

Head of Design at Facebook: How Her Team Uses Data To Make Decisions - mikemcaveeney
http://www.zurb.com/article/515/podcast-of-julie-zhuos-talk-on-how-facebo

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lpolovets
FTA:

 _"Facebook had a really boring deactivation page when you close your
account... [One of the designers created a page] which has all your friends
waving good-bye to you as you deactivate. Give you that final tug of the heart
before you leave. This reduced the deactivation rate by 7%."_

While that's a nice reduction in deactivations, it also strikes me as somewhat
manipulative. It feels like many of the "social" companies see users solely as
metrics to optimize, not as human beings.

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snprbob86
You say "manipulative", I say "persuasive".

Is it manipulative to optimize the tag line on your landing page? You're
trying to persuade a visitor to buy your product. Or are you trying to
manipulate them to buy your product? The same principal applies to _keeping_
customers.

I'd call this manipulative when it becomes disingenuous. For example, had they
put actual speech bubbles above my friends' heads and led me to believe that
they actually were asking me to stay. Until then, this is roughly akin to
saying "Hey man, don't leave the party yet. We haven't had cake yet!" To which
I'd reply "OK, well twist my arm why don't you" and then eat some cake.

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kurtosis
Well the deactivation page did automatically say that the users "friends"
would "miss" them. Did they actually check with these users to see if they
would want their image and identity to be used in this way? If not, then it
seems pretty disingenuous to me. How do they know that these users will
actually miss them? Why is facebook assuming that my friends would not respect
my decision to leave facebook if that was the case..

~~~
zach
Well, they A/B tested with your friends saying "good riddance!" and "fine, get
lost!" but the clear winner was the "miss you" page...

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mwexler
It's not just enough to have or even "use" data. They carefully chose metrics
that matter. In their business model, for example, they saw that photo sharing
was a primary driver of longevity and of driving additional usage down the
social graph.

Therefore, the metrics where carefully chosen to foster those behaviors.
Having a goal and then choosing measure to support it is surprisingly rare,
not just among designers, but across businesses.

And just picking things like "Volume sales... and Profit!" as your metrics are
kind of specious. Yes, every business wants those, but that just delays the
real question: what behaviors by your customers will make that happen for you?
And once you think you have those, look for metrics that diagnose that those
behaviors are happening, or can help you diagnose why they aren't.

We all have data. Picking useful metrics and linking them, well, that's
insight.

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notmyname
One thing that is implied is a strong understanding of who the users are and
what they want from the product. I'm always encouraged to hear of large,
influential companies talk about these sorts of things because I hope that
these practices become more standard. Understanding users rather than guessing
at what they want and measuring the effects of changes made seem to be
obvious, but I'm always surprised at how often it isn't done.

~~~
away
Perhaps the founder does not want to pander.

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swah
How is this generally done? Do they add JS to every UI element to log what the
user does and send this info with the requests, or they can find that out only
from the http server logs?

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dnewms
I wonder how many users visited that deactivation page just to see "x will
miss you" once they heard about it, without any intent to deactivate.

~~~
sasmith
Excellent point, but it shouldn't impact an A/B test. Specifically, the
experimental and control users should be equally drawn to look at the
deactivation page.

However, this could give a false impression of improvement if you just look at
the data before and after the launch. It's a good reason to also look at the
total number of deactivations / visits to the deactivation page.

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kgrin
Interesting contrast between this and the stories about teams at Google
gathering data on optimal line widths or hues of blue...

