Julie Zhuo, the product design manager at Facebook, has had plenty of experience dealing with people who are unhappy with change. In this podcast with Jared Spool, Design Lessons from Facebook’s 350 million with Julie Zhuo, she talks about why people don’t like change and how Facebook takes that into account when they introduce new features. “In general people won’t like change, right? And it makes sense. It’s like you’re used to your desk being a certain way, right? You write letters, you look at photos. And if someone came and rearranged everything at your desk, even if they added a bunch of cool new things, your first reaction is ‘Why did you change everything?'”
In the podcast, she talks about the reaction when Facebook introduced its Newsfeed feature in 2006. Everyone at Facebook was “really, really excited about this feature.”
Julie: We’ve been working for months to get it ready. Then one night we basically flipped it on and then we waited and we waited for people to tell us how great it was, and how exciting. About an hour later we had about 10,000 pieces of feedback, and only one person liked it. Everyone else was basically like, “Oh my God, this is creepy. This is, you know, invading my privacy. This is like, I can stalk my friends. Like, what’s going on? Why did you guys ruin my Facebook experience? I can never come back.” It was a really, really strong negative feedback, but two hours later, there was like a protest group outside our office already complaining that we need to get rid of the feature or else they would boycott Facebook.
Jared: People actually showed up at your offices?
Julie: Yes. Yes. People showed up over this.
Jared: Oh, wow.
Julie: The security sent an email to everyone saying, “Hey, if you’re going to leave, take the back door because there’s people out in the front.”
Zhuo says Facebook learned its lesson.
“It used to be we’d just flip the switch, it goes from zero percent to 100 percent of users who get the change. Now it’s more of a dial that we twist slowly. We’ll launch it to one percent of users … We’ll monitor all the feedback, we’ll listen to what they’re saying and we’ll even check the metrics to see that they’re still sharing and they’re able to communicate and that one feature hasn’t just completely disappeared off their radar.”
These days, Facebook has teams of 30 or more people working on each design change. The teams include product designers who work on the core product, communication designers who work on the messaging, experience researchers who develop the testing, and content strategists who figure out how content fits into the final design. Even with all that expertise, Zhuo says the most important part of the process is feedback and usability testing.
We’ve learned over time and time again that launching something by just pushing a big switch and changing that for everyone and just expecting people to love it is not really the way to go anymore. Nowadays, we still pride ourselves on moving fast and not being scared to really take the risky moves that we think are going to put us in the right direction in the long run, but we’re a lot more careful about it.”
In the podcast, Zhuo gives an excellent detailed explanation of how A/B testing works, and the important role it plays in usability testing. Zhuo will be one of the featured speakers at the Web App Master’s Tour later this month in San Diego.
To read more about A/B testing and the role it plays in usability testing, read this oldie but goodie from Jakob Nielsen, Putting A/B Testing in its Place.
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