The Lesson from Facebook: Your Customers Want You to Ask What They Want

I’ve been keeping tabs on the fallout from Facebook’s big interface change today and I have a few things to add to my previous posts on the subject. The conclusion I’ve drawn from all this is that your customers want you to ask what they want, not tell them what they want. (Duh!) This is especially true of young audiences who are used to this as a best practice.

Now to the specific points…

Point Number 1: I agree with Jeremiah Owyang when he writes:

I’ve seen feature releases happen many times with websites where users were not involved, the results are hit and miss. I like 37 Signals approach, they involve users/customers nearly every step of the product development cycle. Customers have such ‘loud’ voices now, they’re in charge now.

Facebook should have introduced this product as a public beta and asked users for feedback. Listening to your customers is never a bad idea and it’s incredibly lame that failed to do that. I think a lot of the student objection over this is about the lack of options associated with the way the feature was introduced. That doesn’t change the fact that I’m alarmed at how many students believed that Facebook was “private,” or the fact that I think they’re immature for not making use of the privacy settings if they’re so concerned about their privacy.

Point Number 2: I disagree with Biz Stone when he writes:

But [Facebook creator] Mark [Zuckerberg], the Facebook community formed around the fact that people had to go digging for these bits of info. Just because you can programatically make it easier to get this info, doesn’t mean you should.

For some people–it looks like a lot–the thrill of Facebook was wasting time hunting around for updates about your friends. But for me, it was just a waste of time, and not one that I welcomed. I love the new feature because it means that I can get more information about my friends in less time and with less clicking.

That’s why the feed feature should be optional and not foisted upon everyone. Facebook didn’t even attempt to listen to their customers before launching this feature. That’s the lame thing here, not the “privacy issue.”

Point Number 3: I agree most vigorously with Michael Arrington when he writes:

I gave the new features a thumbs up yesterday and stick by my review. No new information is being made available about users. Facebook privacy settings remain in their previous state, meaning you can have your information available throughout the network or just among your closest friends. Don’t want a particular piece of information to be syndicated out even to them? Remove any single piece of data by simply clicking the “x” button next to it and it will not appear in the news feed.

If this feature had been part Facebook since the beginning, their users would be screaming if Facebook tried to remove it. It’s a powerful way to quickly get lots of information about people you care about, with easy settings to remove that information for privacy reasons. No one can see anything that they couldn’t see yesterday. It’s just being distributed more efficiently.

I also applaud Facebook for launching a product clearly designed to reduce total page views in the network by no longer forcing users to go to their friends pages for updates. That shows serious long term vision and dedication to the principle of facilitating communication among its users.

An easy fix to the problem is for Facebook to simply make each of the new products optional. Users who don’t participate will quickly find that they are falling out of the attention stream, and I suspect will quickly add themselves back in.

So what’s the overwhelming recurring theme here? Facebook needs to listen to its customers, not just after the fact (although that’s critical now) but before it launches a feature that totally changes the way people interact with its service. The misstep was not in launching a feature that violated people’s privacy in a “creepy” or “stalkerish” way, it was unilaterally activating the service for everyone without asking.

Facebook further compounded its mistake by shutting down commenting on its fledgling blog at the same time that it launched the new feature. It should have been using the blog to communicate with users about the new feature before it was launched.

Let this be a lesson to you companies. Launching a new interface or anything else that changes the user’s experience without offering some options is going to piss off some of your users. Facebook is in particularly deep doo doo right now because it has a customer base that is used to being given exactly what they want when they want it, but everyone can learn from their mistake.

We’ll be talking more about using your blog to listen to your customers and work with them when you’re making changes at the next Blog Business Summit.