First off, some background. I’m a ‘power user’ who often exercises the features of software services to their limit, and so Google and Facebook often add me as an early adopter to many of their features (Google is nice enough to ask permission; Facebook just adds me to their beta group without asking me — really bad etiquette).

So for a few weeks now I’ve been using the ‘New’ Facebook before most people saw it. It was buggy, and worked slightly differently than what is live now.

They have a new feature called ‘Subscriptions’. It’s basically a way to allow public posting of your status updates — sort of like blog posts or Tweets, these are people who aren’t your friends will automatically see.

When I first was presented the ‘new’ Facebook interface a few weeks back, it asked me if I wanted to turn on ‘Subscriptions’ (it didn’t explain how it worked or anything). I turned it on not knowing what it was. Back then I tried to turn it off afterwards but could find no way to do so.

Then, without really telling you about it (at least, not that I recall) Facebook changed the way your status updates work — by default (at least for me), the status updates are ‘public’, meaning anyone who subscribes to your ‘public’ feed can see your status updates. Essentially, at this point, if you don’t take extra steps to limit the scope of who can see your status updates to ‘friends’, you are friends with the entire world.

If you’ve turned on ‘Subscriptions’ without really realizing the impact of this move, this screenshot shows how you turn it off (click the two images on this post to enlarge them).

I’m not sure if this is technically a privacy violation (I’m sure they’re updated fine print in their legal text says essentially “we don’t guarantee anything is private”) but it is sure something to give parents pause.

The issue is that Facebook is so confusing and poorly managed that users can easily opt into settings which are contrary to what they want. On a related note, I am becoming increasingly concerned that Facebook has no interest in allowing any parental controls of any kind — parents cannot control these features if their child has an account — there is no ‘parent admin’ role. Facebook clearly does not have the safety of children in mind.

Facebook is totally bungling their customer experience. There are some many examples of this. One glaring example is that some things can only be changed via ‘Edit Options’ at the bottom of the page, which is hard to get to because, if you scroll down, the pages dynamically retrieves more status posts, meaning it’s a race against time to scroll to the bottom of the page. If you’re too slow, you’ll NEVER be able to get to this feature. A very bad experience which is effectively reducing your control over your privacy.

My personal theory is that Facebook is so afraid of the explosive growth of Google+ (a Facebook competitor) that they are rushing features out without sufficient testing — a very bad idea.

I’m not sure what the answer is to this issue — Google+ isn’t perfect (they’ve had privacy issues too — remember Google Buzz?) but in general Google is better managed and is a company I trust more in such matters. So I recommend considering adopting Google+ and giving it a go. It will take a while before enough folks are on it to make it viable, but Google has the smarts to make things easy and intuitive.

Here’s how to sign up for it: https://plus.google.com/up/start

You shouldn’t need an invite at this point, but if for some reason you do, drop me an email at stanshinn@gmail.com and I’ll send you one.

Over the years I’ve adopted some best practices to process and write email — I hope you find some of them useful.

4 Rules of Processing Email

When you get an email, do one of four things immediately:

Do it (If it takes < 2 minutes)

Delete it (If you are done with it)

Delegate it (If you can forward to another for completion)

Defer it (But have some way to remind you the email needs actions — maybe file it to a ‘Tomorrow’ folder, flag it, etc. If you’re defering it, email them to tell them that you’ll get to it later.)

Using this system avoids the ’1,000 emails in my inbox’ situation, and prevents you from scanning the same email a dozen times before acting on it, which wastes time.

3 Rules of Addressing Email

Never “Reply All”. Well, not unless you absolutely must.

BCC Groups When Needed. If you’re sending email to a group where a “reply all” will be troublesome, send the email to yourself, and BCC the group, thus disabling the “reply all” capability. You can mention in the body who you sent it to if necessary.

Don’t Enter Recipients Till You’re Done. Don’t enter the recipients email address in the ‘To’ box until you’re done composing it — this prevents the premature sending of email by mistake. If you need to, list the recipients at the top of the email body as a placeholder, then remove that and fill in the ‘To’ box at the end.

8 Rules of Composing Email

When composing email, do the following:

Be Concise (also known as the ‘Don’t make me scroll!’ rule). If the email is so long the reader will have to scroll to read it, it is too long. Here’s how you make it ‘shorter’ — create an executive summary (maybe labelled ‘Summary’) at the top, then put the larger section beneath labelled ‘details’. This frees up your reader to scan the summary and only read the details if/when they need to.

Use Multiple Emails For Multiple Topics. If there is more than one topic, break it into multiple emails. Otherwise the read may respond to one topic and ignore the other.

Communicate “Action Steps.” List the action steps first, not last, in the body of the email, so the reader can know within seconds what is expected of them.

Number Your Questions. This makes it easier to respond to and clears up confusion about what point the author is referring to.

Include Deadlines. List deadlines even if they are artitrary (otherwise, they may not get done this year!).

Tag Subject Lines With Priority and Deadlines. Listing “JUST FYI:”, “URGENT:” or “ACTION REQUIRED:” or “NEEDED BY 12/6:” at the beginning of a subject line saves time and increases the odds it will get the attention it deserves in the timeline desires. In particular, use “FYI” for emails that have no actionable information. Maybe add “Just FYI” in the body as a second tag.

Make Subject Lines Informative. An email which says “ACTION NEEDED BY COB 3/12: Please review ARCW contract” in the subject line is much better than one that reads simply “Contract” or “Re: ARCW”.

Never Send an Angry or Contentious Email. Pick up the phone or schedule an in-person meeting if that’s the tone of topic.

The remaining 46 search engines it tracks accounted for less than 2.0 percent.

An interesting study from ClickTale gives detailed behavioral patterns related to scrolling. Some takeaways:

When did above-the-fold design become important?

Web designers and usability professionals have debated the topic of web page scrolling since 1994. At the early days of the web, most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling and it was not a natural thing for them to do. As a result, web designers would design web pages so that all the important content would be “Above the fold” or even worse, squeeze the entire page into the initial screen area. This practice of “squeezing” continues even today.

Nowadays, scrolling has become a natural practice in surfing the web. Scrolling is also associated with web 2.0 design because big, clear text and “spacious”, “clean” content implies longer web pages. Source

ClickTales’s research was based on data that collected from a subset of about 120,000 page-views dated November 2006 to December 2006 to analyze vertical scrolling behavior. General findings were:

• 91% of pages are long enough to require scrolling.
• The average location for the fold is between 430 and 860 pixels down on the page.
• 76% of people will scroll below the fold.
• 15-22% of people will reach the bottom of the page.

Based on this and other studies, ClickTale gave the following recommendations:

• Don’t try to squeeze your web page and make it more compact. There is little benefit in “squeezing” your pages since many visitors will scroll down below the fold to see your entire page.
• Since visitors will scroll all the way to the bottom of your web page, make life easier for them and divide your layout into sections for easy scanning.
• Minimize your written text and maximize images, visitors usually don’t read text – they scan web pages.
• Encourage your visitors to scroll down by using a “cut-off” layout. Source

Another article commenting on the ClickTale data had this to say:

As the ClickTale article suggests, people are scanning and skimming a page’s content regardless of its size. Web developers should back away from trying to squeeze content toward the top of a page in order to supposedly make it easy to scan. Using proper amounts of white space, headers and sub-headers, along with bolded text and bullet points increases a page’s scannability for all personality types.

When it comes to critical elements, like calls to action, you don’t want 5% of visitors not seeing it. Pages have more power when they stick to one main idea per page. And remember, copy should be long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to be interesting. A site will generally get better search rankings by having highly relevant links from page-to-page. So, there are advantages to leaning toward shorter pages, but don’t sacrifice clear page design and layout to squeeze a few pixels off of a page’s length.

So was there any difference at all? Yes:

But keep in mind, shorter pages did perform slightly better. “Almost identical percentages of page views (15%-20%) reach the page bottom regardless of page height.” While the data was fairly similar regardless of the page length, shorter pages were closer to the 20% range. source

Based on this, one might conclude that an all-above-the-fold page would perform 5% higher than a similar, have-to-scroll page. More importantly though, the essential selling points and call-to-action should be above the fold. If you can engage the user and sell them on continuing the process (whether it is buying a product, or taking the next step in a survey, or any desired behaviou) they will continue down the page.