Tag Archives: Facebook

Making it Personal

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One of the aspects of great products is that they become an extension of you. In some sense a product that is designed for a vast audience is appropriated by you as you see it fit best in your world. A product goes from something you buy in a store to something that becomes an intimately personal object in your life. As I was reading, Samuel A. Papert’s, “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Power Ideas“, one of the frameworks presented by him in the context of “appropriating” mathematics in a way that a child can make it part of his life, could be explored for designing a ‘personal’ product. Papert mentions three principles that he thought were design criteria for making the subject “appropriable” by children. Building on his words in the book, here is one way to approach this:

  1. Continuity: The product must be continuous with well-established personal knowledge from which it can inherit a sense of warmth and value as well as “cognitive” competence.
  2. Empower: The product must empower the user to perform personally meaningful projects that could not be done without it.
  3. Cultural Resonance: The product must make sense in terms of a larger social context.

As a thought experiment it could be useful to see how some of the popular successes may have fit in this framework.

 

Continuity

Empower

Cultural Resonance

Facebook

The personal knowledge came from your close circle of friends. By definition, that is warm and valued. In essence, the core of the continuity principle for Facebook is the social graph.

Facebook inherently had features that empowered users to do meaningful things and keep in touch with their friends easily. By then opening up the social graph to applications, Facebook opened up the empowerment at a much wider scale.

Facebook chose metaphors and symbols that fit well within most people’s social context – facebooks, Wall, status, pokes, messages, “friending”, gifting etc. With an easy translation of some of these concepts in a person’s life, one can imagine how this can become an extension.

iPhone

Mobile phones by nature are personal. However Apple made it more personal by building on the personal knowledge of your body – specifically your fingers. Touch is an intimate act in most Western cultures, and by closely tying the screen and the input into one canvas, it provides a whole, continuous, personal experience.

iPhone went to an unprecedented level to add capabilities – accelerometers, GPS, camera – all aimed at making the mobile phone a very powerful tool in a person’s hand. Again like Facebook, they also opened up the ecosystem to developers so that more apps can be created to empower people to accomplish their projects using the phone.

iPhone’s resonance in the broader social context is largely built on Apple’s amazing ability to understand how products fit in a person’s life. iPhone’s (and Apple in general) approach to cultural resonance is somewhat more subtle and grounded in a deep understanding of how design metaphorically approaches our cultural values.

 

Few companies designing to make their products “personal” end up achieving depth in all three parts of the framework.