Facebook Fan Pages (Groups)

I decided I needed to be more comprehensive about my fandom on Facebook. I had randomly become the fan of several topics my friends had become fans of but this left topical gaps among my Facebook pages. I had no idea what I was getting into! I don't know why I thought the task would be quick, I guess it had something to do with the small number of groups I was in up until this evening. For those that don't know about Facebook pages (groups), on every Facebook user's profile there is a tab marked "Info." At the bottom of the Info tab is a list of "Pages" (groups) that the user joined by supporting their causes or becoming a fan of their topics. Politicians get support for instance, rock bands get fans.

The impetus for feeling my Facebook pages needed attention was the fact that I appeared to be supporting Barack Obama twice. Because of limited real estate on the Info tab this meant that some other topic was falling onto a second page. I thought I could get all these objects of my admiration onto one page. Silly me! This became pulling the proverbial thread from a sweater and unraveling it entirely.

I could probably have compiled a satisfying list of pages by "depth charge" searching. By this I mean look at a few pages of topics and via inspiration (one television program begets another, etc.) I could round out a pretty good collection. If I like Star Trek (I do!) then I would search on analogous topics such as Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, and Galaxy Quest. Instead of doing it this way, the Harris in me came out and I decided to tackle this the slow and methodical way...I would browse through all of Facebook's group pages and find all the things I am a fan of in this fashion. What a dreadful mistake!

It would appear that Facebook fan pages are sorted primarily by popularity. I say "it would appear" because with each page turn, at the top of the page there is a topic that has more fans than the last topic on the previous page.

Many have observed before me that Facebook's pagination provides no hint as to how long the queue is. I decided I would find out the hard way. When I started, the pagination read "1 2 3 4 5 Next." For those curious, if you are on page one and you click Next, it takes you to page two, not the next set of pages--there is no easy way to advance to page 100 on Facebook.

At the top of page one was Barack Obama with over six million supporters (I am one) followed by Vin Diesel with over three million fans (I am not one). By page fifteen I was on topics just above and below the half million fan mark. For those interested, Mariah Carey has 500,496 fans on Facebook. Just behind her, at 499,691 fans, is "Naked Cuddles In Bed." Although I am a fan of naked cuddles in bed, I choose only to share that with you my loyal blog reader, making this fact a blog post exclusive. My Facebook friends will be so jealous!

Atop page 100 we find "Mini Eggs Cadbury" (not a fan). The mini eggs have 97,186 fans tonight.

While I browse I begin to wish there was more governance over these pages. Not just for parentally challenging topics but also because of the amount of redundancy. As far as getting parental I'll go straight to the crux of the problem as I see it. I believe that Facebook was started by and for college students and I applaud both the ingenuity and the end result. The number of fan groups around specific brands, of alcoholic beverages for instance, becomes saddening to me. I hypothesize the majority of fans of Marlboro Light cigarettes and Smirnoff vodka are people not legally old enough to purchase or consume them. A search on the topic "wasted" yields a few fan groups for a band (or bands) called "Wasted" but it also shows a group of 106,133 fans of "Getting Wasted" and another focused on "Getting Wasted After Exams" --an "Event Planning Group" with a fan base of 31,974. Among Facebook fan pages that's not a particularly high number but it's greater than the number of males in Framingham, MA (the largest town in the USA) according to the 2,000 US Census. Similar searches on "partying," "drinking," and the like yield depressing results.

With regard to redundancy it seems as though if I was the owner of the Boston Red Sox I wouldn't mind if a Facebook moderator combined the three fan groups I have seen so far into one category--permitting the world to see the true number of Sox fans on Facebook in one group. There are three pages of search results full of Nutella fan groups. Dr. House and Chuck Norris each have several groups, instead of the single, centralized page they each deserve.

I also observe that lingual barriers seem to create redundancy. There are several groups around each of the following topics: sleeping, napping, siestas, hating waking up on Mondays, hating waking up for school, hating waking up for work, and hating waking up for exams, but each one is labeled in a unique language, some of which I am only guessing as to the topics by their "avatar." Here is one entitled "La grasse mat' avec son (sa) chéri(e)." Babelfish translates that from the French to mean "Fatty the mat' with its (its) cherished (E)." This illustrates why I find the language barrier a little offputting.

I click further on and a disheartening revelation dawns on me: as the pages advance and the popularity goes down the difference between each topic's number of fans is also going down. This means that while on page 120, I am probably not even half way through the results. When I started, I was determined to go through all the pages. At this point, a few hours in, I have decided to cap my hunt at four digits (9,999): the first group with under 10,000 fans will end my hunt for topics this evening (and perhaps for good). I realize as I write this I may need to rethink even that goal.

Another effect of doing this for so long is I start to lose my judgment. Early on I would go past several sequential pages without joining any fan groups, but I just caught myself asking over and over again "Am I a fan of 'Axe Body Spray?'" (the answer is NO!). While Facebook has categorized each of the groups, even when I delve into a category (Celebrities / Public Figures) I am still presented with the same pagination issue.

[ long break ]

Good morning! I had to go to sleep at the bottom of page 150; the group was Tie-dye shirts with 52,415 fans (now including me). My hunt goes on.

I decided my new goal was to get to a topic under 50,000 fans. This project was not intended to take days; I don't frankly have days to devote to it. At 49,625 fans, the group "Brothers and Sisters" is about an eighth of the way down page 159. From here I will depth charge the rest of my fan groups and I will conduct that activity after I post this blog entry.

This blog entry was being concluded with dismay when I discovered I could cheat to get to the last page of results. All I had to do was spoof the browser's query string. Duh! So using this new method to circumvent Facebook's limited pagination I discovered that they capped pagination at 1,000 pages. Go figure...I am glad I gave up on page 159! The group that currently holds the dubious distinction of being the last topic before going into the too-unpopular-to-appear-in-the-pagination void is Hobart (a "Religious Center") with 3,466 fans. I feel good knowing now that it was best that I gave up browsing one page at a time; and I was able to get around the confounding pagination--GO ME!

It has been an interesting study--let me review what I have learned.

1. Facebook's pagination is due for a rehaul. There are so many good models for good UI/UX it is unclear why they don't provide better control. Throughout the Facebook experience, there are so many instances of brilliant DHTML pop-ins and on-demand control; why not provide something like that for getting to a high-numbered page?
   
   
2. Non-English speaking people like to sleep and cuddle naked a lot. OK, who am I kidding? Most people like to sleep and cuddle naked but the vast majority of the groups around these topics have titles in languages other than English. A friend of mine confessed that she set her primary language on Facebook to French and this has done wonders for dusting off her knowledge of that language. Shouldn't these titles be in the language I declare and get translated based on my preferences?
   
   
3. Facebook groups desperately need librarianship. I was asked "why?" this morning by a friend with a post-baccalaureate degree in library sciences. If for no other reason I might have found Brothers and Sisters on page 80 instead of 159. Further if I were to have kept paging forward to groups with really small memberships, I would see increasing redundancy and that's where I believe the groups suffer most. Ultimately a librarian's pruning and grafting is needed because for so many topics such as fanaticism for "snoring whilst sleeping during an exam" parsing through all these groups becomes exceptionally painstaking.
   
   There are way too many groups for any individual to actually parse through and become a fan of even a small fraction of the things they like. I wanted to find peanut butter on the list (I finished a jar while doing this study). I will have to go depth charge for that. Now that I am done clicking through 159 pages of groups I have an unwieldy list on my Info tab that I have to consolidate--who among my friends wants to wade through 293 topics across thirty pages of my predilections? Also, having now cheated Facebook's pagination algorithm, I wonder if I really only have thirty pages or if this is another imposed cap. Ultimately this falls under the category of poor UI/UX.
   
   My suggestion for this is two-fold:
   
   
   • Combine redundant groups. It is OK for there to be differentiation between "Star Trek" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation" but there don't need to be ten groups called "Star Trek" spread across six pages of results when I query against that search term. I want one definitive group!
     
     
   • The other way to reduce the number of groups is to set a firm policy for group creation and police for inappropriate topics (getting wasted after exams) or antitopics (I Hate Boston Red Sox). Fanaticism is about things we like, not things we like to hate. Hate groups beget hate groups, adding to the confusion.

Facebook is a positive, family-friendly environment. Without effort, it will fall into the pig sty that MySpace fell into. I can't visit MySpace with children present for fear of some form of profanity or nudity; it's safe to say I don't particularly like to visit it alone. I enjoy sharing the lives of my friends and classmates with my kids. I would hate to lose that on Facebook. Information is entropic by nature. With entropy comes chaos and amid that chaos users will post inappropriate content into the mix. It is a slippery slope, one particularly hard to scrabble back up after you've gone any measure of distance down.

To conclude, I enjoy and applaud Facebook's groups functionality but I feel it needs TLC.

That's my two bits, what do you think?

Designing for iPhone

I had a wonderful dinner with a friend and colleague, Scott Sutcliffe. Scott is an all-around engineer, comfortable with both mechanical and software engineering. I apologize if this sounds like mechanical/software are either the entire range of engineering or the limits of his expertise, but those are the two areas he and I most often find at the core of our conversations.

Scott was the engineer who oversaw the development of a lot of the back-office b-to-b tools I designed for the Thomas Register of American Manufacturers. He was the coding genius behind the prototype for a color thesaurus, a screen shot of which can be seen in my portfolio. I also designed a logo for him and put some CSS together for his website.

At dinner, Scott showed me his latest endeavor, an iPhone app called Tippety Split. He constructed the tool as a practical exercise to better understand the iPhone SDK. The application is very simple in its sophistication: Scott managed to pack a lot of clever functionality into what seems like very simple UI. Then, like he was reading my mind, he asked if I would be willing to play around with the UI!

How could I turn down such an opportunity. I won't go into all of the stuff I did to the UI (that would be giving away confidential secrets!) but we came up with some very cool concepts. In order to conceptualize them, I had to overcome some of my web design bias. For instance, the application is essentially an interactive form. On the web, with basic HTML and JavaScript, a product designer would be able to infer from that their design needed to accommodate a small series of fairly well known event states: onFocus, onBlur, onClick, onMouseOver, etc..

These states are all gone or different on the iPhone. There is no happy little pointy cursor, there is in fact no single point of focus. One of the features that makes this UI so slick is the fact that a user can create multiple points of focus, and depending on whether those points move closer together or apart, a control will behave differently. An example of this is when looking at a photo, a user can touch two points on the image and push them apart; the effect of this will be to zoom in on the picture. If the two points converge, the photo zooms out.

Another iPhone behavior that I wanted to capitalize on is the focal deceleration that makes the UI so realistic. When looking at a list of phone numbers, a user can put their finger on a number and nudge it up or down. The list scrolls in that direction, decelerating as it goes, then stopping. I won't give the particulars of how I took advantage of this (hint: it doesn't have anything to do with lists) but suffice it to say that we've come up with some very clever UI constructs. I fully acknowledge that acceleration and deceleration are easy to accomplish in JavaScript in a web browser, but the point is that there are common conventions built into the iPhone GUI that users have come to expect. A once relatively stable and small lexicon of mouse events are replaced by a significantly more elegant vocabulary of interactions: nudging, brushing, pinching, pushing, pulling, flipping, etc.

I understand that the iPhone as a device and it's interface as a GUI have practical limitations and a finite shelf life, but jumping into this venue and playing with these new conventions was like being a kid in the proverbial candy store. What a delightful experience this is!

Better interface through gaming

I was just having a great conversation with a gentleman named Yoav Shapira from Hubspot.com. I should briefly digress and mention that I am in love with what Hubspot does (Internet Marketing) and you should check them out if you are at all interested in online marketing. Yoav asked me what was going on and I told him about my weekend.

My brother had come to visit me and we had (among all sorts of other trouble) turned on my Playstation 3. I realize that this is by no means a new game system. There isn't anything revolutionary about any of my insight here, but it is funny how we are what we do. As my story to Yoav unfolded I explained that my brother is into racing games but his current state of technology is the Playstation 2 (a totally competent gaming platform). He was taken with the accelerometer in the PS3 controller and how this enabled him to engage games in 3D. He was also taken with the fact that the system has its own operating system and even connects wirelessly to the Internet and has a big hard disk with onboard games and music.

As I relayed to Yoav, my brother tried a racing game (Toys Home to be specific). As he turned the controller like a steering wheel, the car responded in turn. He was driving with no warm-ups. The user interface was direct and exact. He quickly picked up that L2 and R2 were the brake and accelerator--amazing! The game designers had created a UI that a "virgin" could drop into and perform accurately in.

My story for Yoav then turned to earlier in the same weekend. I should mention that this was my first experience with the Wii, but it won't be my last. A six year old challenged me to Wii Boxing and I agreed. This is a smart kid, and he was sounding out several of the words onscreen but I should point out he was six and flying through windows and the operating system like a champion. What I am saying is that without reading comprehension as a tool for operation, this six year old was navigating menus and using a sophisticated graphical interface. My hat is off and my head is bowed to the folks who developed the UI for the Wii. It is natural, logical, intuitive and usable by folks who haven't even mastered literacy. I should also mention I got my clock cleaned in the boxing ring.

Anyway, the point of this story is that I was watching my brother and Kevin (the six year old) carefully as they engaged these systems. They took to radial menus, modal dialogs, and VR (virtual reality) UI concepts amazingly well and it makes me tip my hat to the folks that developed the interfaces for these systems and the games we played.

I realize this also indicates I need to get back to work--I am sitting here doing focus groups with friends as they play games because I have no better place to exercise my career discipline at the moment. I am analyzing a child who is beating me brutally in the boxing ring instead of fighting back--how funny is that?

If you are a UI/UX designer, you may have already played with a PS3 or a Wii, but I recommend you take a step back and watch others as they play. Watch how swiftly cursor movement becomes second nature. Watch how often the user's eyes leave the screen to look at the controller. Watch the decision-making process. There are a lot of lessons to be learned there--oh, and you might learn a new gaming trick or two while you are "studying." :)

Will social media change e-commerce?

My career started in interface design for medical training applications. From there I ended up moving to general librarian-centric interfaces, and that segued into e-commerce. My e-commerce exposure was very robust, not just consumer-oriented e-commerce but real meaty b-to-b stuff. Back end merchant interfaces designed for handling everything from inventory to level-three credit card data. The e-commerce experience ended shortly after 9/11 as I and most of the dot-commers in the U.S. found ourselves suddenly jobless and scrambling for anything.

After another stint in medical applications that allowed doctors to prescribe vetted and board-certified medical articles regarding conditions, tests, and treatments for patients suffering medical issues in a diverse range of medical disciplines, I found myself in a very unique job working on social media. And when I say social media I mean Message Boards, Blogs, Chat, and User Profiles. One of the most interesting parts about these products to me was designing the provisioning interface.

I should quickly define provisioning as functionality extended to permissioned users that allows them to say who can see what information within a given venue. On Facebook, this is how you can upload a photo album but only let it be seen by your friends, or a group of friends, or just one friend, or even just yourself.

Within user profiles, we allowed the end-user to establish this sort of provisioning for components on their profile (such as their contact information). We spent a lot of time thinking about this provisioning, and it wasn't until I began my current job hunt that I started applying the principles of what we discovered to e-commerce.

When I worked on b-to-b software, we learned that in general everyone wants everyone to see all of their products. This is logical. However a product is only a small part of a catalog, and what we found merchants and distributors asking for was the ability to establish custom catalogs for different customers. A product could be public, meaning it could be provisioned for anyone with access to the Internet, but pricing and delivery information should be more selective. Further more, you might want to show special prices and delivery options to a group of or individual preferred customers.

I remember the first time a MySpace user could make friends with a can of Coke (which also had a profile). While MySpace is a consumer-based social media venue, I see this as an inspiration for a more complex, and compelling business case. What if EVERYONE and EVERYTHING in the commercial food chain were associated via a social network, from the Product Designer, to the Manufacturer, to the Marketer, to the Primary Distributor, to the Secondary Distributor, to the Wholesaler, to the Retailer, ultimately all the way to the Consumer (whether that Consumer is a business or an individual is a hair I won't split here) and even to the Product itself? Wouldn't that be simply amazing?

Transparency and availability could be as granular and intricate, or as open and simple as desired. Direct-from-manufacturer specials could be offered from a company that also has a tentacular labyrinth of distribution channels. Everything from order fulfillment to buying trends to buyer affinity to targeted advertising could be managed in an elegant and modular environment.

I see a world of potential in this model and I have had some astounding conversations on this topic with some powerful social media and e-commerce thinkers. It is something I imagine will be commonplace in ten years but from where we are now seems light years away.

I hope I get to participate in the construction of such an environment--the UI/UX opportunities it presents are unbelievable.

What do you think? Will social media revolutionize e-commerce? Will brick-and-mortar stores last in the new economy? Where is it all going? Sound off!