What Designers Can Learn From Facebook’s Beacon: the collision of “fronts”

The blogosphere (and even the regular old newspaper-sphere) is alight with stories of Facebook’s online advertising flop, Beacon. What can designers learn from this flop? It’s not about privacy; it’s about the presentation of self. People have different “selves” for different places — virtual or otherwise — and designs must be consistent with these variety of selves.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow posted an interesting story on InformationWeek that predicted the decline of Facebook because of its own success. He predicts that the more people that are one Facebook, the more confusing it is. Your “creepy coworkers,” your boss, and your friends you met at Burning Man are all in the same “place,” making it confusing, embarrassing and difficult for everyone.

What Doctorow is really describing is sociologist Erving Goffman’s notion of “the front.” Using the theatre as a metaphor Goffman argued that we actually “perform” multiple selves. Each place we go has a “front” that we learn to incorporate. A front has a wardrobe, a setting, a decor, make-up, a script and stage direction. We have a “front stage self” that we perform for everyone to see, a “back stage self” for only our closest intimates to see, and a “core self,” which is deeply private.

A doctor, for example, has a front that includes an office, a lab coat, a stethoscope and medical jargon. This is her “front stage” self. But when she’s talking to her best friend, she may use a “back stage self,” being less formal, not wearing a lab coat, or using less formal language. Her “core” self is secretly wishing she were a full-time marathoner, but she tells no one that.

Facebook’s Beacon didn’t work because it forces people to use multiple fronts AT THE SAME TIME. If I tag a recipe from Epicurious.com, but I broadcast that fact to friends that perceive me to be a party girl, I have a collision of fronts. If my boss demands to be my friend, I have a collision of fronts. If I rent The Notebook on Netflix, and my friends think I am a Goth, I have a collision of fronts.

Facebook’s Beacon forces its users to combine multiple selves. Goffman considers the collision of fronts to be a source of embarrassment or shame. Take, for example, the hilarious “Meeting in a Swimming Pool” gag on Just for Laughs. Swimmers have their swimming front (including a bathing suit, casual demeanour) and forced into a meeting, with its serious demeanour and fully clothed attendants. This is embarrassing.

Facebook has done the same thing by forcing its users to expose their selves to different fronts simultaneously. It is embarrassing, even shameful.

What Designers Can Learn From Facebook’s Beacon

• Discover your users’ fronts: If you are designing a product or a virtual place, ask your potential users what they consider the character of this “place” to be. Is is a formal place? Is it a casual atmosphere? What kinds of “props” are expected here? What would be an embarrassing topic of conversation or incident?
• Design using the theatre metaphor: Make the product consistent with that place, as if you were writing a play. Ensure that what you design is part of a script that users understand or expect.
• Pay attention to embarrassment: If your users mention shame or embarrassment in any way, gently press them about it. Discover the character of the “collision of fronts” that is the source of that embarrassment, and, above all, avoid forcing users to feel embarrassment.

Update: The New York Times is reporting that Facebook’s lawyers have not succeeded in having documents about its founder Zuckerman removed from an online magazine. These documents are “embarrassing.”

Update (12/19/07): Mashable is reporting that FB is now allowing people to “group” their friends, but they haven’t quite mastered the collision of fronts problem.

Why customer satisfaction surveys are useless

Many readers seem to enjoy my qualitative versus quantitative research post. I take this to mean that designers are hungry insight that beyond the requisite (and useless) customer satisfaction survey.

I’m not a huge fan of customer satisfaction surveys because they are usually 100% reliable but 0% valid; they tell you nothing (but consistently tell you nothing). Witness, for example, the Foresee customer satisfaction survey. This survey is designed to give pop up as a user leaves a Web site. They are asked a variety of customized questions and then a variety of demographic information. Foresee tallies these results regularly and even ranks your Web site (or company in general) in comparison to your competitors.

What does a designer learn from this? Almost nothing.

Why? Several reasons.

1. Consumers have “satisfaction” fatigue: consumers are surveyed to death these days. We are all familiar with the Likert scale “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Few survey researchers actually rework their surveys for validity. It’s called “acquiescence bias” where people tend to just answer the same way repeatedly. Survey researchers who know better use reverse-scoring techniques; but most don’t. These surveys, therefore, result in a questionable assertion that they are actually valid representations of how consumers actually feel.
2. Satisfaction surveys breed incremental “metricism”: surveys tell you nothing new: designers need to innovate their products, Web sites, and images. Satisfaction surveys tell you nothing you don’t already know. What’s more, they may actually inhibit creativity because they draw attention to minute changes that may be due to chance alone. Once organizations become regular consumers of satisfaction surveys, even small improvements become cause for celebration — even if they don’t reflect real improvements (see number 1).
3. Surveys provide numbers, not detail: designers need thick description to make their designs truly evocative of lived experiences. Satisfaction surveys are simply stripped down representations of how people feel (or more accurately, how they say they feel). Designers need richer information to spark creative solutions.
4. Customer satisfaction is a poor predictor of looming competition: Imagine a company that had consistently high customer satisfaction scores. Imagine also that this company falls victim to “incremental metricism,” and fails to see a competitor’s new, better designed product on the horizon. This competitive product would never appear in customer satisfaction surveys. It’s possible for customers to be “satisfied,” only to have them lured away by an innovative, better design.

Instead of customer satisfaction surveys, I recommend designers pore over free trend-spotting data, like the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which is a comprehensive and rigorous survey of current attitudes and beliefs. It’s harder to pull out insights from data that don’t look like they’re relevant, but the return is so much better than from a tired, staid customer satisfaction survey.

When to do qualitative and qualitative research

In a previous post, I talked about what designers need to know about economic class. How did we learn that economic class can be “seen” in designs? How did we learn that “refined” taste is “upper” class?

In general, use qualitative research at the beginning of a design process to uncover innovations. Use quantitative research at the end of a design process to measure improvement.

It started with qualitative research, and became “refined” (no pun intended) with quantitative research. French sociology Pierre Bourdieu followed a typical arc to the narrative research by first investigating economic class in an open-ended fashion. Once he established what he thought was going on, he tested these ideas with large surveys.

If you know little about the topic, start with the qualitative. This means ethnographic observation and in-depth interviewing. Open ended questions are best. At this stage, you’re trying to find the lay of the land. If you’re designing a new car stereo for example, you may wish to start by watching people use their existing car stereos. Maybe drive around with them and ask them questions about what they like.

Once you’ve learned the basics of car stereo requirements, user needs and pain points, it’s time to test your assumptions. This is where the quantitative comes in. Close-ended questions are best here, including multiple choice, yes/no, or simply number of “successes.” Let’s say you’ve learned through your observations that people don’t like how their stereos require programming their radio stations. It’s too much bother, they told you. You think pre-programmed stations might be a good design improvement, so you create a new stereo with pre-programmed stations.

Did it work? Ask your stereo users how they like the new system after they have bought their new car. But the question is, compared to what? This is where quantitative research gets tricky. You can compare the new stereos on select models (58% of users of the new model are very satisfied, while only 32% of users of the old model are). Or you can compare before and after the improvement — the so-called “pre-and post test.” That requires time, foresight, and — you guessed it — budget.

Below is a diagram that summarizes the research “funnel” from exploration to validation.

Discourse analysis and design: reading “texts” for design purposes

Designers are already discourse analysts, they just don’t know it. These designers can produce more innovative ideas by adopting a more systematic approach to their intuitive discourse analysis.

Discourse analysis the practice of deciphering the meaning of “texts.” Anything can be a “text.” Television commercials, Us Weekly, a trial transcript — these are all “texts.” Famous discourse analyses include Michel Foucault’s analysis mental illness, in which he traces how we collectively think about mental illness through “texts” of it, such as “patient charts,” or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Designers intuitively analyze “texts” all the time, especially designers who work in advertising. They obsessively collect imagery and copy they find interesting. They innovate on this copy or imagery by re-tooling some of the subtle messages in them.

How to systematize discourse analysis “lite” for designers:

1. Collect more than one genre of “texts”: instead of a single medium, try collecting several media of the same theme. If you’re designing a new toy, for example, gather a TV commercial, a print ad, and a fan’s tribute Web site. These differing “texts” may tell you what is missing in toys, or what toys are unintentionally doing to the parents who buy them.
2. Look for the “silences” in texts: If you’re designing an online advertising campaign, compare texts on a single theme and ask yourself, “What is not being said?” For example, if you’re targeting women with small children, maybe you’ll find that these women are never painted as actually having personal preferences only “mother preferences.” This is a silence that you can speak to.
3. The obvious meaning is the tip of the iceberg: If you want to know what an object means in culture, you must look more deeply than the obvious. Most designers understand this intuitively, but sometimes you must make a concerted effort. When you see the famous “Diamonds are forever” ads by De Beers, the obvious meaning is one of romance, but what is the subtle meaning? Romance is fleeting but diamonds? Diamonds are forever. The ad’s brilliance lies in its ability to leverage the symbolism of the world’s hardest substance (the diamond) with the most coveted but ephemeral experience (romantic love).

The other day I was tutoring an adult learner (a highly educated one) about discourse analysis. She complained to me that she well understood quantitative methods, variables, and counting. But she saw discourse analysis as “mumbo jumbo.”

On the surface, discourse analysis looks like mumbo jumbo. But in practice, it is a tool to see both culture and the “reality” we have constructed.