Lately, at work, within our department we’ve been discussing company culture. A while back, we read Delivering Happiness, the book by Tony Hsieh about the history of the company and culture of Zappos. A few months ago, a Googler accidentally posted an internal memo on Google+ that showed the world a lot about Google culture, especially with the fact that it was allowed to be left public and did not receive any negative repercussions (as far as we know). We’ve also been mulling over the Netflix culture presentation over the last few weeks. I love what I do and where I work, especially the team I work with and the department I work in. I’m always encouraged with a discussion about how we can improve workplace culture, so I was very interested to dive into a study of workplace culture and how the corporate presentation of culture and actual practice line up.
Julie Zhuo – Facebook: Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions
UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 23, 2011
Facebook likes the start-up culture. They believe in small teams: photos, engagement, etc. Each team is treated like a small company with a product designer, researcher, engineers & a product manager.
Facebook uses data to form a lot of the decisions that are made. Data helps understand how users use product and how they can be optimized.
Facebook had great ideas, built products and then left them to move on to the next thing.
Photos
Were using an old photo uploader tool built in Java, didn’t work well and was poorly designed. Built their own tool, which required a plugin. Tested it and only 34% users successfully uploaded photos. Went back to the drawing board. Research showed that people were bailing at the plugin install step.