Facebook Uses Users to Shape the Direction of New Product

Tony Zanders

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you work in the tech community, there’s a good chance you’ve been invited to, or know someone who has gone into Google for usability testing. My first time was in 2007, when one of my co-workers had a sister who worked on the GMail team. She gave me an invite to apply for usability testing, and within the month, I received an email from Google asking me to come in for an hour to answer some questions and poke around into a then unreleased set of GMail features.
It was great because not only did I get a tour of the Googleplex, but I also got my choice of free health snacks and Odwalla juice drinks, and a $75 stipend! While this may not excite many folks in the Valley, I know that this is unheard of for some, especially people from my neck of the woods.

Now earlier this year, Facebook began to publicize (or leak) information about a tool called “Questions”. But just recently, they’ve made it possible recently users to apply contribute to the development of a new feature their releasing called “Questions”. While the six year-old firm has been known to involve their user community in making decisions around things such as their privacy policy, this is the first time they have publicly involve users in development of a feature. Like every other company who values user input, there’s some neat incentive if your contributions get you chosen. The incentive is a great way to encourage users to participate, while allowing them to highlight the best question and answer sets, and weed out the rest. Here’s the link to apply:

http://www.facebook.com/product_application/

Think about it. The worst thing that could happen is that you give yourself a refresher course on English Composition and Rhetoric. And besides, if they like what you turn in, Facebook will fly you to California to visit their headquarters and meet the team if they like your work. (And you can come and visit us during your trip!) Now that surely beats $75 bucks and a SuperFood.