In spite of the fact that parts of the interview sound like it was recorded at a high school basketball game, Eric provides some great insight, even suggesting at one point to “launch” an idea with just marketing materials and an ad campaign, and no backing product. Based on the clickthrough/conversion rate when customers move to subscribe or purchase your product or service, you can reasonably gauge how the idea might do.

There may be an argument to be made about potentially losing those individuals as sales, but you can ask their email, make up an excuse, or explain that things aren’t ready yet and thus limit your costs to just a simple ad campaign and marketing/informational site. If you’re presenting the idea as you will once it’s built, and no one is clicking through, it’s a good indication that you’re going to want to tweak the idea or that you’re headed down the wrong path.

The interview is split into two parts, and I’ve embedded the first part below.

What is the minimum viable product? (Part 1) | Venture Hacks
Opening Board Meetings (Part 2)

With the exception of the penultimate “new Facebook”, they have had to rollback or significantly change tack from their initial position of “this is new and you’re going to like it,” forced  instead to listen to their users, post a mea culpa and attempt to save face with the global press and the blogosphere collectively rolling their eyes at each new foible. TechCrunch has an idiotic post about how when Facebook listens to their users, God kills a kitten for bowing to the masses and “designing by committee”. Robert Scoble backed this up with a misguided treatise about how Zuckerberg is on track to score billions from these changes and how they shouldn’t/wouldn’t start listening to their users. I call bullshit.

Scoble cites the fun designer quip: “if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say “well, they just designed a Volvo.””

This isn’t that. This is as if Facebook simply removed the steering wheel from the car and told you you’ll go farther now that you can’t steer.

What Facebook did here was not revolutionary. It was not bringing about hard change we needed. Instead, they stripped away piles of features their users had come to like and depend on. They replaced them with broken stand-ins, like the quiz/application-spammed “stream”, with no way to reasonably filter the nature of what was coming in. Sure, you’ve exposed me to “more” of the “social graph”, but at great cost to the signal/noise ratio that made Facebook so very useful to most people. When you make a product markedly and objectively worse to use and interact with on a daily basis, under the backwards-minded notion that the new way will help users connect “better”, you’re going to frustrate nearly EVERYone. And rightfully so.

This is not a question of design by committee. It’s interesting to note that, while excessive, there’s been a lot of chatter on how Google designs, if not by committee, then by cold, hard statistics. Douglas Bowman, Google’s former lead designer, recently left Google because of their engineering-centric approach to design: essentially to (arguably) overengineer the user experience and back every design decision with quantitative analysis, facts, and figures. He goes on to cite how Google tested 41 shades of blue in what must have been one hell of an A/B test—the point here is that the “committee” was essentially the aggregated experience of the user base, whether they knew it or not. This is fundamentally different than assigning 20 or 30 key “stakeholders” who can significantly alter the course and outcome of a project on their personal whims. Likewise, Facebook “listening” to their users is closer to the Google approach of implementing user feedback—saying it’s “design by committee” is a false dichotomy.

Further, telling me that Facebook is slimming things down and cutting features “for my own good” is like telling me that new keyboards will no longer come with an “E” key in order to simplify the user experience—I’ll just have to launch Character Map and manually copy and paste my vowel from now on, but look! Fewer keys! This is a perfect example of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

What’s stranger still to me is that the example Scoble cites is a complete non-sequitir: he basically suggests that Facebook is moving closer to copying FriendFeed than Twitter, and that we’ll be able to use it for recommendations and the “social” or “peer-based” marketing. Point of contention: the “old” Facebook design did absolutely nothing to stop exactly that. It was simply a different, more powerful interface that gave users more of what they wanted and better controls by which to express those preferences. Further, the *new* Facebook does nothing to better deliver that.

Even Mark Zuckerberg has trouble making a compelling case for the changes. Quoth Z:

We’re also going to make some changes to the home page. The new home page will let you see everything that’s shared by your friends and connections as it happens. [Previously possible with the Live Feed option on Old Facebook.] It will also provide you more control by letting you choose exactly who you see among the people and things you are connected to. [Previously possible with the Old Facebook sliders and "more" or "less" about this person option.] You can decide you no longer want to get updates from your old friend from high school who you rarely talk to, or you can filter the stream to only see updates about your family members. [Both previously possible.]

So what’s changed? They’ve consolidated four purpose-driven feeds into one amalgamated clusterfucky stream. They’ve *removed* the capability to specify the type of events you’d like to see the most, and thus, which things should remain visible for you the longest. The advantage to the old system was dynamic, intelligent exposure. Old Facebook would do its level best to show you what it thought was most important and make sure those things were persistent and visible. It used algorithms. It did NOT just spew an unadulterated, stream-of-consciousness of everyone around me with no means to filter it. Enter New Facebook. The world is better when you can’t turn down the volume, right?

Facebook has announced that they are, in fact, integrating some user feedback into the new design. Among these changes are things to mitigate application updates (something that Old Facebook already had, since you could mute a given application’s update), photo tags (sometnoshing that Old Facebook accomplished well enough with the Photos feed), more Highlights (something I’m not sure anyone really wants), and moving the Friend Request and Event Invites to the top right corner. You know, where they were on Old Facebook.

Subjective, design and interface-oriented changes that don’t significantly improve any user’s experience do not enable me to be better in touch with my “social graph”  or heart chakra, for that matter. Please, let’s not confuse good design with an overly simplistic, featureless future. And let’s not just full steam ahead, ignoring the pleas of millions, simply because Mark hath seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. Facebook’s future is still bright and buzzing with potential, but they haven’t gained any ground by seriously smudging the window to my social graph.

Responding to Your Feedback | Facebook Blog via TechCrunch
10 Things That Suck About the New Facebook | HTMList
Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now | Scobleizer

Developing a “web 2.0″ application brings with it a host of new challenges previously unfelt or easily ignored with older, single-page-load-per-action apps. The browser has evolved from a simple page renderer to an application platform that busily executes JavaScript and receives, parses, and displays loads of new data without ever leaving the page. Developers are now struck with the challenge of ensuring their applications manage memory properly and efficiently—your JavaScript can leak memory, killing the user experience on your site, but also impacting the user’s complete experience with their system across the board.

To date, it’s been a bit of a struggle to manage memory, since developers are essentially forced to rely on their operating system’s memory managers to even monitor the memory usage of their browser. Even then, testing can be frustrating, as Firefox, for instance, stores all tabs in the same process. Google Chrome is multi-threaded; each tab is its own process. Chrome also features its own built in task manager, so you can identify which page is using exactly how much memory, CPU, and bandwidth. Even at its most detailed, the stats available only show aggregate memory and virtual memory usage—these abstract figures make troubleshooting individual pieces of your code difficult to say the least.

The folks over at Mozilla’s Developer Tools Lab are looking to change that by building a memory analysis tool that helps devs understand exactly how their application is using memory, and the behavior of the cycle (garbage) collector:

We plan on the initial implementation of this tool to be simple. For memory usage, we want to introduce the ability to visualize the current set of non-collectible JavaScript objects at any point in time (i.e., the heap) and give you the ability to understand why those objects aren’t collectible (i.e., trace any object to a GC root). For the cycle collector, we want to give you a way to understand when a collection starts and when it finishes and thus understand how long it took.

Ben Galbraith and the team are soliciting help and feedback, so if this is an issue you’ve had to deal with in the past, make sure you comment.

A New Memory Tool for the Web | Ben Galbraith’s Blog via Ajaxian

Facebook began rolling out their new design two days ago, and it’s frankly simply terrible. The first thing you’ll notice about the Facebook redesign is that it looks a lot like a basic Twitter page. Facebook talks a lot about how this new layout helps show a “live stream of your social graph” and a lot of other nonsense that would seem completely applicable if they were switching from the new design to the old.

The reality is that they are angering their customers by making things difficult to find, dramatically altering the aesthetic and interface of the site, and in many people’s opinion, taking a dramatic step backwards in usability. My exposure to this nightmare of an interface began just today, but I get a distinct impression that it won’t grow on me like the last changes.

What don’t I like? Let’s take a look:

1. Avatars: I’ve grown to love Twitter. I use it every day. Facebook has made a clear overture towards Twitter by displaying your friend’s avatars on every single feed item. This takes up space and annoys me a great deal: On Twitter, I may not know the individuals I follow. I may closely associate them with their avatars and use that as a visual reference. On Facebook, however, I know almost everyone I’m “friends” with, by name, and relatively personally. I know some users are exceptions to this and have tons of friends, but the avatar won’t help them any more than it will annoy me. It takes up space, looks off-balance, and feels out of place:
   
2. What’s on your mind? As it turns out, the same thing that’s on everyone’s mind: The new Facebook makes us stabby. They’ve changed the simple status update to a more poignant question: What’s on your mind? This has been merged into something called the Publisher, which essentially combines posted items, photos, and any app that is built to post news stories using the Publisher into one unwieldy and rather confusing component. While I think the Publisher has some potential, I think only showing the “Add” pane on focus is a mistake. The “building” interface is confusing–as you progress down the path of adding items like a link URL, more options become available to you, but because they’re not visible to start with, users may worry that they’ll end up just posting a straight link.
   
3. Multiple Notification Areas: Facebook has always walked the line with this a bit: New friend or application requests or other pressing needs always appeared in the upper right corner, at the top of the sidebar. This wouldn’t inform you of new inbox messages; for that you need to see if there’s a number next to Inbox. Facebook has does us one worse by putting friend requests near the Welcome banner, at the top of your stream, while other notifications like birthdays appear on the right side near the Highlights sidebar.
   
4. Birthday Handling Is Curiously Stupid: This one is hard to verify, because it’s not presenting right now, but when I first loaded the new design, it showed me my friend’s birthday was today. Below that, it offered me a link to view more upcoming events. As it turns out, another friend has a birthday within 3 days. Nice that I need to click a call to action to display that information. Old Facebook just showed me birthdays of friends three days out. Worrying: My friend’s birthday has passed, but my other friend’s forthcoming day of jubilee is no longer showing up anywhere on the page, at all.
5. Event Handling Is Curiously Stupid: Or broken, I can’t tell which. I have a forthcoming event—one I created, am attending, and would like additional details on—but all I see near the Highlights sidebar area is a stupid sponsored event for a forthcoming movie I have no intent on seeing. This is wildly inconvenient as a reminder to NOT see a film I couldn’t care less about is markedly less useful for me than a friendly, ever-present reminder of an event I’m, you know, RUNNING. I’m hoping this is just a simple bug, because not having a consistent space for forthcoming events that you’re attending will near-completely irradicate any usefulness that feature once had.
6. “Highlights”: Not Anyone’s Definition of Highlights: Seriously, I understand the concept, as Facebook describes it:
   “This section will feature photos, notes and other content you probably don’t want to miss: events lots of your friends are attending, links many people have commented on, public profiles your friends connect to and so on.” But they really missed the boat on this one. Maybe it’s my particular group of friends, but showing me a few people’s tagged photos doesn’t really rank as “breaking” for me. It’s stranger still that it seems to give weight to the first two items, even though their presence at the top of the list is arbitrary.

   Finally, I can’t “clear” items from this list. I like to remove persistent items after I’ve decided to read or disregard them. But because I can’t nix them, I’m stuck looking at the same stupid rotation of menial items until it decides to rotate them out. (A good example of the functionality I’d like to see is the “People You May Know” widget that appears on the home page—click the X and it’s replaced with a new potential person you may know, until there are none left.)

7. Fully Integrated Ads: I understand Facebook needs to generate revenue. Integrating ads directly into the Highlights sidebar with absolutely NO visual cue that it’s an ad is a quick way to ruin the entire Highlights experience for me and annoy the fuck out of me in the process. I read and responded to Facebook ads before, when they were disparate and set apart and clearly ads. Now, I’m skipping the entire Highlights bar because a few items look like ads to me.
8. No Sorting by Content Type: Facebook let us select the News Feed, which was the generic home page view, or drill down to just Status Updates, which was actually very useful when you just wanted to keep tabs on your friends’ statuses. These filters aren’t available anymore, though I hope that’s just for now. (You could also filter by Top Stories, Photos, Posted Items or the Live Feed, or any of your friend groups—all very useful in their own ways.)
9. Changing the Interface So Dramatically Frustrates Users: Sure most people will stick around and “get the hang” of things. And Facebook will continue to evolve the design so that it’s perhaps someday half as useful as its predecessor. But every time you make a sweeping change to the entire way the site functions, you alienate all of your users who took the time to learn their way around your software. It’s not really practical to allow users to select their theme, since branching design concepts could become a maintenance nightmare, but it’s also not fair to ask your entire user base to relearn their way around. Least of all when it offers such little additional utility and frustrates so many.
10. It’s A Full Step Backward: As argued throughout, the new design is actually less functional than its predecessor. When you remove very useful features that people know and love from your application, you’re looking for trouble. When you do so for what appears to many to be no particular reason, change for the sake of change, all you’re going to do is stir the ire of the masses.

Facebook has a very, very bad habit of firing off sweeping changes to the site without properly introducing them or soliciting real feedback. They did it with the news and mini feeds, they did it with the Facebook Beacon, and they’ve done it again. The last sweeping change to Facebook, they approached much more civily. They had a long transition period where you could elect to try the new Facebook, submit your feedback, get the hang of it, and see where they were going with the changes. Even still, when they formally launched the new version, it wasn’t tightened down and finished properly—that came later.

This iteration around, Facebook provided significantly less time and warning, and instead of soliciting honest feedback, their attitude seemed to be much more to the effect of: “This is what we’re doing. And you’re going to like it. Whether you like it or not.” It feels half-baked, especially when features like content-based filters are missing entirely. And it doesn’t feel as if it’s aiming to assist with any of the goals they espouse when talking about the social graph and tracking the actions of those around you.

It’s clear they see what Twitter’s doing and they think they can leverage their platform to do roughly the same thing. But they are two different properties. Facebook is where I go to track people I know and love. It’s where I share my photos, write long treatises, chat directly with friends, monitor birthdays, and challenge friends to games. Twitter is where I go to meet new people, strike up random conversations, and take in a peripheral awareness of my friends, but also the happenings of individuals I don’t know but am otherwise interested in. Because of the limited nature of the information Twitter provides, individuals like celebrities can allow people to follow them, when they would typically not add every fan as a “friend” on Facebook.

Facebook seems to be a bit of David chasing Goliath, even though they don’t necessarily operate in the same footprint at all. I wish they’d stop and consider what they do to their customer base when they make these changes. If the feedback on the blog post is any indication, they’re going to need to decide if they want to weather this storm, capitulate, or compromise. They’ve done all three in the past. It’d be nice if they would take a break from massive, crowd-angering, sweeping changes, perhaps for just a few months.

Welcome to Your New Home Page | Improving Your Ability to Share and Connect

Design firm Squidspot has published a very cool and useful Periodic Table of Typefaces. They’re grouped roughly by “family” and “class” groupings, and ranked roughly based on their popularity from several different font ranks, though they’re loosely grouped in order to enforce the aesthetics of the table.

This will be very useful for anyone trying to play the mind-numbingly difficult Deep Font Challenge game. My personal favorite is Frutiger, followed very closely by Myriad. (Naturally, I also love and respect Helvetica and all its gifts to the world—I mean, it’s the only typeface to have a documentary produced about it, and is listed, quite fittingly, as the Hydrogen of the table.)

Periodic Table of Typefaces | Behance
Deep Font Challenge | via iLT

If you’ve ever spotted a dip in your Twitter followers count and wondered which of your faithful disciples haven’t been quite so faithful, sign up for Qwitter. It’s mind-numbingly simple: enter your Twitter account name and your email address and you’re off to the races. Qwitter doesn’t need your Twitter password since the follower information is already available, so they just basically run a diff and see who you’ve managed to bore away, sending you an email with their name and the (potentially) offending last Tweet that convinced your follower to bail.

Qwitter

In trying to link my new account from the store with an online account, it prompts for a security question. I select “mother’s middle name” since things like “what’s your favorite restaurant?” are ridiculously inane as I’ll almost *certainly* forget what I entered, which will promptly be followed by feelings of wanting to stab someone. And then I enter ma’s middle name: marie. Nevermind that the security answer is CaSe SeNsItIvE, (because, clearly, I should also be forced to remember if I proper-cased my answer) it goes ahead and tells me:

Great. Now Barnes & Noble is calling me a liar AND insulting my mother. Swimming performance there, kids. [Really, the error message reads as follows: Your Security Answer is not formatted properly. A Security Answer must be 6–15 characters long, spaces allowed. Remember that Security Answers are case sensitive (i.e., "Dickens" is not the same as "dickens").]

The moral of the story? Don’t enforce ridiculous limitations on a security question if the user’s correct answer might violate those limitations. And don’t insult your customer’s mothers. (CrunchGear blogged about this too, some two weeks ago.)

I agree with almost all of them, like Clicking on the logo should take you to the home page—this has become a convention most people expect on a given site, along with highlighting your current location in the navigation bar. There are a few, however, that I might nitpick, such as always underline links, except some navigational cases (unless he means either on hover or the regular state; I note quietly that the links on his blog are text-decoration:none and only underline on hover).

Either way, it’s a great, quick read with some things to always keep in mind when building a website, so take a look and subscribe.

50 Tips to A User-Friendly Website | Designing Interactive

Related articles by Zemanta

• 50 Beautiful And User-Friendly Navigation Menus (web2list.com)
• FeedbackArmy.com - Test The Usability Of Your Site (killerstartups.com)

Our beloved web analytics tool Clicky blogged about a pretty crucial SEO & analytics issue today: Google is rolling people over to a new AJAX-powered search, that pushes query strings AFTER a hash mark. So: http://www.google.com/search?q=what’s+my+referrer becomes: http://www.google.com/#q=what’s+my+referrer

The problem with this is that browsers don’t send anything after the hash mark (this thing: #) in their referrer string, since they’re used for named anchors. Since analytic tools use the referrer string to parse search keywords, this breaks that functionality for anyone on the “new” Google. Nightmare. It’s as if they’re effectively “commenting out” the rest of the query string from the referrer string–dark pool, that. Learn more about the ramifications here after the jump.

What’s interesting to me is the split opinions on the Clicky blog post. A lot of people seem to be taking a “they can do whatever they want” attitude towards things, with some noting that if it were instead Microsoft making this change, the ranting wouldn’t stop. While I agree that a company has the right to change the way they operate and to change the way their application functions, I think they’re doing everyone a vast disservice by essentially breaking such a useful component. Many, many tracking tools and logging systems will cease to process search keywords properly.

What’s stranger still is that this appears to break even Google Analytics’ own implementation of keyword tracking, based on its use of the referrer string and some preliminary testing by this guy. This leads me to wonder if this was a test concept that got pushed to production inadvertently, and if we’ll be seeing a rollback sometime in the near future when the engineering team realizes what unholy hellfire they’ve released on the analytics community. Worse still, this isn’t a simple tracking-system fix. The browsers themselves govern the data sent in the referrer string. They parse out anything after a hash mark, because it was traditionally used to refer to a section within a page, pointing to a named anchor somewhere on a given page. (Whereas a regular query string is typically calling dynamic content, and thus fundamentally different even if the root file were the same.) No reason to consider index.php#top and index.php as separate pages; in fact, this would further muck up analytics tools.

It will be very interesting to see what develops here. Losing the ability to track incoming keywords for no appreciable reason and with no word from Google seems a bit obtuse, but there’s a fair chance we’ll be hearing something or seeing some changes very soon.

Meanwhile, if you want to test this yourself, visit Google directly, search for “What’s my referrer” and click the first result. Then try it from a Google Toolbar search; these searches still use the old query string method, as its the toolbar itself formatting the search request and not the site. Search for the same and note that the referrer now contains your search string.

In my review of Filttr, I mentioned that Facebook features some comprehensive friend sorting and grouping tricks that Twitter sorely lacks. But the feature is only slightly obvious, so I’m going to show you an equally obvious quick tutorial on the quick way to get a reasonable Facebook feed of People You Actually Care About, and setting that as your home page, to differentiate from People You Met At That Party That One Time or That One Girl (or Guy) You Shouldn’t Have Hooked Up With Who Keeps Posting Creepy Profile Pictures Of Themselves But Blocking Them Would Only Make Things Worse.

This is really simple: When you first log into Facebook, click the down arrow next to Live Feed. Next to Friend List Feeds, click Edit Feed, click Make New List, name it something cool, and start typing the names of people you really care about. Easy. (You can also manage all of this from the Friends page, from the top nav.)

Now, if you access Facebook via a bookmark, or through the Bookmarks Toolbar, you can click on the same arrow, right click on the Friend Feed, and use that for your new bookmark.

To be fair, this feature has been around since August 2008. Disturbingly, they broke the permalink functionality about two months ago, which drove me absolutely insane because it happened to be about three weeks into having changed my primary bookmark to the Friend List Feed. Facebook Support told me that they knew it was an issue and that they were working to resolve it and it looks as if it’s finally been restored, so you can now make the first thing you see when you log into Facebook the feed of people you care about. Or your “Keeping My Enemies Closer” list. Whatever.

(Bonus: You can also use Friend Lists to send blanket messages to groups of friends. To do this, just start typing the Friend List name when composing a message.)