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Will the Facebook Redesign Help or Hinder Applications Developers?

Posted by Tadhg | Mar 6, 2009 | Filed under Platforms, Research

Facebook announced a couple of days ago that they’re changing user’s homepages in a couple of significant ways to bring about more of a Twitter or Friendfeed-like environment of live sharing, and they posted some screenshots of what those updates will look like. Inside Facebook has the skinny here.

I like the redesign direction that Facebook is taking and think it will continue to drive their growth. However, as with all redesigns, alterations to the Facebook design cause changes in user behaviour and that can have unintended consequences. This is an article examining Facebook from the application discovery and retention perspective and asking the question of whether the new design will be an overall positive or negative influence.

App Discovery

Application discovery and retention in the current Facebook design is a bit of a UI muddle. There are several ways to discover applications such as:

• Search
• Sponsored Links and advertising
• App-to-App linking (Playfish, Zynga and SGN all do some version of this)
• Shares through Friends
• Applications button

Searching is okay but it relies on the user wanting to search and therefore knowing what they’re after. Sponsored Links are nicely prominent, featuring as they do on the user’s profile, but they are paid advertising and so not necessarily in reach for developers operating on a recession-economy shoestring.

App-to-App linking is essentially a smart hack. Zynga calls theirs a ‘social bar’. Once a player chances their way into your application, the bar presents them with many others. It’s a useful innovation on the part of developers to overcome the inherent issues of discoverability, but it can result in stealing Peter to pay Paul.

Sharing applications works reasonably well if it’s tied up in reasons for both the sharer and shared to make the link. Sharing has acquired the reputation of being spammy. This is largely the fault of the zombie-biting and other chain games that appeared early in the life of Facebook Platform. It is thus uncommon to see many app shares these days, and I suspect that for most applications they do not really work too well unless they’re directly related to the relationship that a player has with their friends (for example We’re Related).

The Applications button offers the most obvious route for finding applications. The Find More option leads through to recommended apps as well as showing apps that are most active and by category. It does not present a full directory so it tends to reward apps that have already gained some amount of traction.

The problem that Facebook has with app content is that they have so much of it that they can never really produce a system that will encompass everything. As startup developers making games on the platform this makes our life a bit harder but I can understand why it may be so. The issue isn’t so much that there is volume competition, it’s that none of the systems above does a good job of assisting the discovery of new applications as opposed to those that already established a foothold. For a brand new developer like Simple Lifeforms that doesn’t yet have the financial muscle to fund mass advertising these systems present challenges as well as opportunities.

New application discovery relies on users to haphazardly run across an app somehow, and as the user base grows massively, the issue is whether new users really understand the discovery options above. My mother, a recent Facebook user, doesn’t even realise that there are applications on Facebook at all or what that’s supposed to mean.

App Retention

Whatever about the impediments of finding apps in the first place (c’est la vie). Remembering to return to an application and finding an easy route to do so is Facebook’s biggest issue (for app developers). As with discovery, there is no one solution:

• Bookmarks bar
• Applications menu on home page
• Notifications
• Wall Tabs
• Boxes
• Application Settings

The Bookmarks Bar has the wonderful quality of being persistent while the user is inside Facebook. It consists of two parts, the bar itself (which resembles Quick Launch in Windows) and the Applications button (which is rather a lot like Windows ‘Start’ button) which opens a menu. The bar is powerful, but also has some odd limitations.

The main one is that the number of bookmarks allowed on the quick-launching bar is only 6. When you consider that Events, Photos, Page Manager and other core functions of Facebook typically occupy the bar (and most users would struggle to find them without those links), in reality the bar only offers room for 1 or 2 game or other applications for the average user. Changing what appears on the bar is a matter of either manually dragging and dropping items on the Applications menu (which is not very intuitive and not ideal) or an application offering the chance to Bookmark, which forces another bookmark off the bar. Neither is a good experience for dealing with this artificial limit. Why 6 slots? Why not 15?

The apps stored in the Bookmarks bar also feature on the home page in the top-right corner, but with the same 6-icon limitation. So while this presentation is more visual (icon-and-text versus icon-and-rollover on the bar) it’s still far from ideal.

Then there are Notifications. Notifications are simply the best way for apps to remind players that they exist. Notifications have high visibility because they have a snazzy red label. Colour in this instance matters because that little red dot stands in stark contrast to the blue Facebook interface. Good job.

The problem with Notifications is that they can become irritating and spammy. Both are a negative user experience and run the risk of incurring Terms-of-Service wrath if abused. A Facebook developer has to tread a fine line between wanting to be seen versus users wanting them stop annoying them. Some applications (Mafia Wars for example) skirt pretty close to this line.

Wall tabs and Boxes allow users to add applications to their profile pages but are very confusingly implemented. The Wall tabs allow for the installation of multiple applications but many of them seem excluded for no readily apparent reason. Boxes represent a sub-set of the Wall tab applications and likewise allow for the installation of applications, but the layout and navigability of the Boxes page is poor and it’s not at all clear how you install a Box or why they appear as narrow or fat, and in what order. Boxes feels pretty DOA in the rest of the interface as a result.

Lastly, users can access all of their applications (and their settings) via the Settings menu. This requires two clicks (Settings > Application Settings) and is likely not a particularly well-worn route. I’d be very surprised if most users even realised that applications have any settings at all.

The New Homepage

Facebook is easily the market leader in social networks and not just because of its size. It is also the platform that other platforms look to for leadership in the innovation race. Nobody had applications until Facebook had them and now all the major and many of the minor networks have them. Nobody had a comprehensive external logging-in facility until Facebook introduced Facebook Connect, and now everyone is following that idea. As such, what Facebook does really matters and it will precipitate change throughout the other platforms. The good news is that they seem to be focused on live publishing and openness.

The new home page is not as dramatic a re-design as last year’s. Aside from some of the structural changes such as Facebook Pages becoming more like Profiles, the issue for us is whether it will make new application discovery more or less difficult for users. In this, the most interesting development is a new left-side menu that seems to offer a list of useful things, including applications. It shows what seems to be a list of three applications with an inviting ‘More’ button underneath.

What does this mean?

It is unclear at this stage, but this little menu seems to replace the Applications menu on top right of the current home page. It think this makes applications subtly more visible as a result. It’s more easily seen by users according to the F-patterns of web page reading.

The question is whether this new placement for Applications is simply a shortcut menu for bookmarked applications or whether it is a proper list of all applications that a user has installed.

If it’s the former then the issues of discoverability go on and may even grow more difficult. The redesign is probably going a way toward eliminating such features as Boxes which, bad as they are, means losing soe amount of discovery unless a suitable replacement is implemented.

If on the other hand it’s a proper list then I think that we may be on to something. Even better, if it were showing a compressed news feed from that application (a less intrusive gathering of Notifications) then that would be a really nice addition. I suspect that it is not that yet, but Facebook have at least opened the door for that kind of functionality with this move.

Conclusion

There are no conclusions to reach yet, as we haven’t received the new design to play with and assess. However I would say that the signs are promising. The key factor with application retention and discovery is that users should find it simple to the point of natural. Rather than rely esoteric solutions in the past (such as Boxes) that require users to divine how they are supposed to work, a simple list in pain sight shows the platform working to make a user’s life easy. That is how it is supposed to work.

Given how far Facebook have come with their efforts to date, I am pretty confident that this is something that they themselves are realising and taking steps to solve so that their network doesn’t become a chore to use like some of its competitors.

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