Thursday, June 28, 2012

Social Design


Social Design is a way of thinking about product design that puts social experiences at the core. Create these social experiences with the features available on Facebook Platform.

Three Elements of Social Design

Social Design defines how we understand ourselves and each other and can be broken down into three core elements: Identity, Conversation and Community.
  • Community refers to the people we know and trust and who help us make decisions.
  • Conversation refers to the various interactions we have with our communities.
  • Identity refers to our own sense of self and how we are seen by our communities.
From our experience building Facebook and helping partner companies think about social design, we've put this document together to try to explain how we think about social design and some patterns and best practices we've observed.

Modeling a Social Experience

One way to model a social product is by working from the inside out: allow people to create an identity, let them share it and build a community over time. Facebook began this way. However, if community is already curated, as it is via Facebook Platform, you can instead work from the outside in: utilize the existing community users have built, define new conversations and let them continue to build their identities further. Facebook Platform makes it easy to take the "outside in" approach.
Start by defining the domain or interest that is core to your app or website (music, books, movies, etc.). Then follow the set of key guidelines below and utilize the tools that Facebook Platform provides to help you build a great social experience.


1. Utilizing Community

Communities feel familiar, relevant and trusted by default. Surface users' interests and their friends in your app to create personalized user experiences.

Start by implementing Facebook Authentication which enables a user to authorize your app to access profile information. You can ask for specific pieces of data about the user by requesting permissions relevant to your app.

Suggest Relevant Content

Utilize Facebook profile data in your app. If users grant the required set of permissions, you can utilize the Graph API to access users' likes, interests, activities, movies and more to recommend content in your app. In addition you can also access their friends' likes to suggest content they may be interested in. Users have spent a lot of time curating their Facebook profiles, so using that information effectively can drastically enhance their experience, provided you clearly communicate how you are using it.
Both Rotten Tomatoes and Airbnb, for example, use profile information and connections to enhance the user experience, offering users personalized and valuable information.

Connect Friends

Users feel comfortable and engaged knowing their friends are already actively participating in your app. When users join, automatically connect them to the friends who are already there, instead of making them search and add friends manually. Not only is this easier for the user, but it provides your app with social data at the start that helps engage the user.
When users connect their Spotify accounts to Facebook, for example, an additional panel automatically displays their friends, allowing them to see friends' playlists, favorite songs and listening history. You can use the Graph API to easily access users' friends.

Show Social Context

Whenever you display information from other users, always show real names and profile pictures. Social apps are about real identity, and users of Facebook expect this. If you show content from non-friends, use the same interface, but also provide other contextual information such as mutual friends, where the user is from or where they work. Context helps make the experience more authentic and personal. Seeing a comment from “Sam, a designer in New York City, 3 friends in common” is more valuable and useful than just seeing “Sam.” Use the Graph API to access information about the user such as their workplace, their hometown, their relationship to the viewer (e.g., mutual friends), and much more. We've found it best to only show faces when they are of friends, so as not to dilute their value in the interface.
Facebook uses a variety of methods to show context about a person, such as mutual friends, school and/or location, both inline and in hover cards. The Comments Plugin, for example, displays profile information about the people writing the comments.

Associating content to people that users care about naturally draws them in. Even something as simple as the Facepile plugin - which shows users the friends already using your app before they sign in - can increase sign-ups and positive feelings about the experience.

Be Transparent and Give Users Control

Be straightforward with the data you are utilizing from the user’s Facebook profile and why you are using it. Only ask for the permissions you actually need; the more you ask for, the less likely users will grant them. Users may join your app and automatically trust their friends, but the first hurdle is trusting your app when first prompted with the permissions dialog.
Airbnb, for example, is clear on how they utilize data from Facebook to enhance a user's experience on the site.
Ensure that users of your app have control over the data they give you and the data your app creates from this information. Users should never feel as though something personal of theirs is being taken without permission or utilized in ways they don’t understand.

2. Building Conversations

Conversations are how people express their identities to communities and how they receive feedback from them. Build experiences that give people the power to connect and share.


An effective conversation is based in two experiences:
  1. "Listening" : Displaying personalized content, social context and user activity
  2. "Speaking" : Making it easy for users to talk, share, give feedback and engage
Listening and speaking create a positive feedback loop that, if done right, grows exponentially.

Listening

Users are encouraged to participate when they can listen to and watch other active users on your site. On Clicker, for example, users can see the shows that their friends have watched along with recommendations based on friend activity. Many sites like EventBrite or TripAdvisor rely on reviews from people to help with decision-making. When you can use information from the Facebook social graph to highlight content from friends, this can be even more powerful.
Showing a history of activity (highlighting friend activity) is an effective way to generate interest and conversation. Users will better understand what is expected of them and will likely seek out ways to participate.

Surface User Activity

Presenting information about the activity and actions of others is an effective and natural way to inform and engage other users.
Our social plugins - specifically the Activity Feed and Recommendations plugin - are simple ways to allow a user to easily see their friends' activity on your site, when paired with the Like Button.
The Like Button lets people express what they like on their profile and with their friends on Facebook. Because other users see what friends like and, more importantly, because they trust their friends, they are more likely to care about the content.
A number of websites are already using these social plugins to showcase the actions that users take on their site. For Sporting News, it's a great way to see the articles most popular amongst friends. For Rdio, it's a great way to discover new music.

Provide Notifications

Create directed conversation through notifications. Use Requests on Facebook to inform users of activity in your app that is specifically relevant to them and requires their input. When users proactively engage with one another, conversation is more effective and personal. Without these, no one will know if anyone is speaking to them directly.

Speaking and Sharing

The other half of the conversation is speaking and sharing. People have to engage in the first place, and will do so when they have the right motivation. If people are sharing with people they trust, they are likely to share more often and be more open and honest.

Focus the Conversation

Rather than build tools for conversation around anything, it's advantageous to decide the core theme of your app and build tools to focus conversation around that. For example, if you were creating a social cooking app, you might want users to specifically share:
  • Recipes
  • Photos of dishes they’ve made
  • Favorite ingredients
  • Cooking techniques
Great social apps get users to engage in interesting ways about things they care about. The easier, more fun and useful a sharing interface can be, the more likely a user will contribute.

Reduce Sharing Friction

Simple actions taken by users can initiate conversations. Placing the Like Button on your website is a simple and effective way to get users to engage and start sharing. The Send Button similarly allows users to share with a smaller set of friends. Apps can use any number of these quick actions to involve users. In aggregate and over time, these simple interactions can provide a more complex and meaningful data set around which you can build conversation.

Encourage Feedback

Users are far more likely to start engaging with your app by responding to content created by their friends than they are likely to create their own. Because of this, users should be able to interact with nearly every piece of content in your app, for every piece of content can be its own conversation topic.
The Comments Plugin is an easy and effective tool that you can integrate into your site to enable friends to easily give feedback on content created on your site. All of the activity in the plugin will be surfaced to users’ friends through various social channels on Facebook. This builds an effective listening experience that prompts more conversation.

Encourage Sharing

When conversation is directed, it becomes more personal. You can use the Graph API to enable users to tag friends in photos or posts which enables sharing directly with them. This is an effective way to involve friends in the sharing experience, prompting them to interact more.
In Spotify, for example, users can send songs to specific friends or post to their own walls and share with everyone.
In our experience, we have found that the rate of sharing and feedback is dramatically impacted by how easy and intuitive it is to share. Think carefully about your sharing interfaces and make them as simple as possible.

Share Outside Too

The relationship your app has with your users not only happens inside your app but also outside. Posting stories back to a user's Facebook profile, for example, is a great way for a user to share their engagement in your app and encourage their friends to visit. It's strongly recommended that you give the user control over their voice and that the content is interesting and useful to friends. It's also important that you be transparent on setting appropriate user expectations around the timing and content of the post.
Enable users to post to Facebook using the Feed Dialog. You can also use the Requests Dialog to enable users to invite specific friends to your app or send more targeted app specific requests.

A number of apps are already effectively utilizing our social channels to get new users and traffic back to their apps while deepening conversations.

3. Curating Identity

Social Design plays to the most powerful form of motivation: the self. People share and interact with communities because they want to, because they learn more about themselves and enjoy feeling known by their community.
Creating and curating an identity within an app is a basic principle that leads to a stronger emotional connection with that app over time. Building a profile that represents a user's identity provides self motivation and personal value to users. The key principles below demonstrate how to add elements of the community and conversations with them to a user's profile in your app.

Be Context-Relevant

While Facebook serves as a representative profile, your app should focus on a particular vertical or domain. Make the user's profile relevant to this context and focus on this aspect of the user's identity.
For example, in the social cooking app, a profile could consist of:
  • A shareable and organized list of recipes users have created
  • A shareable photo album of all the dishes they’ve created
  • A space to house a list of their favorite ingredients with their own descriptions and reviews
  • Shared articles on cooking they’ve found interesting or useful
Don’t just think of features common to all social apps; think of what will be special to your app only. Explore what people can do with your app that they can’t do anywhere else.

Curate Content

Users should feel that the content they contribute is theirs and that you provide them a place to house it. If you’re asking users to contribute thoughts, photos and other content, they should be able to keep a record of this activity. Your app should use their input to organize content intelligently for them.
Facebook organizes a user's interests into a clean, structured interface. Use the Graph API to let users upload photos and videos from your app to share on Facebook. Last.fm compiles your listening history and favorite songs into an easy-to-read interface as well.

Tell Stories

People want to share experiences they have everywhere - not just on Facebook. Part of what builds identity is the storytelling of these experiences. Although displaying a history of user activity and posts to their wall helps, it's not the full picture. Use the Like button with Open Graph tags to enable users to share likes and interests from your app. By allowing users to like objects in your app, those experiences are integrated into their Facebook profile and shared with friends.

Highlight Interesting Information

Part of what makes building a useful profile is not simply presenting the data, but additionally analyzing it to tell users something they don't know about themselves. For example, Spotify informs users of their top tracks and top artists. In a social movies app, you may highlight the user's most-viewed actors or genres. In a social cooking app, you may want to highlight what ingredients a user uses most of the time.

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