6 Wisdom Chunks from Paul Adams

This is a slide from Facebook’s Global Head of Design, Paul Adams (@padday). He was giving a presentation at PivotCon last week, seeming to make it his mission to level-set expectations for Facebook and advising agencies and their brands on the optimal ways to “be” on Facebook. 

1. Don’t Think About Sharing. When someone asks “what did you do last night?” the reply isn’t “oh, I spent the night sharing on Facebook.” The point being, if your main intent as a brand is to get someone to share your message, you’re missing the point.

2. Build Many Lightweight Interactions. The things that make the newsfeed are the things that are simple to accomplish. Sure, brands can design intense interactions and custom Facebook apps but the expectation of participation should be much lower.

3. Design the Feed Story First. Building on the above tip, thinking in terms of how a post is communicated where most people will see it helps determine what ultimately should be made. Which brings us to…

4. Remove 80% of the Features. I think agencies build in complexity because that’s just what we do. We take too long to pull the trigger, feature creep things to death and ultimately overproduce interactive ideas.

5. If You Don’t Ship, It Doesn’t Exist. Word.

6. After You Ship It, Change It. Word, redux. Another behavior inherent in agency life compared to software/startup life is that once something’s built, we move on. As we create more evergreen programs, feeding and nurturing is going to be paramount to success.