Becoming Social By Default

Part 1: A Mobile-First Mindset

DESIGN + BUILD MOBILE-FIRST

The market is going to be mobile-first. Where do you want to be? Don’t use your existing web services as a starting point. It is easy to make this mistake. Start from scratch. Do it as a cohesive team and a cohesive experience. Compromises are focused around mobile, instead of ‘legacy’.

DESIGNING IN MEANS DESIGNING OUT

Design decisions are drastic on mobile. Every decision matters. Less is always more: Mobile: less features, more focus, less data, faster, etc. “Last night, a typeface saved my life” Every decision matters: MIT AgeLab research shows that better typefaces can reduce car crashes

Design decisions impact trust on mobile Once you share something inappropriate, you can lose trust Personalization, when you share (you also expose), your actions have explicit and implicit consequences Every action can amplify or nullify Your hypotheses are probably wrong. Measure.

DESIGNING IN MEANS DESIGNING OUT

LATENCY KILLS

10 / 100 / 1000 ms – map out your interactions to these buckets and make sure they align with the UI/UX To win: mobile-friendly design, great engineering, and magic. [translation: focuses your user, help them quickly, and hide this complexity] Do things at the right time. Measure. Don’t miss. Responsive! = Fast

EMBRACE BEAUTY

Aesthetics matter Polish is expected Design for the next billion users. Don’t use a floppy disk icon. Caring about design should be everyone’s job This is even more important for social apps because you are building a trust relationship

EMBRACE TOUCH

Sometimes, this is what people mean when they say mobile-first: -  Touch-friendly targets -  Not too much functionality on small screens -  Paradigms that are touch-friendly (but gestures are not

discoverable if designed poorly)

This should make you redesign your interactions from scratch (important to not reply too much on past for social apps)

BUILD AROUND A-HA!

Know what your product value actually is Know what actually makes your users happy Once you know this, then you can focus your design, testing, engineering to make this better Remember that a user will only use your app briefly. This is how you get this to come back.

CACHE IS KING

Web Stack: Building for scale still applies, but focus is now on latency and building MVC + Network Requests stack Syncing device to servers Offline scenarios Graceful connectivity

“All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this.” Miyamoto Musashi

Have perfect timing

HAVE PERFECT TIMING

Reach out to your users: Passbook, etc. Social really helps with this. Do things at the right time (this helps hide loading times) Little things that connect users are way more important on mobile Slice at the right time to kill it.

SHOULD YOU BUILD A MOBILE TEAM?

Get to YES / NO ASAP Build initial product + kickstart operations around process, project execution, training and hiring Adopt process that helps you ramp up fast - Pair programming, Agile, etc.

Do you want to build a team that knows native? Then you need iOS and Android leads. Go with your strengths. If you’re much faster at web, build a dev team with mobile web stack knowledge.

WHAT YOU SHOULD LOOK FOR

Generalist + Design-Minded: you need people who do not see UI and polish as dirty work Young/Fast-Learner: you need people who learn new platforms and stack quickly without set ways Strong SE Fundamentals: helps pick up and learn platforms quickly and establish good practices Pair Programming-Friendly: you need people who can communicate if you’re creating a team that can onboard consistently Previous Experience (Optional): background in application/ mobile app development is helpful

KNOW YOUR USERS

Build a great agile engineering process… Crash reporting: Bugsense, Crashlytics, Crittercism, etc. Minimal: email your logs and catch your crashes Analytics: Flurry, GA (for web), Kontagent (games), need data before you can test. Lots of tools. Review/Feedback loop (lets users rate your app when happy, send you feedback when sad) A/B Testing: Pre-launch in smaller markets – may be very time-consuming to build A/B

Now we’re in a mobile-first state of mind

Part 2: Hard Lessons Learned the Easy Way

WHAT HAPPENED?

People use their phones to share a lot more iPhone era: Silos created by apps. Existing models. 500+ MM Mobile FB users, OS integration with FB / Twitter / G+, etc. People are using their phones to communicate and share stories: trillions of SMS messages sent annually

What we talk about in general when it comes to

social networking integration

AUTHENTICATION (KNOW THE REAL YOU)

Tying authentication to social networking can make it easier to sign up for your service Single Sign-On Easier to get user’s information and profile filled out When connected to their social networks, you have users with authenticity Can think about new use cases like social-proofing

DISCOVERY AND DISTRIBUTION Growth and user acquisition is often the main reason to have social network integration But don’t do this as a starting point! Apps that are social by design will have this user acquisition loop built in! Goal is to be aware so that you can optimize Best: You actions are related to personalization and doing things with friends Worst: Getting friends to participate out-of-app / Just inviting friend to try the app

DISCOVERY AND DISTRIBUTION

PERSONALIZATION

Making things social by default means making it theirs Personalized content is about increasing relevancy Think about music: the interests of a user and the interests of the friends of users can make Rdio or Spotify a more satisfying experience Recommendations based on past context

USING SOCIAL NETWORKING DATA

Not just about getting users, about getting useful Using Foursquare or FB places for a location-based app Uniting people with common interests, location and other connections Provide context: these signals can make you do this better Beware of public sharing vs. private sharing (think open graph) - Designing in and out – let’s revisit frictionless

We are getting better SDKs now that native is a focus

SOCIAL BY DESIGN = SOCIAL BY DEFAULT

Rdio – MAKING MUSIC SOCIAL

Rdio – MAKING MUSIC SOCIAL

Personalization is a perfect fit for music Thinking mobile-first is a must: streaming / offline syncing / consistent experience across devices

Instagram – MOBILE-FIRST

Sharing and story telling Focused on experience Makes you want to share more

Oversharing leads to no sharing

Draw Something – GROWTH

Growth was great A-ha moment was great…(fun to send silly photos to friends) Still fun? (sometimes) Too many ‘friends’

“Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.”

-Rousseau

So make sure you get it right!

Revisiting Designing In and Designing Out

(for our private parts)

Then you can start to make it better

Path – INTIMATE SOCIAL NETWORKING

SimplyUs Shared Calendar

Pair Communication App for Couples

Part 3: Trends of the Near Future

Mobile-First Experiences are Disrupting Incumbents

eBay MOBILE

Billions in revenue annually 100M+ downloads, 100M+ items listed eBay app launched in 2008

ESPN

Mobile streaming rights to all their major sport partners Users over minute over 100K (increase of over 48% this year) 70% of sport content consumed on mobile devices are on one of ESPN’s mobile apps

UBER

Mobile-first UI: You see a map, hail a car, it comes, driver calls your phone Removes paying at the end from the experience

Social-First Experiences are also being moving to

towards mobile

FANCY

Show off things you like and maybe even buy them -  Over $50K weekly sales

Social by Default -  Personalized tastes and

recommendations -  Fancying something is

inherently social -  Connects to social networks

Recently launched suite of apps

Where becoming social by default on mobile happens

Social as a Platform Strategy on Mobile

RETHINKING THE INBOX

PEOPLE-CENTRIC DESIGN

EVERYTHING YOU DO IN ONE PLACE

OUR RETHINKING OF THE INBOX

CARAMEL – SOCIAL INBOX

Everything is connected to your inbox

iOS - PASSBOOK

Android Jelly Bean (4.1) Google Now

BlackBerry 10 – Blackberry Hub and Peek

Facebook Messenger - Android

RETHINKING THE CAMERA

JUST ONE PRESS

WHAT IF IT WAS AUTOMATIC?

What if there was no more storage?

This will happen with every core experience on mobile. And it will be aggregated.

You will have to think about how to build at the platform level. This is where we are headed.

SOCIAL AS A PLATFORM STRATEGY ON ANDROID

LAUNCHER + SOCIAL INBOX

CAMERA

MAPS

PAYMENTS

MAKING ANDROID YOUR OWN: XIAOMI / MIUI

MAKING ANDROID YOUR OWN: KINDLE FIRE

MAKING ANDROID YOUR OWN: BAIDU YI

MAKING ANDROID YOUR OWN: SHARP FEEL UX

NOT JUST PHONES AND TABLETS AND PHABLETS…

“Re-imagination of nearly everything” Mary Meeker

NEW BEHAVIOR = NEW APPS, NEW TECH, NEW INTERACTIONS

What does social by default look like for the next billion users?