working at facetplay
nthID Networks was my first job after grad school. I joined this little startup based in Milpitas, Singapore and India as part of the core team, as the lead interaction designer (yep!).
The product we were working on attempted to rethink the one-identity nature of today’s online conversations and interactions by enabling people to manage all facets of their identity. What does that mean, and more importantly, why would we want to do that? Think about it. First, a lot of cross-pollination happens between different facets of our lives. You might be thinking of starting a startup with your close friend or with someone you play pickup Ultimate with. You might be training for a triathlon with a few office colleagues, maybe even your boss. Or you and your professor are keen on photography and movies. But friending your boss or professor on Facebook – umm, not ideal. Right now, it is mostly black or white – either we share all or nothing. The goal was to move towards a ‘share only relevant stuff’ – not just a question of your privacy (which is important) but also one of maintaining boundaries and reducing information overload. I want to know what my professor says about movies and photography, and the classes am enrolled in but nothing else. With my boss, we share triathlon training related conversations. And so on and so forth.
So, why did we fail?
A combination of factors, as is the case. I do believe the idea has a lot of promise and a reboot/rethink in someone else’s mind will happen soon and we will have a Facebook competitor. We did not focus on our idea but tried to do a ‘me too’ as well – incorporating other social networking aspects that we just did not have to. Not sticking to our uniqueness and keeping it simple. Instead, we grew into a bloated product that diluted what we were trying to do. Also, we might have been too early.
What did I do there? What did I learn?
I think I got incredibly lucky – to be part of the core team at a startup with a couple of Silicon Valley veterans. Working in close quarters with the VP of Technology and Products, constantly brainstorming ideas and figuring out a strategy, designing and iterating rapidly – I learned more in a month than in my first semester at grad school! I
- Drove the entire design process under the supervision of the VP
- Re-defined the complete user experience
- Designed and defined new features for the product
- Synthesized user goals, business and functional requirements into design specifications
- Conducted research and usability testing and incorporated the results into iterative designs
- Managed off-shore development team in Chennai, India. This was a great learning experience, more than the others. Coming from a CS background, I was able to use my technical know-how to relate to the dev team. But it took considerable project management skills as well. And obviously, I could not do this singlehandedly and could always turn to my VP for help or resolving a situation.
Our CEO was an inspirational figure to work with as well. Even though he was in Singapore, he would shoot of emails at all hours of the night and constantly be spewing ideas. Being fresh out of grad school with a head full of ideas, both of these senior people at nthID allowed me great freedom to explore.
So, did I do anything tangible and cool there?
I’d like to think so. In fact, there are a couple of things that am proud of. One was ‘Quick Reply’ (something GMail also came up with later). There are many times when people want to respond to some communication (email, phone call, voicemail etc) with something simple – like “Thanks”, or “Yes/No” etc. These take up valuable time to compose (how long should I make this? Would it be impolite if it is too short? etc.) and to read as well. Instead, the quick reply would be a signal to do this. You would just hit the dropdown and select one of the signals. And both parties understand the curtness of the message!
The other thing was much larger. One of the side-questions we were trying to solve was “How can people jump in and out of conversation streams”? Think back about keeping up with my professor’s photography and movies, with my colleagues’ training (but not their family conversations). And we came up with “Stroom It”. The idea was based on tagging your conversation with, well, tags. And the tag serves as a pseudo subject line. People can subscribe to conversations based on tags. And of course, the originator of the conversation (or stroom) will also include people he wants to have that conversation with. This could be applied to many things – photographs, status updates, questions, everything. And maybe, that was our killer idea. Yes, this is sorta similar (in concept) to FriendFeed, to Buzz – but we came up with it when we would not have been a ‘me-too’ but a ‘hey, these guys are trying something interesting’.
After this, I moved to AT&T Interactive, working as a Sr Human Factors Engineer (well, that’s what the job title is called!).
