What is the secret of Facebook owning the world's largest user base?

Preface: I think everyone will wonder what the secret of Facebook has the largest user base in the world. A study has pointed out that adherence to its good software design principles is why Facebook is the number one global user.

Parmit Chilana, a graduate of the University of Washington, has interned as an intern at a social networking giant, Facebook. During her internship, she interviewed Facebook's engineers and design experts to learn about the process and methods of building and developing the latest features for Facebook. Later, Chilana at the American Computer Association's top International conference on human-machine interaction in Austin, Texas, to report on her work with other researchers at the University of Washington and Facebook.

and Chilana in the report that even the most users of the SOFTWARE product user base and the number of Facebook users is simply different. In a recent statistic, Facebook has more than 845 million subscribers worldwide, and its user base is spread across the world. At the same time, Facebook has supported more than 70 languages, and about 80% of its users are in the United States and outside Canada worldwide.

Even if 1% of users feel dissatisfied with Facebook, the number will reach 10 million, and 10 million is a myth for most software companies, Chilana said. So it's not hard to imagine how much Facebook's design would affect its operations.

Facebook's users often complain about privacy violations or other issues, but Facebook maintains a steady rise in the number of users and keeps users loyal. About 50% of Facebook users log on to their accounts every day, interacting with more than 900 million of the Facebook site's objects (people, objects, data, etc.).

Chilana is trying to figure out why Facebook's user interface has been so successful in attracting users. She interviewed 17 Facebook staff, from software engineers to product designers to production managers, about how they made decisions when releasing a new product or feature, and what decisions were taken to meet the company's interests.

Wayne Lutters, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland in the United States, said Chilana's research on the development of Facebook's design is one of the earliest studies in this field. It was not until Facebook opened its doors that everyone was aware of its development.

As a benchmark, Chilana adopted a universally used user interface design principle, which was reported by John Gould and Clayton Lewis in 1985 "Designing for Usability:key principles and what Designers is widely supported. Gould and Lewis focus on iterative design for user testing and user focus.

Chilana found that while many of the product designers were unaware of the importance of the design principles, Facebook was clinging to these principles, with more than half of the respondents explicitly taking the user experience as a major factor in the design of the Facebook site.

Facebook attaches great importance to iterative design. An engineer told Chilana,facebook that the company would release certain products or functions in a reasonable manner, and then iterate the design according to the user's usage. And another engineer said, design is a very difficult thing, although these very smart people together to do their best, but there will be many failures.

With many Facebook users and a wide range, it's not easy to meet everyone's demands. One engineer told Chilana that it was very difficult to find a path that would satisfy all of us when the core requirements were removed from the design process. Engineers often try to devise an outcome that meets the most common standards. So there are some very advanced features that have to be canceled because of the user usage.

Engineers ' designs cannot simply rely on intuition. In the early days of Facebook, engineers had a point of view that they thought they thought the perfect, very practical feature would certainly be well liked by users. Under the influence of this view, they released a lot of engineers think the perfect function, which has a bad impact on the development of Facebook. And it took a long time for Facebook companies to get out of this mess. One engineer told Chilana that some of the new features must now be released in multiple considerations, such as the photo download button, which should be equally intuitive for a 90-year-old Mongolian grandmother and a 14-year-old Brazilian teenager.

Although Facebook is very concerned about the satisfaction of users. Designers are also hesitant to launch some of the cutting-edge features that are good for Facebook's future development, although this may also lead to a decline in user satisfaction in the short term. Last year, for example, when Facebook launched the timeline page, users complained that it was difficult to manipulate.

One of the engineers interviewed was very pleased with the company's frequent improvements in every area. For example, Facebook's timeline, a controversial page, has given users the opportunity to choose whether to update the new interface before timeline is widely released. This behavior minimizes the discomfort that the new interface may cause and gives the company's engineers more time to design.

Despite Facebook's huge user base, Lutters says, like other companies, it can be frustrating and very often when trying to design a good user interface.

Lutters finally said that it is certain that Facebook is doing the ordinary things that other companies do to keep up with the trend, focus, etc., and if there is any secret, there is no way to chilana it.