If Women Had Designed Facebook

I agree with your analysis that every thing designed reflects values, priorities, and a worldview; and when it comes to Facebook, I suggest that its values and priorities reflect its concern with what the masses will use. Your complaint about Facebook, that it lacks a richly human aspect and limits its users in the same way, seems right to me. And your point that the lack of these qualities (aesthetic, inclusiveness, and so on) is reflective of male qualities also seems right to me.

What I find interesting about the Facebook creation story is the other social networking models it beat out. While it is true that Facebook was savvy in its management – not expanding too fast, yet being very aggressive when expanding (e.g., surrounding schools that initially picked another social networking site to force them to switch to Facebook) – it is speculated by some that the appeal of Facebook compared to other models was its simplicity. It wasn’t personalizable, flashy, or dynamic like Myspace, Connect U, or Campus Network. In a word, the masses took to it because it wasn’t too complicated. After thinking about these points a question about male versus female created things and institutions came to mind.

Your argument is that certain feminine characteristics would improve Facebook – would those same characteristics cause it less likely to succeed? Could being complicated be a characterization of other things created by women, and if so, does this create an inherent disadvantage for such things? (By “complicated” I of course do not mean something like a degrading “women are inscrutable” or anything like that, I just mean more complex to handle by intellect or understanding.) So the question is this: even if some things women create are better in some way, do they often have the disadvantage of being more difficult to use or grasp and thus more likely to be disregarded in favor of simpler approaches?

Hello CV, I enjoyed your post about Facebook and agree with your points. We are thinking alike! I tried Facebook last year and wrote about how its design doesn’t fit my real social life and personality well enough to be useful to me. I also wrote a recent post about Facebook and social activism in response to Malcolm Gladwell’s article on Facebook in the New Yorker. Happy to connect if you want to talk about these things!

I’m a woman, and I research and design and build software, and some of it supports social networking and social activism (see especially my Rakontu project). And I’ve been working with my husband on software projects for decades so I’ve seen both sides. Some aspects of software engineering will always be dominated by men. But those aspects are a small fraction of the total, and they are complemented by an equally critical set of aspects that women bring to the table in disproportion. Building excellent software requires many complementary skills, and the synergy created by diversity is empowering – when you can get it. I agree that software designed by women (or by women and men working together) comes out different than software designed only by men. I have seen much evidence for this in my own work as well as the work of others. However, from what I’ve seen, gender is just the tip of the iceberg.

The problem we face as a society is that the diversity of the software we use doesn’t match the diversity of those using it. Facebook’s designers were not only predominantly male but also for the most part young, relatively privileged, white, and from a very limited set of cultural backgrounds. Have you seen the recent writing on how the exclusive use of WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) research subjects has biased sociological and psychological research findings? I’d say the same bias appears in software design. What if the next Facebook were designed not just by women, but by men and women, and by people from every continent, from every socioeconomic class, from every ethnic background, from every religion, from city and country, from the shy to the outgoing, from every orientation and identification, from every personality group …. What would that Facebook be like?

The elephant in the room here is power and money. A lot of the people out of power do write software; they just are less likely to have the means to get that software well funded. There are many Facebook alternatives out there, as one of your commenters mentioned; but many of those people can’t get funding to bring their diverse abilities and skills to the world stage. If history is written by the victors, software is written by (and funded by) the powerful. That’s the main reason it doesn’t match its users and their real worlds (not that men design software better, which is a red herring). The mismatch between diversity of tools and diversity of people is hardly a new problem – it stretches back through history – but that doesn’t mean we can’t address it.

One more point: Just because people use something, that doesn’t mean it works for them! Have you tried buying a toaster in the past decade? One that doesn’t catch on fire and works for longer than a year? Just because people keep buying or using things doesn’t mean they love them. I know lots of people who are leaving Facebook because its inadequacies are piling up. We as a society can do better, but the question is, will we?

Dear CV,

I super appreciate your article and the follow-up piece. I was kind of depressed to see the response when it was posted on the Diaspora discussion boards:

http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-discuss/browse_thread/thread/fe469e5aef3c1f9d

This kind of confirmed my feeling, as a woman who works in tech, that a social network designed by feminists is fundamentally impossible while the tech field is so saturated in sexism.

Hannah: depressing indeed. I just posted about this in What a maroon. However I’m more optimistic than you about the possibilities for a social network designed by feminists (and womanists and mujerists). You can build something great with a small team — and while the overall climate is indeed incredibly sexist, it’s possible to create bubbles where the oppression is somewhat relaxed. So I see cv’s posts as the early steps in the process.

For more on Facebook’s all-blue UI and Zuckerberg’s color-blindness, see Anil Dash’s The Facebook Reckoning and my comment. I did a lot of experimenting with people’s reaction to color when I was at Microsoft and came away convinced that overwhelmingly-blue interfaces are so normalized that people don’t even stop to question them. At my startup Qworky, we intentionally went for color balance in our logo and default UI: two shades of blue, pink green. Guess what? Different people like different things.

In terms of the broader discussion on the Diaspora list, it doesn’t seem to me that there’s are a lot of user experience experts involved. Colors and customization are something that everybody thinks they understand so it’s easy for people to weigh in. But yeah, I was curious how the discussion would evolve, and thus far they’ve failed to impress. Oh well. They’re not the only game in town.

I don’t even like Facebook, why would I try to design something like it…It’s too common, too out in the open, too “everyone’s doing it:” if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge, too?