10 Evil(ish) Thingsand how they relate to Features Engineering

@ the Wikimedia Foundation

We’re going to try to provide FRAMEWORK for understanding FEATURES ENGINEERING here from the through 10 evil things. A CAVEATS: I’m keeping this at 5 minutes so that works out to ONLY 30 SECONDS PER EVIL.

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And second, they’re not all evil, or necessarily inherently evil by the “Google Corrollary of Evil” (if Google has done it, it can’t be evil.)

Who am I?

I normally being my talks with an introduction to who I am. A long time ago *in a galaxy far, far away), I used to work at Plaxo and TaggedI might have learned a thing or two about Evil during that time. :-)

Right before I left, Tagged was the World’s Most Annoying Website according to Time Magazine. After I left Plaxo, TechCrunch is writing articles how they’re less Evil.

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Long time ago: Before I worked at WordPress and heretop google suggest for Plaxo was “Plaxo evil” when I worked at Plaxo

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2006/03/22/plaxo-now-with-less-evil/http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1903810,00.html

#1 PHBhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss

Luckily Erik and Sue, in their infinite wisdom, decided to keep me from directly doing evil here by making me a Pointy-Haired Boss. Which gets to my first Evil—MIDDLE MANAGEMENT, which is what I am.

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first Evil: the evilest of evil if you willSource:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pointy-Haired_Boss.jpg

MY (NOT) EVIL MINIONS

+2

Visual Editor/Parsoid

+2

Editor Engagement

Ori LivnehS Page

Matt Flaschen

Experimentation Fundraising Tech

Like anyone evil, I can’t act directly, I can act through minions. Features Engineering is divided into FOUR MAJOR TEAMS: Visual Editor, Editor Engagement, Experimentation, and FR-tech. I’ll be explaining what they do in WHITE SLIDES, so look out for them.

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Note that the pictures above only cover the engineers, there are other minions in this group, most of whom report to Howie Fung, who worked at eBay. eBay:that’s not quite Evil… more like Chaotic Neutral.

Source: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors]

“but being stagnant without any data sucks. Even if staff doesn’t want to be stagnant, community wants to be stagnant.” —former WMF board member

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editor_engagement

Text

First the reason that motivates all of us in Features: THE “OH SHIT GRAPH that all of you are familiar with. I won’t bother explaining it.

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#2 Heat DeathInstead I want to give a different perspective on editor retention. There is a theory in COSMOLOGY: because the arrow of time follows increasing ENTROPY, eventually the universe will reach a state where it EXHAUSTS THE USABLE ENERGY and the only thing left is heat. This is called the HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE. The “Oh shit” graph means if editor retention problem isn’t dealt with, the inertia of ACTIVE EDITOR ENERGY will be exhausted and we have the Heat Death of Wikipedia.

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Source: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/index.php?date=091410

#3 Affordance

What is Features going to do about it? Affordances are QUALITIES THAT ENABLE DISCOVERING ACTIONS WITHOUT THINKING. Take a lightswitch. You can figure out what it does without thinking. That’s an affordance. There are affordances on THE WEB also. Whether this box with magnifying glass is on Wikipedia or in Safari you know what it does. Web AFFORDANCES ARE NOT STATIC, or may not quite establish themselves before they’re discarded: take WISHLISTS on Wiki and compare them to BOOKMARKING actions on PINTEREST. In fact, they can get quite advanced from the “salad days” of Wikipedia as in the WORDPRESS FAILED LOGIN example (which uses a real world affordance of SHAKING ONE’S HEAD.

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Source:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toggleswitch.PNG + screenshots of my Safari browser windowhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

& PARSOID

When you consider the INTERFACE our EDITORS use interact with the Wikis, this is what you see. This DOESN’T RESEMBLE MODERN AFFORDANCES such as WordPress or Google Docs. The Visual Editor and the Parsoid teams in Features are trying to update this affordance because it is the ALPHA OF ALL EDITOR INTERACTION.

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Source:screenshots of my browser windowhttp://ns.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visual_Editor-logo.svg

#4 The Habit Loop

Cue

Routine

Reward

• Alcoholism

• Exercise

• Social Gaming

• Page Patrolling

To further understand WHAT we’re trying to do, let’s talk about Habits. In the Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg talks about the Habit Loops. They consists of A CUE-ROUTINE-REWARD CYCLE, which is true whether it’s a bad habit like alchoholism, a good one like exercise, when gaming on social networks or page patrolling on Wikipedia. Note though is is not a real loop, because THE REWARDS DO NOT CYCLE BACK TO CUES.

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Reference: The Power of Habit

#5 Viral Growth

signup send e-mails read e-mail click link

new userA real loop is the exponential viral growth curve. Take the first example on the web, Hotmail, as an example. Hotmail placed a the viral link. This created a FUNNEL where a user signed up, sent some emails and SOMEONE ELSE read the e-mail, maybe clicked on the link and possibly signed up. If it’s a funnel, HOW DO YOU GET VIRAL GROWTH? A user sends e-mail to many users creating a MULTIPLICATIVE POSITIVE FEEDBACK to the loop.

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Source: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1290/4690702547_d9d5000e48_m.jpg

#6 Gameification

Cue: See Wall Post/Tweet

Routine: Click on stuff

Reward: Brag on social network

different userCue: See Wall Post/Tweet

=

Routine: Click on stuff

Reward: Brag on social network

When this principle is applied to HABITS it is known as GAMEIFICATION. In social games, a user sees some sort of social cue which reminds them to check their crops on Farmville. They do their routine by clicking on some stuff (I hope I’m not oversimplifying here), and get their reward which is to brag about how awesome their crops are on a social network. Where does the loop come in? with a DIFFERENT USER where the rewards of one user become the cue to a habit loop of another thus you have A REAL FEEDBACK LOOP, but multiplying TIME not number of users (as in viral growth).

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The Gameification habit loop is designed to optimize user time instead of user count.

EDITOR ENGAGEMENT

Cue

Routine

Reward

Friday, July 13, 12

Time spent is known as “Engagement” in the web world. And this explains the purpose of the Editor Engagement team in Features.

Whether it’s Echo or Flow, the Editor Engagement team is building the pieces that empower the community to send the NOTIFICATIONS OR THE MESSAGES that close the habit loops already on the Wikis, thus INSTALLING THE LEVERS allowing to create a POSITIVE feedback loop of editor engagement on the site. But this is purpose-driven, not random clicks unlike standard gameification.

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The second features team is Editor Engagement.“Engagement” is also an industry term meaning “time spent on a website.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WMF-Flow-Concept-open.pnghttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Wikimania_-_2012_-_Athena_Project.pdf

#7 Viral Marketing

BUT WHEN DO YOU PULL THE LEVER? Let’s go back to Viral Marketing. Have you every thought what the difference is between word-of-mouth marketing and viral marketing?

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Source: http://www.socialsignal.com/system/files/images/mouth-to-ear-whisper.hallmark.jpg

#8 A-B Testing (Measurement)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soft_ruler.jpg

Whether in the viral loop or in gameification habits, unlike in meatspace world of word-of-mouth marketing, EVERY STEP IN THE FUNNEL CAN BE MEASURED AND OPTIMIZED. (This is known as A-B Testing in industry argot).

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Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soft_ruler.jpg

EXPERIMENTATION

Guided Tours (Affordance)

Event Logging (Measurement)

ACUX (viral funnel)

Post Edit Feedback (Reward)

Onboarding (Cue)

This is what the Experimentation team is doing. In EVENTLOGGING’s case this measurement is LITERAL. But in terms of the experiments: whether Post Edit Feedback, Account Creation, Onboarding, or Guided Tours, what the Experimentation Team creates SHOULD NOW BE UNDERSTANDABLE FROM WORDS WE’VE ALREADY TALKED ABOUT.

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Source:Eventlogging: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schema:GettingStartedACUX: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Main+Page&type=signupPEF: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PostEdit_screenshot,_sandbox.pngOnboarding: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Screen_Shot_2013-01-02_of_version_of_GettingStarted_special_page.pngGuided Tours: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Screenshot_2013-01-28_of_GuidedTours_test,_step_two.png

FUNDRAISING ENGINEERING

Which brings us to FEATURES’S LAST TEAM unlike in the COMMERICAL WORLD, Wikimedia has an added restriction. As with many things at the Foundation, taking Fundraising as a model. Yes, this graph of our statistics is cool—having a $2 MILLION DOLLAR DAY and all. But the meaning is NOT the NUMBERSS themselves, but in the fact that it means that the Fundraiser is SHORTER, MORE EFFICIENT, LOW IMPACT. That’s a QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCE not a quantititive one

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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tychay/8225719074/

#9 Quantity vs. Quality

• Virality (People)

• Gameification (Time)

• Commercial (Money)

“Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.”

“every single human being”

“freely share”

“sum of all knowledge”

That’s a big difference. Commerical companies use Virality and Gameification to optimize quantities like people and time for its own sake because it leads to the BIGGEST QUANTITY OF ALL: MONEY. But when you look at our vision statement, it’s not the quantities themselves, they’re just proxies to describe the qualities of “every single human being” instead of people, to freely share INSTEAD OF SPEND TIME NEEDLESSLY; to create the sum of all knowledge, not generate huge piles of cash.

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#10 Responsive Design

HOW DO WE ACCOMPLISH THIS. I’d like to draw inspiration from an area of Tomasz’s Mobile Engineering known as RESPONSIVE DESIGN. What Responsive Design is a set of javascript and CSS such that a SINGLE mobile first design can be accessible to a variety of devices. Note in the video, whether it’s smartphone sized or tablet sized this is NOT AUTOMATIC, NOT REACTIVE—instead it responds to USER action of me resizing the browser window so it EMPOWERS the user to interact with the site instead of simply reacting to it.

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UNBREAKABLE!

• Victor’s story

• not timid, bold

• not policy, system

• community not obstacle, empowered

• not automated, responsive

This reminds me of Victor’s Story AT WIKIMANIA. He talks about his first action of Wikipedia being to VANDALIZE the site multiple times and have it REVERTED. But note the story, what he did was not timid but bold, it was handled not with policy but a SYSTEM where the community was not an obstacle but empowered. And this was not automated but RESPONSIVE. That Responsiveness is a model to how Features wants to tackle the Editor Engagement problem: CREATE BOLD SYSTEMS THAT EMPOWER THE COMMUNITY TO BE RESPONSIVE (NOT REACTIONARY).

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•Who? (1) PHB

•Why? (2) Heat Death

•What? (3) Affordance, (4) Habit Loop (5) Viral Growth

•Where? (6) Gameification, (7) Viral Marketing

•When? (8) A-B Testing (9) Quantity/Quality

•How? (10) Responsiveness

I hope this explains the four teams in features (VisualEditor/Parsoid, Editor Engagement, Experimentation, Fundraising) and how they want to tackle things, and how the four features teams.

Who am I? I’m a PHB.Why do we do this? To prevent the Heat Death of Wikipedia.What are Features doing about it? Creating affordances and assisting in habit formation to create positive feedback loops of engagement.Where do we install these changes? Using principles of Gameification and Viral Marketing to install leversWhen do we pull these levers? With measurement and A-B testing tempered by the knowledge that the quantities are just proxies for the qualities we’re trying to achieve.How? By designing responsively: to create bold systems that EMPOWER the community, not ignoring it or reacting to it.

So those are the 10 evil things and you see it’s about how they’re used, not about being really “evil.” None of these 10 things are INSTRINSICALLY EVIL…well except for middle management—that guy IS evil! :-)

Thank you!

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