Facebook Redesign Planning

This article was originally written as an assignment in Project Management (ATEC 4340) at UT Dallas. This is not a review of the recent redesign on Facebook.com. The instructions and questions (in bold italics) were written by my professor, Dr. Marjorie Zielke. This assignment was submitted in May 2008.

Things you should include are:

1. How they should decide what the “redesign” should be.
2. What steps they should follow.
3. How such a project should be organized from a manpower standpoint.
4. How would marketing, financial and e-marketing considerations fit into such a planning document?
5. Tools available for such a project and the reason for using the tools.
6. Table of contents of a plan and why each item is important to a final planning document.
7. Anything else you have learned in class that you want to include that would tell Facebook how to go about this type of a project.

Remember…you are NOT redesigning Facebook …you have been hired as a consultant to tell them HOW to plan such a project. Make any assumptions that you need to…but state them.

I would be very fortunate to be tasked as a consultant to a Facebook redesign. I think that if I got that job, many doors would open for me because of the experience. I would give the project my 100% devotion and complete the task in the following manner:

The first thing to do is to really understand why the site needs a redesign. What was the cause of people voting for this project and why do they feel the way they do? Once the employees’ positions were established, I would say that it would be important to consider customer feedback – past, present, and future (through the use of surveys) – to gage how satisfied the end users were with the site operation and also find out what exactly they want to accomplish on the site.

Manpower would have to be allocated for creating the new design. Fortunately, Facebook has no shortage of PHP developers and interface designers. Some of the team could be pulled from current employees, while other team members might come from outside to give some diversity to the group. The main goal of Facebook would continue to serve its current customers, so maintenance of the current site would be a higher priority than designing the new one.

As with any project it would be important to understand the budget and financial implications of the redesign. The marketing department would have to communicate effectively with the developers to make sure that the interaction and message about the site remained consistent across all channels. Certainly, how Facbook plans to advertise and how other companies plan to advertise on Facebook would be important considerations in the new design.

When working with a team, collaboration tools would be a must. They could use Basecamp from 37signals to communicate with each other, share ideas, and set milestones. A Git repository would allow them to branch and version their code. A unified set of standards would have to be established for coding and for graphics – tab structure and commenting for the code and the allowed filetypes for the graphics. A Wiki might help them post and update these standards as needed.

The plan for the development would be something like this:

1. Define the project
   • This will allow the goals to be written for the redesign
2. Develop the site structure
   • This will create the standards for the content delivery
3. Design the visual interface
   • This will be the new face of the site
4. Build and integrate
   • This is where the grunt work will happen of writing the code and testing it to make sure it performs as expected
5. Launch …and move beyond
   • Transition facebook.com over to the new site and make sure the maintainers and the customers understand the changes. Then, figure out what to do next!

As a consultant, I would provide them with the tools and information needed to get the process started. I would also serve a supervisory role throughout the development, all the way through to the launch of the new site.

Question Two (25 points) – Project Post Mortem

Do a “postmortem” on the project you worked on in class. Basically this includes four things:

• An analysis of what went well on the project and what did not go as well as it could have. Include an analysis of the IMPACT of the positive and negative factors. Be specific.
• An analysis of how you would use this information to better plan for next time. Imagine you are now starting the class over and given the same assignment. What would you now do differently?
• An evaluation of yourself and your team members. Include….a ranking of each team member’s overall work on the project, including you, on a scale of 1 to ten, with ten being the best. Explain why you gave the person this rating. Be professional in your comments and focus on those issues that affected the project.
• As mentioned above, include yourself in the rankings. Also, delineate in detail exactly what you did on the project prepared for class. Given your role, how could you have improved your performance both functionally and as a contributing team member? What would you do differently to improve if you were starting the class now? What do you think you did particularly well? Were you a strong team member?

Overall our group, FitPRO, worked well as a team. We divided and conquered. Tasks were fairly evenly distributed and we were each able to use our talents to complete the project. ON that note, we did learn many things throughout the semester. On the last slide of our final presentation we provided the following bullet points as conclusions for the project. I’ll go in to detail about what each one means and about how we came to that conclusion:

• Make important decisions as a team
  • Sometimes it was difficult for us to meet together outside of class. Because of this, decisions were made affecting the outcome of the project by the people who were available for meeting. While this wasn’t usually a problem, sometimes the decision that was made went in a different direction than what the other team members were anticipating.
• A variety of experience is good — diversity of opinion
  • If you have a bunch of designers, they’ll quibble over the merits of the design and interface, and important concerns about the viability of the company or the real problem the device or service is solving will go unaddressed. People from different backgrounds can bring questions to more aspects of your company than a single group can.
• Let each team member do what he or she is best at
  • If possible, let each person accomplish what they enjoy. In this manner people will most of the time go over and above what has been asked of them, and the final product will be much better off. The software, prototype, the hardware prototype, the financials, and the final presentation all tuned out better than we expected because we made use of this strategy.
• Keep a schedule
  • People have a tendency to procrastinate. If milestones are not established then, as a rule, projects will be pushed back and the deadlines will not be reached. In addition it is necessary to budget some time for testing to ensure that all the kinks are worked out of the final presentation.
• Stay in contact — don’t let weeks pass without talking
  • Even if you do have milestones, it is important to talk with the different sub-project on your team and make sure that things are going as planned. If you can stay in contact, then you will avoid problems arising close to the deadline.

If I were to take the class again, I would try to instate each one of those bullets. If I was successful, then we could spend more time on the project itself and less figuring out solutions to issues. Like I said, we really didn’t have many problems in our team, but any way to streamline the process and accomplish the goals faster would have been welcome.

Team Ratings:

• Myself (Ben) – 10 – I worked to prepare the hardware prototype and tied the software side of the company to the business side.
• Andrew – 9 – Andrew prepared the financials and also pulled together research about the chain gym companies. He has been docked a point because sometimes he did not communicate with us on his progress or attend meetings.
• Nathan – 10 – developed the final software prototype and helped us brainstorm about the interface we should use
• Sam – 10 – is our speaker and subject matter expert. His experience as a personal trainer was invaluable throughout the process
• Vera – 10 – as our project manager, Vera took the initiative to set up our Wiki and to schedule our meetings. She also developed the preliminary software prototype.

I think that I was a strong team member. Vera and I sort of shared the leadership roles in planning how things were going to get accomplished. I sent out emails to our team members reminding them of milestones, facilitated our team discussions, and asked appropriate questions. I also helped with the graphics work when I could, and constructed the hardware prototype (both preliminary version and final version) by myself using the team’s ideas.

I think I might have improved my performance by communicating with each team member individually. Vera and I spoke to each other through IM’s, but I didn’t have that personal communication with the other team members. If I was going to do the project again, I would make sure that I conversed with each person rather than sending out mass emails.

Question Three (15 points) – Micromarketing and its Impact on Interactive Projects

Read this article – http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

Describe, in detail, how the factors mentioned in the article affect the project you designed for class. Integrate concepts discussed in class as part of our e-marketing session.

The Long Tail describes how online services have an advantage over brick-and-mortar shops. Online services can offer unlimited selection of products, whereas physical shops have a limited shelf space. Examples of unlimited online offerings include Amazon (for books, and now pretty much any tangible product), iTunes (for music), and Netflix (for movies). These retailers continue to gain popularity because in addition to all the popular hits they also carry older, more obscure, and even generally unknown products. Stores with physical locations can only sell to the customers who come into their store. Their market is limited to the customers within driving distance and also only the customers who feel a compelling reason to come inside. On a website, customers can arrive via recommendations or links in seconds, so it is easier to entice people to look at a product in your store.

Our product, DigiTrainer, makes use of the Long Tail philosophy, but not in the same way the online retailers do. While we both serve the vast majority of people’s needs, we do so by offering a single product rather than an unlimited selection. In the same manner that Apple builds their product to suit the majority of users we’ll do the same. The reason Apple has been so effective recently is that they build products that simplify the process for end users. Most people have no need for an media player that plays all the different formats. Similarly, most consumers don’t need fancy enterprise-level proprietary software. This may seem quite “short tail” since it is restricting freedom and choice. But by doing so Apple actually creates a better product that appeals to a larger group consumers Another company that has taken advantage of this philosophy is Nintendo. They created the Wii video game system. It supposedly restricted freedom by having weaker processing ability. The critics said limiting the graphics and the calculations games could perform compared to the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 would turn people away. However, due to the system’s novel control scheme, the product actually appealed to a much larger market than the typical gamers who bought one of the other “next gen” consoles.

This idea of creating a new markets, or new “tails”, is taken to heart by Apple, Nintendo, and FitPRO. We plan to open up a new market of people who don’t already know how to use gym equipment and also do not want to see a human personal trainer. Our preliminary research indicates that the ladder segment is vastly larger than the first two.

Question Four: (20 points total, 5 points each)

1. What is a fixed cost?
   • Fixed costs do not vary with production. Whether a company produces 5, 50, or 5000 units, fixed costs remain constant. An example of a fixed cost is rent.
2. What is a variable cost?
   • Variable costs change as production goes up or down. They reflect the volume of products or services that a company produces. For Toyota Motor Corp., each engine has a cost associated with it. The more engines they produce, the higher their variable costs for engines will be.
3. What is a semivariable cost?
   • Semivariable costs are a mixture of fixed costs and variable costs. An example of a semivariable cost is labor. The fixed portion is paid to the workers for their regular hours, and the variable cost is incurred when the office needs the workers to stay after hours , thus incurring overtime.
4. How does the cost of capital affect Return on Investment (ROI)?
   • Cost of capital is the interest expense on debt from raising capital. It affects the ROI because it is a cost and therefore lessens the return. If you add the cost of capital and the ROI then you will get the total return of the investment. For example, if $1 investment has a 1% ROI and a 10% cost of capital, the investment must be worth $1.11 at the end of the year.

Question Five: (15 points) – Summarize best practices in the hiring process

As a hiring employer, it is your duty to obtain all legal certifications such as an employer identification number and registration with your state’s labor department. You must set up payroll to withhold taxes and post notices required by federal and state agencies. All this ensures both you are legal in the eyes of the state and ready to hire employees.

During the interview process, you must follow all antidiscrimination and privacy laws. Questions regarding race, gender, pregnancy, national origin, religion, disability and age are off-limits. But, while there are many laws that govern the employee-employer interaction during interviews and otherwise, there are also certain ethical obligations that an employer has to his employees. Prospective employees must be treated with respect and told the truth. It is your duty to tell the new hire exactly what his or her job will be, and to disclose any pertinent information about the culture of the company. You must not make promises that you do not plan to follow through on. For example, you should not say the workplace environment is safe if it actually is not. In fact, making the company appear to be better than it is could result in claim of fraud.