay, so I'm gonna finish up.
I'm gonna talk about design process.
All that's, up until now, most of the stuff
that I've talked about, I'm pretty confident in.
We have a lot of research and data behind it.
I'm now going out on a limb,
and I'm gonna say something to you guys
that some people might be upset with,
some people might think it's total blasphemy, maybe.
It's just my experience, you know,
I worked as a researcher at Google for four years.
Before that I worked at Flow, there's a bunch of people
here from Flow, who used to work at Flow as well,
a consultant in the, UX consultant in the UK.
You know, like I am, if any researchers in the room
are people who really, really love and believe in research,
I am one of you.
I'm just telling you my experience of the last,
I don't know, three or four years.
I don't do research anymore, and I'm gonna explain,
that's probably like what, and I'm gonna explain why.
It's not quite that dramatic.
Okay, so there's some people in the audience
that are gonna laugh at this, cause they worked at Flow.
This is a diagram that we used to show,
bajillions of people, right?
And like talk it, talk about it.
So, you know, do contextual research,
find out what your users need and want,
and where the gaps are, concept stuff, prototype it,
you know, specify, or it's to circle
a lot of usability testing,
formative research up front,
lots of iterative testing along the way,
and then once we're confident in the product, we launch it.
So, put your hand up, and be honest,
put your hand up if you still follow roughly
that type of process.
Okay, so I don't know how many hands that is,
but it's a lot, like at least half the room.
Okay, so this process works really well for some things.
Buying tickets, right, works really well.
Human-computer interaction works really well.
In my opinion, oh hang on, we have a clicker situation.
This process does not work well for social design,
and because the web is evolving
to incorporate all of these social experiences,
to me, this will soon become,
this process does not work well for design.
There's two reasons why.
One is, as the web moves to become more social
and being fundamentally built around people,
you are not gonna have human-computer interaction,
you're gonna have human-to-human interaction, right?
People interacting with other people,
or certainly people interacting with machines,
or things, or other people in that process as well.
And it is so complex and so subtle,
it is almost impossible in my experience
to make meaningful conclusions
from any type of small, qualitative,
formative research study.
It's too hard.
People are too complicated and too complex.
Like a perfect example I have is,
through a lot of research,
we kind of concluded that showing things
like 4,000 people like this is actually valueless.
People were like, if my friends love it, that's good,
if it's like millions, 10 million people
looked at this YouTube video, that's really good too.
This number in the middle, like 4,000,
I don't really care, you know, right?
But if I actually look at data,
that does actually impact things.
People do click more often
when those types of numbers are shown, right?
There's social proof.
So everybody kept telling us,
and kept telling us, and kept telling us
that that was valueless to them.
So you're like, okay, well, kill it, kill a feature.
But actually, once you ship and learn,
it did a value and it does a value, right?
So I think it's incredibly hard.
So this is the process that I basically want to hurry up
because I think we're kind of short in time.
So, oh, this isn't working, I forgot.
All right, so basically, this is the process.
This is going to look, for any of you guys
who like think of lean startup, lean UX,
this probably looks very, very similar,
probably not a coincidence.
So first of all, build a hypothesis.
There is so much social science research in the world.
Like if you want to understand identity,
you have people think about themselves,
you don't need to do more research.
There is so much research in the world.
There's so much research being contributed
every single day from social science.
Nobody, I can't keep up, nobody can, right?
You don't need to do more stuff
unless it's really, really niche.
Do literature reviews, understand the social science space,
understand the patterns and things that we already know,
and build a hypothesis and do that fast.
Second is build a simple product as fast as possible.
Launch it publicly in the world
because then it's going to use people's real identity
and it's going to use their real friends
and that is critical.
You cannot, if you build prototypes, wire frames,
and kind of fake some of the social data,
you can't get reliable information about that, right?
It's like, oh, you know,
when people suddenly have their real friends
and their real content,
all the stuff about the relationships
that's been generated for decades in many cases
comes back and it's like, oh, well, actually I wouldn't add John
and I'll tell you what.
I hear this in research, I wouldn't add John
because actually John knows Jim and two years ago,
basically Jim went into this baseball match
and didn't invite John.
What happened, right, and like, oh, okay, I get it.
You just can't systematically study that stuff.
So for me, it's better to launch it.
It has people's real identity and real friends
and then you will learn very, very fast
whether it works or not.
And people often say to me, I'm afraid to do that.
Like, what if a product has no users or is embarrassing?
If your product, when you launch it, has no users,
that is not bad.
That's pretty good.
And the reason is because you can start iterating
and learning in real time.
Okay, so the fourth is to simply measure and iterate.
Analytics, now you can do primary research.
You can start to do research,
qualitative research to understand why.
You have what, you have how,
and when you start to see patterns,
you can kind of dive in and start to understand why.
And the final thing is to build it in such a way
that you can push code and push changes
and do A-B tests and multivariate tests every day.
On Facebook, we push code twice a day, right?
First, company of our size, for any developers here,
that is like pretty phenomenal, right?
You need to push code all the time
to make changes all the time.
Okay, that's a lot of stuff.
I don't know if you're tired after that.
I'm certainly tired.
This is a recap and then I'm not sure if we've time for Q and A.
I hope we have a couple of minutes,
but we need to feel unique and connected, right?
Those two truths about humanity.
Stop talking about mobile and social as abstract things.
They are not.
They are fundamental to everything that we're creating.
We have this massive, massive volume of information
that's been created that is a huge opportunity
and also a pretty challenging one.
Help people tell their story,
help people build relationships,
help people make connections,
design this around many lightweight interactions,
and then finally, do it really fast.
Build a hypothesis, build it, ship it, iterate.
To give you an example, we did a project recently.
I got a phone call from one of the guys on my team
on a Sunday.
He was like, hey, we have this idea for this client,
blah, blah, blah, blah, here's our work.
I was like, oh my God, that's really cool.
It was kind of around homophily.
I thought it was super interesting.
We just shipped it.
It took us 19 days to come up with the idea
and ship the product.
And like, is what we shipped amazing?
It's okay, but we're learning.
We've data, we're learning.
It's going super fast.
We're constantly gonna change it
and make it better and better and better and better and better.
And every successful social product Facebook included
took years to stabilize and took years to grow
because you can't build relationships overnight.
You can't suddenly become best friends
with somebody overnight.
So that's it.
Thank you.
I wrote a book about social design,
which I feel really awkward talking about all the time,
but I'm Irish and we have issues with that.
If you want it, you can look at it.
You can talk to me.
That's my handle.
I'm all over the web.
I'd love to hear feedback.
And otherwise, thank you for listening.
Thank you.
