Yeah, another Facebook story: this one’s about their design strategy
You are probably sick of Facebook stories today of all days—as FB goes public. But I thought it might be fun to look at a piece I worked on last year, for frog’s Design Mind magazine (and it later was republished by Fast Company). It went behind the scenes at FB, looking at how the company views design as a strategy.
Facebook’s Design Strategy: A Status Update
By Reena Jana
It seems odd, if not entirely counterintuitive, to find any building on Facebook’s main campus devoid of devices connected to the social-networking site. But inside the slightly grungy old warehouse that houses the company’s Analog Research Lab, there isn’t a single computer in sight. Instead, the space is filled with power saws, silk-screening gear, a small letterpress, and an industrial paper-cutting machine that slices through dozens of sheets at once, as swiftly as a guillotine. These tools are ideal for making what, exactly?
Apparently, they’re for making stacks of postcards with the word “poke” (a riff on the virtual act of “poking” someone) printed in inky red letters on one side and lines for a hand-written address and a postage stamp on the other. The cards are available to any Facebook staff member who wants to use them as personal stationery for keeping in touch with friends and family the old-fashioned way.
You see, Facebook’s creative leadership prefers to develop new features and products based on people and their online behavior, not technology and algorithms—an approach the company calls “social design.” Christopher Cox, vice president of product, defines the concept as improving how people build human-to-human, versus human-to-interface, connections online. Facebook’s social network, he says, is the virtual equivalent of an actual space in which people regularly gather to converse, play, collaborate, and share.
This starts to explain the postcards and the lab’s adorably anachronistic gear and comfy furniture. Two Facebook communication designers, Ben Barry and Everett Katigbak, transformed the space in their spare time about a year and a half ago. Beyond such old-school items as a photography darkroom and racks where wet prints can dry, there are soft chairs to sink into and a fridge filled with beverages. The business reason why the lab exists is to provide a space for communication designers like the lab’s co-founders to create branded marketing materials—T-shirts, for instance—for developer conferences and other Facebook events. It’s also where designers experiment with simple fonts and sleek iconography that will eventually influence what appears on the Facebook website. With its laid-back playful vibe, the Analog Research Lab has also become a place where Facebook’s growing design staff—which has more than tripled in size in less than two years—gathers for frequent happy hours.
Design is such an influential part of Facebook’s strategy that Cox and 64 other members of the design staff occupy desks that form a U-shape around founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The emphasis on building the notion of “social design” is so important that, when asked about its controversial privacy policies, Facebook’s in-house counsel invokes the “d” word: Earlier this year, a privacy and product attorney at Facebook was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that the company would “apply the Facebook design experience that we bring to everything we do and extend that to our privacy policy.” After all, to users of the site, finding the controversial privacy policy and adjusting the settings is really a user-interface issue—and, ultimately, a design concern.
“Everything Just Is”
Despite its pivotal role in the company, the lab typically gets left out of media profiles and Hollywood portrayals of Facebook. Those tend to focus on the website’s phenomenal popularity (more than 685 million active users worldwide at this writing) or the controversies surrounding the company, from privacy issues to its rivalry with Google. Cox is quick to point this out as a major oversight, because the lab is shaping Facebook as both an organization and a social-networking platform.
“You can learn a lot about a company by what’s literally on the walls. We don’t have clinical-looking logos on ours. They’re adorned by stuff designers have made in the analog lab and that people have put up, with no direction from me,” Cox says effusively. “We have a rogue, emergent, generative culture. We show people that when they come into Facebook, they start creating.”
This is also true of users when they log on to Facebook.com, he says: they can post whatever they want on their virtual walls. Indeed, company data shows that the average user creates 90 pieces of content per month, contributing to more than 30 billion pieces of shared content—everything from photos to Web links to posts—across Facebook’s social network during that time. Every day, some 20 million installations of third-party applications further customize Facebook accounts.
Kate Aronowitz, Facebook’s director of design, says the lab also provides a place where employees “come up with expressing who we are.” The company won’t disclose how much it has invested in the lab, or its budget. There are no staff members who work full-time in the lab; instead, the resource exists to encourage designers to play and create with non-digital tools, which, Aronowitz says, is a powerful tactic to help inform how Web design is effectively executed today. “Today, Web designers are returning to original design principles—simple shapes, contrasts, and colors. It’s not like 10 years ago, when it was all about what tools you could use to create animations on a Web page,” Aronowitz says. “At the lab, we have this extra-creative outlet, where designers can get back to basics. Sometimes people bring in old book covers, or go there and sketch. The printing press forces them to play around with super-simple typography, things that aren’t overly decorated or complicated.”
Heavyweights in the design world—museum curators and executive creative directors of well-known firms—have been largely unimpressed. They question the effectiveness of Facebook’s so-called “social design,” often using adjectives such as “cold” and “unengaging” to describe the social network’s aesthetic to publications ranging from the Washington Post to Advertising Age. Paola Antonelli, curator of design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, seems to concur. “The awesome designers, engineers, programmers, executives, and thinkers behind Facebook—who all have my eternal admiration—have designed a unique system, but the result is not an example of design,” she observes. “Let’s assume every interface is a design: Some are good. Some are bad. Some are neutral. Facebook falls in this latter category. It is not offensive, and it leaves room for people to do their own thing.”
Facebook’s plainness, Cox and Aronowitz argue, is the key to the success of its design strategy, which targets a potential 1 billion users worldwide, appealing to people ages 13 and up, with diverse cultural backgrounds in more than 70 languages. “Yes, we’ve had negative press, in terms of our ‘lack of design,’” Aronowitz says. “But honestly, when we’re doing our jobs right as a design team, we do not want people to remember interactions with our brand; we want them to experience real connections with each other and with content. That is most important.”
As an example, Cox cites the names of Facebook features. “In 2005, we decided to create a photo product that we called Photos. Other people at the time were using names like Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, right? Very niche-y,” he says. “Instead, we use common words. We recede into the background. We design a place where there aren’t new objects to trip over. Photos are photos. Chat is chat. Groups are groups. Everything just is.” To directly address criticism of the site’s design, he recalls his comparison of Facebook’s virtual space to physical space. “Look, you can design a place with the coolest-looking windows or the most beautiful archways, but that doesn’t mean people will want to sit down in those spaces and stay there,” Cox says. “The problem or challenge that we face with creating social products that work online is that the subtlest of gestures are what makes them comfortable.”
Click here to read the rest, along with photos of the Analog Research Lab.
