Shelfari

Paging through the Widget

We love books.  We also love the new Web.  So when we get a chance to combine nifty Web 2.0 AJAX with
our shelf, we get pretty excited.  You may have noticed that the thousands of Shelfari widgets out there now have 'next' buttons on them.  Give them a click.  The shelf loads new books quickly and gets ready to respond to all of your clicking (back and forth, forth and back). 

We've had feedback from bloggers that they liked the widget, but wanted a slick way to keep their readers on their site while they perused the blogger's library.  We're committed to serving the blogging community and giving them the tools they want, how they want them.  So keep sending us your feedback.

The paging back and forth also works with the text widget, which takes on the style of your blog or web site and blends in.  If you want to play around with a widget, they're easy to build so give it a try.

The New Shelfari - Advanced Reading Copy

OK.... Here goes!  We have mentioned our new site design that has been in the works for a couple of months, and we are finally pulling back the covers.  We started this afternoon linking from users’ home pages to the new site, dubbed "arc" or advanced reading copy.  Take a look.

You will notice right away that we’ve made some significant tweaks to the visual design, updating the colors and layouts of most pages.  This is a departure from some of the design elements of our current site, but we’re very pleased with how it turned out.  This new design will act as our canvas on which cool new features will soon appear.  A lot of the site's new features are in development this week and will soon see the light of day.  It's going to be fun to watch this unfold.

Let us know what you think.

Expanding the Team

Shelfari's team has grown substantially in the last seven days, so I thought it appropriate to introduce you our new best friends. 

As you may have known, Shelfari (Shelfari.com , our Facebook application, the blog widgets, and our upcoming OpenSocial widget) is built and supported by two men, both named Kevin.  They work long hours, efficiently creating great products and releasing them to the world.  Last week, we added three new full-time team members: Jason Hills, Aaron Colwell, and Mike Smuga to take some of that burden off their backs and help us move faster.  You'll want to get to know them, so here's a blurb about each one.

Jason's specialty is in building the user interface of software and web sites, and will bring his wealth of experience to Shelfari.  He joins us most recently from HouseValues, and previously cut his teeth on Microsoft Word, rode the startup road at Cozi, and lived through the dot-com crash and aftermath at Construx Software.  Jason is also our company pilot.  He builds planes (yikes!) and flies them around the beautiful Puget Sound.  He is also enjoys ice climbing, racing cars, and skydiving.  So, hopefully we'll have him longer than a life insurance actuary might predict. 

Like a few of us at Shelfari, Aaron hails from RealNetworks, where he was a software developer for nine years (a certified eon in Internet time).  Aaron worked with Real's top clients to customize server software and spent several years building RealPlayers for set-top boxes, phones, and a variety of hand-held devices. He helped launch the Helix Community, developed high-performance media delivery systems, and managed the RealLabs Systems Research Group. Josh and Aaron became friends during this period, and have stayed in touch since then. As you may have guessed, Aaron is the man who will ensure Shelfari performs better and better, and can support the mounting load you all keep piling on our servers.  (Don't stop!  We'll catch up soon.)

Mike left Microsoft after nearly seven years to join our team.  At Shelfari Mike will work with Tim to create an incredible user experience that is second to none.  At Microsoft he worked as a program manager, focusing mostly on mobile phone products, including Windows Live Spaces, Hotmail, Messenger, and Windows Live for Windows Mobile.  Kevin D worked with Mike when Kevin was fresh out of school, and remembered how talented Mike was and how great he was to work with.  Mike will be reading over all of the feedback, recommending what should come next for Shelfari's products, and prioritizing how we will get it all done.  So don't be shy.  Tell Mike what you want.  He wants to deliver. 

We're really excited to have these new folks packed into our Pioneer Square office, and expect to see a dramatic improvements to our products, which we already think is pretty great.  (Hubris, I know.  But what can I say?)

--Dave

Invitation design

Over the past couple of weeks our invite flow has drawn some attention. This blog post is intended to explain what happened and what we’ve done to correct it.

Original Design

First, some history on our invitation experience.  We released the following design in May of 2007, allowing users to invite their friends from their address books.

 
This page appears when a member invites contacts from an address book (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL).  The page has three sections:

• Top-left section shows friends already on Shelfari
• Bottom-left section shows friends which are not yet on Shelfari
• Top-right section allows the user to customize the invite message

Each of the three sections has a “Send invites” button, which triggers the action of sending invites to all of the users marked with checked checkboxes anywhere on the page

Right after we built this design we carefully monitored how our users were using it. At that point less than 1% of our users with large address books sent invites to their whole address books.  This seemed like a reasonable number and we concluded that our design was clear and didn’t have many people accidentally emailing their address books.  While we received occasional complaints we put re-designing this page at a lower priority because of our initial research. 

In September we began monitoring our email spam complaints.  Our spam complaint rate is actually very small – less than 1 out of every 200 of invitation messages is being marked as spam by recipients.

So, what changed?

Over the last few months our complaint rate has risen.  In the middle of last week I ran an analysis of how many people are sending to their entire address book and was surprised to learn the rate had risen dramatically.  It was 10x what it was in June when I measured it last.  You can call us stupid or evil if you’d like, but the reality was we have simply been extremely busy.  We figured that if the page had not substantially changed since June, that the user experience was much the same. 

The biggest change is that we have seen explosive growth.  Back in May we had tens of thousands of users. Now we have hundreds of thousands of users. While our growth has been fueled by people inviting their friends, we have not used tweaks to our invitation process to achieve our growth.

Since we have more users on Shelfari, the top-left section (with contacts already on Shelfari) is much longer for an average user than what it was in May.  As that section grew, it began pushing the list with users not yet to Shelfari lower and lower, finally pushing it off the screen for many users. If the user didn’t scroll the page and realize that there are more checked contacts on the page, he or she ended up unwittingly emailing their entire contacts list.  The screenshot below illustrates the problem (the darker section would most likely be off screen when the page first appears)

Because of this effect, we had a much larger percentage of users pressing the “Send Invites” button unaware that all of the checked contacts from the bottom section would also get email invitations to Shelfari.

One specific suggestion we had received in the past was simply to remove the extra “Send Invites” button in between the two sections.  In retrospect I should have done this a long time ago. It doesn’t take many development resources to remove a button. Still – we were a small team and I was relying on old data to justify maintaining an old design.  I sincerely apologize for our bad design misleading anyone with this decision to leave the extra button on the page.

What is the right thing to do?

Last week we had three new developers and one new program manager start! All of us who have been working hard on Shelfari are very excited to have extra engineering help.  Last week after realizing how poor our invitation experience was performing, we quickly released a new invitation flow.
Our new program manager did a quick comparison of invite flows from other sites: Facebook, MySpace, BeBo, LinkedIn and a couple more.   For reference we have included Facebook’s find friends flow:

Screen 1: Sign in

Screen 2: Friends on Facebook

Screen 3: Friends not on Facebook

Our Fix

Seeing how important it was to fix this problem, we decided to forego a complete redesign and to go with a design that resembles Facebook.  We split the invite process into two screens:

SCREEN 1: Allows our users to see contacts already on Shelfari and select which of them they want to add to their friends list.

SCREEN 2: Allows our users to clearly see contacts not yet on Shelfari, decide which contacts they want to invite, and send the invite.

This new updated design went live last Thursday night. We’ll most likely revise it again in the coming weeks, but we will make sure to be super clear about what emails are getting sent when new users join the site.  We will also update you when we make changes and talk about them in detail.

We want to deeply apologize to all of our users who mistakenly emailed unwanted contacts. Looking back at the screens from May, the placement of the middle “Send Invites” button was clearly a bad design with bad consequences. Our key goal is to build the world’s largest community of book lovers.  Unwanted email does not help us achieve that in any way.

My goal in writing this blog post is to remove any confusion about what we have done in the past, why we did it, what we do now and what we plan to do in the future.

Happy Reading,

Josh

Changes to Shelfari's invitations

I thought I'd give up an update on the changes we made Thursday night to invitations on Shelfari.  We made a fairly radical update that makes invitations clearer for everyone finding friends on Shelfari, fixing its core problems  The most significant issue with the former design was that when members had more than five or six friends on Shelfari, the list of their friends not yet using the service dropped below the fold.  So when a member clicked "Send Invite", it sent to the whole list of friends, including that group that the member never saw because those names were pushed below the fold by the list of friends on Shelfari.

Our new design uses two separate pages for the two very separate actions of 1) requesting friendship with those already on Shelfari, and 2) inviting new friends to the site.  Looking at best practices of sizable social networks, we see that this change is necessary and given our size was overdue.  Now that we've divided these actions on separate pages, we feel that Shelfari is back on track to providing the best user experience for our members and their friends.

Mike and Josh plan to talk in greater detail about what we've changed and how if affects our members later this week.

Dave

Invitations and updates

We've seen the recent emergence of complaints about Shelfari's invitations feature, and it's quite distressing.  We've been working hard over the last few months on our OpenSocial application, adding more web servers, releasing our new widget, creating a personal weekly email, and in parallel redesigning Shelfari.com (coming very soon!). We haven't taken the time to address the complaints about our invitations in our blog or by updating the site. We're changing that now.

It's been about five months since we last touched our invitation design.  In June we looked at a number of different designs with the goal of creating something easy to use as well as clear.  Recent feedback has been clear that our current design is not clear enough.  As I read through the feedback, and look at the experience afresh, I can see where the problems stem from.

Up until now Kevin B and Kevin D have been Shelfari's only two development resources, but I have exciting news!  We recently hired two super star developers -- Aaron & Jason.  We've also hired MikeS our first program manager (you'll be hearing from him soon).  Our new team will be much faster to address the needs of our users, including this invitation problem. Making our invitation flows clearer is one of the top priorities for our team. Look for updates to the invitation flow in the near future.

In the meantime, if you do encounter any issue or confusion with your invitations, please send us an email and we will take action to stop invitations from going out.  Since we started Shelfari we've tried to be very active in responding to users' questions and feedback and we'll keep doing that as we continue to grow.

Happy Reading,

Josh

UPDATE

We updated our find friends experience late Thursday night, which should make the experience infinitely clearer.  I'll write more about what we did and what impact it will have later on Friday.  Thanks everyone for your feedback and for support.