How to create an elegant tool? Facebook has these four commercial design principles

Lei Feng network (search "Lei Feng Net" public concern) by: author of this article Margaret Gould Stewart, Ali mother translated from " Facebook's Four Business Design Principles for Crafting Elegant Tools" .

When I first joined Facebook to guide the commercial design business three years ago, I faced a steep learning curve because my previous career was devoted to designing and experiencing consumer experiences. With the desire to meet new challenges, I decided to devote myself to less prominent, but equally important B2B/enterprise software areas to help Facebook realize its great potential as a marketing platform. All I need to do is to set up a team that can promote the development and design of Facebook advertising products and link different types and mass organizations with people around the world in a meaningful way.

Not only is I learning how to design elegant tools for more than two million Facebook business partners, but the entire company is facing such challenges. Although we can be confident that Facebook has been shown to be particularly good at building compelling consumer experiences, we do not have the same good reputation in the business world. Previously, building B2B and enterprise software was not the company's core competitiveness. The lack of commercial experience in design directly affected the quality of the products we released. Of course we want to do more and better, but we must first understand how to do it.

So we went into the design exploration of this great product in a humbly state of mind. Indeed, the definition of “what a good design is” is often universal. Good design needs to solve practical problems. It should be easy to use and it should be done carefully. We knew we wanted to create the most effective advertising software in the world, and the company also provided us with a team of engineers who care about product quality. However, in order for the team to manage itself and maintain a high level of product quality, it is essential to establish some basic principles; what does the product quality actually mean in the work environment, and the difference between the commercial product and the user product design?

Different from the user-type product field, in the commercial environment, it is difficult for us to imagine ourselves as behind-the-scenes heroes. I previously wrote about the low quality of commercial tools. We are working hard to improve the quality of the company's products and the quality of the products we have in the larger advertising technology industry. In the long run, we hope that we can engage in high-quality work and share what we have learned from this road, hoping that it will be of great benefit to other industries with similarly complex ecosystems such as health care, education, financial services and government. Software to improve the drive system and industry is good news for all of us, especially those who often use bad design software to complete their work.

Over the past few years, through repeated explorations, we have gradually learned what great business tools should look like, what they feel like, how they work, and how they affect people’s efficiency. With achievements. We have found that when designing tools for most of the work environment (not just the advertising section that our team focuses on, but also other business-related tools), there will always be some of the same modules - such as content management systems, development tools, and even internal tools Cost reports and performance management products. We summarize the lessons we have learned as four guiding principles for designing great commercial products.

Guide people to make the best choices, increase their confidence and help them succeed.

When we design for people's work, we have to take responsibility not only to help them to complete the piecemeal work, but also to help them to complete better, which means that we need to find a lever to promote their business development and success. . So our design must help their work be more efficient - with effective embedded help documentation and notifications, to prompt people to do the right thing at the right time, and to train people to use the best course of action to help them The work goes a step further.

Think of your product as a personal trainer for each user. Ideally, everyone gets a personalized experience where they expect, and then slowly expands to complete something that they originally thought was not. Possible things. What is the actual situation?

In the past, Facebook's embedded help provided businesses with explanations of various features and terminology, but this is generic and does not take into account the huge diversity of advertisers who access our advertising tools. Our users range from the nearest Facebook page administrator to the front-line professional marketers, but there seems to be little in between, perhaps because we have not made targeted optimizations for any groups. The service is not enough for every group.

Now we have introduced the smart embedded help framework, which is the best practice example of what I call the first principle. Internally, we call this “action you may take” or AYMT (Actions You May Take); the help it offers is more than just highlighting tooltips or hovering layers for a particular function, but more. Sexual and personalized guidance.

The example of Facebook advertising, the "You may act" system, will give users guidance and guidance throughout the entire advertising creation and management process.

AYMT's goal is to comprehensively consider the liveness and expressiveness of advertisers and page managers' life accounts, and to propose some corrective suggestions and solutions to help them improve their business performance in Faceobook. The instructions each user accepts are dynamically generated and personalized according to the different circumstances in which each company uses the system. AYMT also provides custom content, such as performance reports for pages or campaigns that are generated by comparison with similar businesses, which is more meaningful than pushing the user directly to the original data. This guidance is impeccable from all angles, but is it equally effective in driving business development?

Last year, we made a non-directed experiment for the entire AYMT framework. The control group members did not have any AYMT skills at all. The results show that they showed that the AYMT system can increase the overall active account by 4%. When faced with more than two million businesses, this means that more people will have more full access to our business tools. This also shows that it is very effective to actively help people learn and grow. Users not only learn how to operate the system, but also understand how to make the system work for them, become their tools, and achieve their desired goals.

Improve the user's working model, in order to achieve their goal with the least amount of energy.

In the user area, we usually use the time of the user's products as an indicator of product quality. Users who participate more in an APP will spend more time on it. Therefore, we carefully consider the “time consumption” and Try to increase it.

But in the work environment, maximizing time consumption is contrary to our original intention. We hope people can realize that the full value of our products is to spend as little time as possible (to achieve the same effect). So one of the important principles of our design is efficiency. If we can try to shorten the time for a little bit of repetitive work that users do on a daily basis, this is a great improvement from an efficiency point of view; those saved time can be spent on Some of the more interesting, creative and rewarding work, or, at least, it allows users to complete their work early to return home...

Last year, we introduced the revised version of Atlas, which allows companies to use Facebook's positioning capabilities for marketing campaigns, as well as digital products other than Facebook and its products. This means that you can also use Facebook's positioning capabilities on other websites and apps to increase the relevance and effectiveness of your ads. In the past, this was a complex tool used by professionals at expert institutions.

Before the redesign, the “classic” Atlas has been neglected by design for many years. When studying the consumer experience, we heard a user describe a very inefficient job. This is a typical defeat. The expression of principles:

"This is undoubtedly the most time-consuming and least effective thing in my life. I have confidence in this conclusion. There is no doubt that people have wasted too much of their lives here."

—Before starting the Atlas revision in September 2014, the users participating in the test stated

This sentence touched me not only because of the customer's disappointment with our products, but also because I smelled a desperate to give up. As if yelling, "Don't anyone care about this kind of experience that makes me inefficient?" Atlas is a business software that users use for hours every day, and users have to use awkward and inefficient old tools to complete many of them. Repeated work, frustration will also increase with the passage of time. When you have to rely on a product to complete your work, or it takes up a very large proportion of your daily work, efficiency is crucial. Therefore, we are committed to researching workflows and simplifying them as much as possible, while also reducing the time required to complete each task (in each step of the process).

However, if only short-sighted focusing on efficiency only leads to some new problems, if oversimplification is made for efficiency, the result may be that wrong output comes along with high efficiency over the same period.

An example of how we are trying to streamline the use of the process while ensuring its effectiveness is the overall redesign of the advertising creative process. The new version has already been launched in late 2013. According to experience, the focus of the creative creation interface is on the ad format details and the choice of ad slots (in the right column of the Facebook homepage, or in the fresh flow, etc.), and the rest of the process is similar, regardless of your business The type is a promotion or an effect that you expect to achieve within any budget.

The flow of old Facebook advertising creation ignores a crucial question: What are the business goals you are trying to accomplish?

At the end of 2013, we launched a completely redesigned Facebook advertising interface. The most important change was to ask the user at the beginning of the advertising purchase process the business goals he hoped to achieve.

The redesigned creative creation flow will first ask the user, "What do you want to accomplish?"

Once we understand the user's business goals, we can significantly simplify the process in an intelligent way. Goal-oriented design focuses on advertising creation and related factors that are closely related to it, just as it takes the user to a local retail store or online retail store. Because of this, we can remove some of the irrelevant or unnecessary elements of the creative flow, and increase the efficiency of marketing staff to repeat work many times a day. Like most of the correct design decisions, it looks perfect in retrospect, but at the time it was a new way of thinking about advertising creation; after we released the product, it was also imitated by other companies. .

There are many things we need to do to constantly optimize the use of our advertising creation tools, but designing experiences based on the ultimate goals of the business makes us more likely to achieve a balance between efficiency and effectiveness.

Provide users with intuitive ways to handle complex problems and workflows.

Business tools are quite complex. We hope to deliver powerful technologies and useful ideas to users. However, it is difficult to achieve balance between ease of use and innovation. This is especially true for more advanced functions. So at the user level, we strive to streamline the design of simple forms that have been completed, eliminate complexity everywhere, and allow users to focus on a single path and put it into action. In terms of business, in any case, our audience has a very different level of experience.

From the perspective of Facebook's advertising business, these tools serve a wide variety of user groups. Some enterprise users are initially entering the digital advertising field, and some are initially exposed to the advertising field. They don't think of themselves as advertisers or marketers, they just want to share their products, services or ideas. At the other end of our user base, there are a group of smaller, but vital, and very professional marketers— perhaps experts in large companies or organizations that use software tools all day to help them do their jobs.

The ongoing challenge we face is to figure out how we can use all the advanced technologies for our "non-expert" users, and also provide our "expert" users with some of the advanced features they need. Good business goals. We certainly understand and respect the inherent complexity of business workflow and technology, but everyone will benefit from cutting unnecessary complexity.

In a sense, this is the design of the blonde girl effect (translation: from the fairy tale "Jin Fenghua and the story of three bears" metaphor for a most appropriate choice, the effect of impartial and just right): the optimal solution must fall A certain parameter, not some extreme.

In terms of complex UI, if you do not simplify it enough, users often do not know how to use it. But if you simplify it too much, you will reduce the value that users expect to achieve through the tool.

More challenging is that each user who uses the tool has different levels of experience and different areas of knowledge. The optimal solution is not static, and the sweet spot for user experience changes according to individual needs and abilities.

Facebook's advertising positioning UI is a good example of trying to bring clarity into the original complex. Facebook offers unparalleled positioning capabilities, we can use any other marketing platform can not be achieved, to help any type of enterprise of any size at the right time and place, accurate information pushed to the right audience. But at the same time, there is significant complexity. The positioning UI of the advertising system is one of the most difficult designs for all Facebook product designs; if we do not do well enough, the risk factor is quite high.

In this part of the product experience, if we can't express the complexity in a clear way, users will not be able to target the precise target audience according to the conditions, and will not be able to convey the information that should have been conveyed. If users get the wrong positioning, it will fundamentally destroy the value of Facebook marketing. Those companies who waste their marketing budgets on the wrong audience will suffer a great deal in the entire process and will naturally lose confidence in Facebook’s marketing efforts.

But if we do this perfectly and help them target the right target audience, this will be the most effective way to use marketing funds, and they will feel encouraged, confident and have a sense of accomplishment. In the process, we will also get something more important: the use of Facebook's features has greatly increased the correlation between advertising and users, more to play the value of advertising.

Over the past few years, we have significantly changed and optimized our positioning UI to balance complexity and ease of use.

Facebook's advertising positioning interface has significantly improved simplicity and usability after revision.

We have re-divided the core of the interface into demographic characteristics, interests, and behaviors. This makes it easier to determine the positioning criteria and also reserves enough flexibility for future positioning operations. Our content strategy team led the optimization of this targeting category. The revised classification clearly became more intuitive and colleagues also reduced unnecessary duplication. We will gradually open up some advanced features instead of showing all the features to users at the beginning. We allow users to build complex target audiences in this interface. This interface will become more and more complex as user needs increase. This improvement, like other improvements, significantly increases the advertiser’s success rate in using this workflow and helps marketers find the target group they want to find.

Provide reliable control and related feedback to help users build trust in our products.

When a user-type application cannot be used normally, this kind of thing can be annoying, but it is far from being a disaster. However, when a commercial application fails, businesses may lose money, lose their users, and more extreme, some people will lose their jobs . This explains why accuracy and predictability are the most important aspects of commercial tools.

In our private life, when using certain products to satisfy some entertainment needs, some accidents and surprises may appear interesting; but in business, the effect of “surprise” is more harm than good. For example, you launch an advertising campaign on Facebook, let users go to your offline physical retail store to buy a specific product, and then you estimate the number of customers that may be present and make some countermeasures. After you started this activity, the number of participants was 10 times what you expected. This sounds good news, right?

This kind of scenario may cause two kinds of problems. First, if you do not know what contributed to your unwitting success, then you are often unable to copy it. This is a case for business owners, including marketers. Fight because they don't have as much time and money to complete too many trials (they need to be able to replicate the successful experience).

The other is that while poorly performing advertising is obviously a problem, according to business goals, performing well-performing ads is also a problem for businesses. If you prepare for a certain amount of traffic, store the corresponding amount of products; but the result is that 10 times the number of users flooded in. You run out of inventory and can not meet the needs of users. This sudden "surprise" will cause a huge user service problem, and it will have a bad negative impact on the business, especially the brand.

Predictability and accuracy are not some attractive words, but they are the product chips that companies can rely on.

For a company that is rapidly advancing and surpassing past performance and challenges, maintaining accuracy and predictability becomes more challenging. However, we are exploring ways to effectively and meaningfully allow companies to trust the accuracy and predictability of our products.

For example, our large-brand advertisers - Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Toyota - have been troubled with how to integrate Facebook into their own marketing plans. On the one hand, because they already have detailed plans in advance, they need to "complete" specific Business goals. Their needs are very challenging for us because Facebook's advertising system has historically been a flexible system based on auction bidding, allowing advertisers to buy advertising space at the best market price. Although this is beneficial to most advertisers, it is a challenge for big brand customers because they need a more predictable audience guarantee under a specific budget.

In order to meet this demand, we introduced a new purchase type called Touch & Frequency.

Facebook's new reach & frequency tools allow large brand advertisers to accurately predict their (advertising) audience and keep this within budget.

This feature allows large-brand advertisers to buy ads based on what they care most about:

How many people saw their ads (reached), how many times did they see (frequency)

Accurately estimate their spending so that large business activities can be planned next

All spent money is spent on the place

We still need to continuously improve the accuracy and predictability of our products in many places. This is an endeavor that we have been working towards forever. But every step we take forward gives our users more confidence in us.

We hope these principles will be a useful framework for other companies and institutions that are also facing such complex issues. Hopefully, ten years from now, when we look back, we will think that this decade is a time when the quality of commercial design is leaps and bounds, catching up with even occasionally exceeding the design quality of user-oriented products. If we succeed, these elegant tools can greatly reduce the financial and human losses caused by bad software. More importantly, from the perspective of people, we hope to help people be more successful and ultimately be able to work more pleasantly.

USB3.2 20Gbps Data Cable

Usb3.2 20Gbps Data Cable,Usb 3.2 Type-C,Usb3.2 Type-C Charging Data Cable,High-Speed Usb 3.2 Type-C

Dongguan Pinji Electronic Technology Limited , https://www.iquaxusb4cable.com