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“Designing Facebook Home” Video Gives Rare Look At Prototypes And Iteration Process
Facebook Home’s launcher was inspired by Lunchables. That’s just one nugget of insight into Facebook’s design process from a presentation it gave to Bay Area designers in May and that it’s now released as a video. The 40-minute clip illustrates how Home evolved, iteration by iteration. Facebook’s Julie Zhuo introduces it saying “the things that the articles never write about is the journey.”
“We all just see the final product, we see the design in its completed state, and we don’t really get to tell the story about all of the things that happen along the way, the ups and downs, the bad ideas we tried, the endless iteration and critique,” product design director Zhuo explains. Designing Facebook Home, embedded below, tells that story.
While that end product hasn’t gained the traction Facebook might have hoped for, it’s slowly getting better. The relentless brainstorming and testing process exposed here are why Facebook keeps evolving, and why Home could eventually become a livable mobile “apperating system.”
Mirroring The Real World
“This is how we should design our products” says Facebook designer Justin Stahl. “I think they should mirror this feeling of being alive. The way we do that at Facebook is by drawing parallels between the real world and the virtual world that we’re building.”
Stahl breaks down some of the key features of Facebook Home by outlining the meatspace experience they mimic:
Cover Feed – “If you think in real life, news tends to find you. You don’t really have to seek it out, and that’s how we designed Cover Feed. I woke up one day…and had the brand new trailer for Iron Man 3 I was totally into [on my Cover Feed]. It was delivered to me. I didn’t have to check a bunch of feeds and bounce between apps. It was as if someone had told me about it and it was available right when I turned on my phone.”
Chat Heads – “It doesn’t matter what I’m doing. If [my friend and co-worker] Francis comes to talk to me, I’m willing to talk to him. I’m not just going to tell him to leave and get back to him later that day. With Chat Heads I can quickly pop in and out of conversations. I can continue what I was doing. It’s just like Francis dropping by my desk every day.”
Stahl then takes a dig at the design of apps like Path, which use showy “fly-out” animations to reveal their navigation buttons. “There’s a tendency to solve tough navigation design problems by doing little magic tricks like having menus fly in out from nowhere. What’s really important for us is maintaining a sense of where you’re at.” That’s a bit rich, considering Facebook has cribbed stickers and one-touch “ok” message replies from Path.
The Social Design Process
The most fascinating part of the video shows early prototypes of Cover Feed, gesture-based navigation, and the app launcher on Facebook Home.
Originally, Facebook considered simply docking a more traditional version of the mobile news feed at the bottom of the Home lock screen. Facebook’s Francis Luu explains that “we put news feed at the bottom so you could just scroll up. And the background was my cover photo.” But that didn’t show how the feed is the “lifeblood of Facebook.” In fact, it conveyed the opposite.
In this design, Luu says “the majority of the screen is just this big photo that doesn’t change much and something that makes the news feed a bad experience is when it feels stale. So we just decided, ‘what if we fill up the entire screen with your friends’ content?’” The video then shows a series of designs for the like and comment buttons, and how it settled on the option to double-tap to Like.
Facebook then tackled how to reveal your apps. Eventually it settled on swipe left for Messenger, right for your last app, and up to open the app grid. The designers originally considered offering more than three gestures to get you to your apps but realized it would confuse people. “What about 5, 6, 8? And you’re like ‘what the hell is going on?’” says Luu.
One solution Facebook tried was swiping to open an overlaid panel of a few favorite apps on top of Cover Feed. Luu says with a laugh that “Maybe instead of swiping up and getting three separate options you got a tray of apps as inspired by Lunchables [the pre-packed kids lunch]. We actually called this design direction Launchables, and we literally turned it into a tray of apps you could curate.
In the end, Facebook stuck with the apps gesture opening a full-screen launcher. Unfortunately at first it came with no widgets, folders or dock. But with time Facebook has begun adding those features, and now Launchables has emerged as Dock, a single row of favorite apps locked to the bottom of the launcher like on iOS.
The video concludes with Facebookers discussing the need to design mobile experiences right on a touchable mobile phone, not some image-editing software like Photoshop. Facebook designed Home using Quartz Composer so they could feel the physics of flinging Chat Heads around the screen. The company’s insistence on careful design led it to have the employees who built Home oversee the productions of the commercials that promote it.
Facebook is famous for its “Move Fast And Break Things” iterative design. By letting its guard down and giving us a peek into its process, we gain better understanding of what works in Home and how it and the rest of Facebook are likely to progress.
When Will Doom Come To Hollywood?
Jane Austen? Shakespeare? Tolstoy? Hacks. Beethoven? Bach? Mozart? Wildly overrated. Statistically speaking, at least.
It’s a curious fact that while the long-dead titans of literature and music are revered above all others, they were working in a time when the talent pool — the educated population of the planet — was a tiny rounding error compared to today’s. What’s more, today’s writers and musicians have the advantage of learning from those who went before. Simple statistics implies that most of history’s great works of art must have been created within the last 50 years–
–but you’ve probably never heard of them. These days it’s nearly impossible for even geniuses to elbow their way out of the teeming masses of would-be writers, musicians, and other artists. It was bad enough back in the 18th century, when Samuel Johnson’s biographer Boswell wrote:
I told him that our friend Goldsmith had said to me, that he had come too late into the world, for that Pope and other poets had taken up the places in the Temple of Fame; so that, as but a few at any period can possess poetical reputation, a man of genius can now hardly acquire it. JOHNSON. ‘That is one of the most sensible things I have ever heard of Goldsmith. It is difficult to get literary fame, and it is every day growing more difficult.’
That’s a sentiment echoed more recently by Microsoft Research’s Duncan Watts, who a few years ago performed an experiment that indicated
market success is driven less by intrinsic talent than by “cumulative advantage,” a rich-get-richer process in which early, possibly even random events are amplified by social feedback and produce large differences in future outcomes… someone who is incredibly successful may owe their success to a combination of luck and cumulative advantage rather than superior talent.
What’s more, the traditional gatekeepers have mostly been beaten down by the hammer of technology, and find themselves fighting for smaller slices of a diminishing financial pie. The music industry has been so utterly transformed that we barely remember what it was. The book business is in the throes of the same transformation: Borders is dead, Barnes & Noble is floundering, 60 percent of book purchases happen online, the lines between agent, publisher, distributor, and retailer grow blurrier daily, and anyone who wants to can and frequently does self-publish.
As for television, as Ryan Lawler pointed out a couple of days ago, TV isn’t even really TV any more:
Re: latest Apple TV rumors. Is Ad Skipping really a killer feature? Aren't live sports and @HBO the only reasons left to even need cable?—
Rich Kearney (@richkearney) July 16, 2013
But even as the supply of what the industry cynically calls “content” skyrockets, the demand for it is at best flat. There are only so many books one can read, so much music one can listen to, so many movies and TV shows one can watch, so much content one can consume — and many consumers nowadays refuse to pay for any of the above when free or pirated versions are available.
Paradoxically, in the face of this ever-expanding panoply of choices, today’s audiences are frequently reading and viewing less diversely. It seems that today’s tech has actually intensified the Watts effect mentioned above — meaning that if you don’t already have a brand or a franchise, odds are you’re in big trouble before you even get started. Just ask J.K. Rowling and/or her nom de plume Robert Galbraith.
Or ask Jonny Geller, CEO of major literary/talent agency Curtis Brown, who says: “We used to operate on the 80-20 rule. Now, it’s more like 96 to four.” I’m all too grimly aware of that myself; I was represented by Curtis Brown back when I was a full-time thriller writer. I’m pleased to report that my novels were quite well-reviewed but sold very modestly. Just like J.K. Rowling’s! …er, as Robert Galbraith. (But it’s okay. Writing software is three times as lucrative and sometimes almost as fun.)
And yet.
There remains one last unransacked bastion, one creative castle as yet unconquered by this rising sea of disruptive technology and social change. I refer, of course, to Hollywood. They’re making more money from the box office than ever, thanks to higher ticket prices. The common wisdom is that they’ve become more megahit-driven, but if you look at the numbers, the top 10 releases of 2012 commanded 31 percent of all U.S. box-office income that year, compared to 27 percent and 30 percent 10 and 20 years ago; not exactly a shocking change.
True, streaming has destroyed the enormous DVD profits to which the studios had become accustomed: but at the same time, the rest of the planet has grown enormously wealthier over the last 20 years, and it turns out they like going to movies, too. Almost everyone does. It’s a social event that isn’t really a social event; how great is that? So: “In the past decade total box-office spending has risen by about one-third in North America while more than doubling elsewhere,” saith The Economist.
As a result the studios just keep sailing along. True, Spielberg and Lucas have predicted a Hollywood “implosion” — but they see it happening because “three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.” Not because of Netflix, or piracy, or increased supply, or diminished demand, or the democratization of the means of production. None of those actually seem to be a problem yet.
Is this a false sense of security? A rising tide lifting a fleet of sinking ships? Maybe–but I don’t think so. I think Hollywood is on to something here, and that the death of the DVD was not such a bad thing in the long run.
Movies at home have to compete with every other form of entertainment, and that’s a loser’s game; but if you can drag people out of their living rooms and into your theaters, then you’ve won the battle already. People who see movies in theaters aren’t just absorbing entertainment, they’re attending a performance. In the same way that live shows remain music’s great cash cow, movie theaters can vaccinate Hollywood against Netflix and BitTorrent.
So that big red flag waving over the iconic Hollywood sign isn’t the death of the DVD; it’s the steadily diminishing number of tickets sold. Ticket inflation may keep short-term revenues high, but in the long run it could be what cripples the business forever. The question is, will Hollywood realize in time that they need to take a short-term revenue hit, and lower their ticket prices, in order to keep their audience coming out to theaters? As a movie lover, here’s hoping that the answer is yes.
Image: Kaiju, Pacific Rim. Go see it.
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