I’m a little slow out of the gates on this one… I’ve been ignoring all the requests to become a @#$%ing Vampire, Pirate, Werewolf etc, and simply ignored gaming on Facebook, in particular the growth of the Farm sims like Farmville.

Turns out quite a bit was going on that I hadn’t noticed….
I found out yesterday that Farmville has 63.7 million active users.
And it was launched in June 2009.

To put that into context, I’d like to make an apples-to-oranges comparison:

LinkedIn has been around since early 2003.
It has taken them 6 years to grow to 50 million users.
In less than 6 months Farmville has overtaken LinkedIn in terms of user numbers.
I would not be surprised to discover that Farmville’s average revenue per user is also better than the figure LinkedIn is able to extract.

It’s easy to argue that Farmville is an app while LinkedIn is a platform, or that LinkedIn has enduring usefullness while Farmville is a fad that is likely to grow stale, but the sheer velocity of the growth is the part that I find interesting.

It says a couple of things to me:

1. The mechanics of building social networks are now well understood. Zynga and others are clearly mastering the ability to tap into networks and grow extremely quickly.
2. Facebook is the social platform that you ignore at your peril. They have successful transformed from an online social application and network into an application platform that can be used to build vast audiences for 3rd-party applications.
3. Facecbook weilds a lot of power in this ecosystem – they are not a dumb platform. It’s likely that the current model will not endure, and that Zynga and others will be forced to use a Facebook-sanctioned payment mechanism for in-game purchases that gives Facebook a piece of the revenues.
4. App platforms and app developers are vulnerable in this ecosystem. While ‘Net Neutrality‘ debates are raging on the open internet, large pockets of the net are now controlled by single companies. This aspect deserves more attention from the Net Neutrality camp if they really care about more than their uncapped and unshaped connections used to download pirated media.

Do you play Farmville? Have you played and then stopped? What does the closed Facebook platform mean for you, if anything?

Related posts:

1. What if LinkedIn was a Facebook app?
2. LinkedIn profitable, Facebook not so much
3. Farmville vs. Twitter

This is a topic that I’ve discussed with colleagues in the past, but never taken the time to write down.. can you (and should you) do effective and useful usability testing on competitor websites?

In my opinion, this is not a good use of test and analysis time.

There’s nothing to stop you asking people what they like or don’t like about other sites, or even performing an evaluation based on simple usability heuristics, but performing scripted tests on competitor sites is not going to give you information anywhere near as valuable as testing on your own site. And even when you uncover problems, you’re not able to solve them in the context of that site.

I was reminded of this when I took the Afrigator guys to task for the poor user experience on their login page in my post about federated identity.

I was politely reminded in my comments by Stii and Justin that they have a very technical userbase, and there were technical constraints in terms of performance and UI that were imposed by RPX, the supplier of the technology they are using to manage these logins.

There are 3 points here:

1. If you have limited usability testing resources (everybody has limited resources – test subjects, facilitators, time), you should focus all you have on running iterations of tests on your own websites, fixing and re-testing multiple times
2. Without being an insider who built the site under test, you have no understanding of the design parameters and constraints experienced by the development team
3. There may be cultural effects, or preferences of a particular subculture that you do not understand

The first point is pretty obvious… if you can only afford the time and effort to run 15 facilitated usability test sessions, you will get a lot more value out of running 3 rounds of testing with 5 subjects on your own site than you will from running 1 round of tests on your own site, and testing a bunch of sites.
You’re not able to fix the problems on those sites, so you will never be able to test whether you can improve the experience for users.

The second point is that you don’t know what constraints might be imposed through technology choices, legacy systems or performance issues. In the case of the RPX supplied login system on Afrigator, performance concerns and the limitations of the free version of their service had an impact on the interface.

At 24.com we’ve experienced this – we’ve tested competitor sites, and discovered things like “users struggle to find the search box”. What we don’t know is why the site designers chose the UI they did… maybe the quality of their search results is poor.. maybe they prefer users to browse rather than search… without understanding the context for the UI decisions that were taken it’s hard to criticise them in a useful way.

The last point is about a different type of context – that of a particular culture or subculture. A great example in two parts comes from Taobao, the most popular C2C trading site in China.
The business and site was discussed during the recent Naspers Harvard program I was fortunate enough to attend through 24.com (the case study can be found here through official channels but can probably be discovered elsewhere through a Google search)
Taobao beat eBay in the Chinese market for a number of reasons related to their deep understanding of their local users including their design and I’m not going to go into them in any detail here.

There are some interesting elements to their interface design that may have confused any usability testing undertaking by eBay in attempting to understand their competitor – the first is that the page is very busy, text-heavy, and tightly-packed. Classic interface design for the web says that you need to make good use of whitespace and use a heirarchy of different font styles. As you can see, Taobao flaunts these conventions, and manages to satisfy their users with unusual interface elements like Men/Women tabs modelled on the divisions within Chinese department stores.

The second piece of UI that I find fascinating is the reduced emphasis on customer ratings (a key piece of eBay’s offering), and an indication instead of when a Taobao user is online and ready to chat.


In the image above, the first seller is online and ready to talk to prospective buyers, while the second is not available. Taobao gives it’s users tools to build what it calls “swift trust”, and without understanding why these tools are available or why familiar alternatives are missing we can’t perform a meaningful analysis of their site.

Without “walking a mile in their shoes”, it’s not possible to truly understand why particular decisions were made by competitors when building their sites.

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1. Federated Identity (and why OpenID sucks)

The idea of federated identity management on the WWW has been around in various forms for years, but has only gained real traction in the past year or so.
For websites, the idea is simple – instead of each site that requires user authentication asking for registration and capturing and storing all that information themselves, sites may allow external services to authenticate users for them.

This is great for users, because they don’t have to remember lots of passwords and maintain identity on various sites, and it’s great for websites too, because they don’t have to force all users through convoluted sign-up process nor do they have to secure usernames and passwords for every user that interacts with the site. The authenticating service only vouches for ‘who’ the user says they are, the authorization, or ‘what’ they may do once authenticated is still managed by the websites themselves.

It’s taken a little while for website owners to get their heads around the idea that they don’t have to authenticate users themselves, but it’s starting to happen all over now.
A great analogy for this new way of thinking is paying for a meal at a restaurant with a credit card – the restaurant probably doesn’t care whether it’s Visa or Mastercard doing the authentication, they just want to know that a trusted authority confirms that the user is probably who they say they are and have funds available.

It’s taken a long time to get to where we are… Microsoft launched their Passport ‘Single Sign On’ (SSO) servicein 1999, promising a single login that could be used at multiple websites, all managed by Microsoft.
Major Microsoft properties such as the MSN Network used it, and other high profile sites like eBay adopted it over the following couple of years.
In South Africa, MWEB launched a similar service called ‘Sign Me In’, sometime around 2001 if my memory serves me.
Sign Me In, or SMI was a Single Sign On service modeled on MS Passport, and rolled out to all MIH and Naspers group sites at the time like SuperSport, the M&G, and News24.
It was also used to lock down all local news and content sites published by Media24 and MWEB to South African users. International users had to pay a subscription to access the content.

Predictably, there was some resistance to SMI amongst partner sites, and it faced a similar battle to gain widespread adoption to that faced by Passport.
Website owners didn’t want to entrust their user database and authentication services to another party. They got the sense that the authenticating services wanted to ‘own’ the users somehow, and they were probably right. Service level agreements had to be put in place. Any down-time on the sign-in service would knock out all dependent sites. International bandwidth and latency issues meant that early versions of SMI could take up to 2 minutes to log users in across all sites.

The way it was implemented meant that it was possible for a user to log in, be authenticated against a number of sites, and then hit a ‘Sign Me Out’ button that would log them out of only a single site, leaving them authenticated against loads of other sites. And most importantly, site owner lost control of the user experience at one of the most important moments of interaction with them.

The experience for all concerned was poor, and SMI and Passport shared a similar fate – over time the relying parties moved away from them or offered a choice of login. Today, Windows LiveID, Passport’s successor is only used on Microsoft sites and services and some affiliates like Expedia. And today SMI is only in use on MWEB’s products and services and a couple of sites that haven’t got around to unhooking from it yet like Food24.

Fast-forward to today, and there is a huge amount of buzz about OpenID, Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID and various other services that allow you to use your choice of authentication service to login to websites.
The use of these services today is quite different to the experience of Passport and SMI:

1. Customers are given choice, rather than the website choosing one single-signon technology
2. Users trust Facebook, Google and MySpace. They already maintain identities there, and use their login credentials all the time to access these services
3. Facebook, Google and MySpace are well-known, instantly recognisable brands for web users
4. Website owners get to access existing profile details without requiring registration, and to interact with the users’ social graph
5. Users maintain multiple personas online, and the use of multiple alternate authentication services allows them to choose which one they use to login to a given site
6. The experience is slick – users are often able to login to a site without a fresh login if they are already signed into a trusted service

At 24.com we’ve started dabbling with the idea of federated identity and 3rd-party authentication, having recently launched an integration between comments on Wheels24 and Facebook using Facebook Connect.
The experience is great – if I’m logged in to Facebook as Tim Gregory, when I attempt to comment on the site I’m already recognized and my details (including profile pic) are pulled through.

When posting a comment, I’m given the option of pushing a notification out to my Facebook activity stream which in turn drives further conversation, commenting, and clicks on the link the article. Nice.

Now on to OpenID, and the proliferation of sites accepting alternative sign-ins. I presume the thinking goes something like this – “well, if accepting 1 or 2 alternative log in options is good, then accepting dozens must be awesome!”
And we quickly arrive at login processes like the one on Afrigator. I’m sure the developers had the best intentions, but the login usability is terrible.

The homepage shows six (6!) logos of authentication services that can be used to log in to Afrigator. These include Google, Yahoo!, WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook.
Clicking on ANY of the images take you through to a second page that now displays the same 6 logos on the right (which will take you endlessly to the page you’re on when clicked), and then the same 6 logos on the left again, with Flickr and OpenID logos now thrown in for a total of 8 branded login choices. In addition to an invitation to login using a form below all the logos.

Kinda makes you think that you might be able to use any of those logins in the form below the logos, right?
Wrong! That’s the Afrigator login, stupid!
If you want to actually login with your Yahoo! account, you need to click on the logo. (no, the Yahoo! logo on the left, the Yahoo! logo on the right puts you into a loop, remember?).
Ok… so I click on the Yahoo! logo again, expecting that perhaps I’ll be presented with a form asking me for my Yahoo! account details. Nope, wrong again… I’m presented with a popup containing the SAME 6 logos I’ve seen again and again… and yes, the Yahoo! logo is still there. By now I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football – “Go on, kick the ball Charlie Brown, I promise I won’t move it this time”. Should I click it again? Will clicking a different logo do something new?

This is not a good user experience, no matter how good the intentions of the site creators. To try convey the full impact of the choices presented, I’ve created a little montage of all the logo choices presented by Afrigator for authentication. In my opinion, too much choice is a bad thing in this context. It doesn’t help users, and that has to be the over-riding usability objective. To be fair to the Afrigator guys, I do understand the impact of using RPX, and the site as a whole is usable. I just get the feeling that nobody has looked past the technical aspects to see if the interface actually makes sense.

And I haven’t even got to OpenID yet….
OpenID is not a brand, it’s a technology.
Only real geeks recognize the logo. Not even Mac users.
Nobody loves OpenID the way they love Facebook and Google.
OpenID breaks common login metaphors, like the username/password convention.
OpenID is not intuitive, and requires explanation (as evidenced by various sites online that explain how to use it).
The multi-site login/logout behaviour is inconsistent.
The experience of using OpenID to log into a site is usually more painful than simply signing up for a new account on the site.
Few users know that they can use some of their existing services for OpenID authentication.
It offers little utility to site owners in terms of trusted 3rd-party authentication (anybody can be an authenticator using OpenID), and it provides little value in the way of a social graph that can be tapped into by the site owner.

If you don’t believe me, go read the reports Yahoo’s OpenID research group have released regarding OpenID usability. It’s not pretty, and this is the result of testing done on technical users by advocates of the technology.
The Yahoo! usability report presentation is here and should be compulsory reading for tech-utopians who haven’t figured out why OpenID is still a solution looking for a problem.

So… if reason prevails when we integrate 3rd-party authentication services for 24.com, there will be a standard login screen with a username and password form, a link inviting users to register, and only 2 additional logos on the page – Facebook, and Google. Close to these logos will be a line of text inviting users to login with one of these alternatives. Clicking on either logo will log the user in (if the user has a valid authenticated session open), or invite the user to enter an username and password for the service of their choice.
And that is all.

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