OKCOOL

A gift application with a twist! As a number of you will know, we recently finished development on a facebook application for Fat Face, the rather funky clothing and outdoor clobber company.

So where is the twist?

There’s a lot of gift applications on facebook but they all seem to follow a general theme. You send a virtual gift to your friends and they say…. ‘ooh, thanks for the pixels mate’. With the exception of the occasional amusing gift they’re all a bit dull .

The thing that has set Fat Face apart is that they have put aside tons of real prizes to be given away. So you send a virtual gift and if you’re a lucky winner, you get the real thing! Pretty cool. I want one of their “Airlie Sweat” jumpers, but sadly, I’m not in the running because it would be all too easy for me to be a winner!

The competition

We knew that the possibility of winning a real prize would be a big draw to users to send their friend’s gifts. To ensure that everyone has a fair chance to win over the entire duration of the campaign and that the winners are spread fairly evenly so that people can see that there are people winning regularly, we had to come up with a sensible prize generating system. It wasn’t just a case of determining randomly if a gift was a winner; not least because we have a fixed amount of gifts to give away, and an unknown total number of users (as it’s growing all the time).

I obviously can’t divulge too much about the internal workings of the prize allocation at this time, because the application is still online and people are actively winning prizes, but what I will say is that the gifts are very randomly (but fairly evenly) spread over the entire duration of the campaign and that not even I could predict when the next winner will be.

Targeting the right people

If you’ve looked at the application (and of course, I would urge you to do so :), you will notice that some of the gifts are aimed at men, and some, at the ladies. We have used the information from facebook to pre-select random friends of the correct sex for each gift. This won’t prevent a user from sending a ‘Sassy Scarf’ to their mate Mark, but it’s a good start! We could have used further demographic information to target particular age groups but Fat Face did not deem this to be necessary.

Keeping it on brand and on time

We had quite a short time frame to get this project completed in time for Christmas so we took an agile approach and involved the client from start to finish.

We used basecamp for project management and Fat Face took to it like they had been using it for years; perhaps they had!? After we wire framed the interface for the application we got building and implemented a basic design for it. We then worked closely with the designers and copywriters from Fat Face to ensure it was delivering the message they wanted consistently with their brand.

facebook throw in a spanner

To say that developing for facebook is becoming slightly painful would be a bit of an understatement. They currently have a massive bug in their system that is causing our application (and many, many others) to be marked as spam. This means we’re having trouble sending notifications to users when they have been sent a gift.

Facebook are trying to suggest that they are looking out for their users by putting systems in place to allow their users to determine what they do and don’t want to see from their friends. What they are actually doing is making some very poor UI blunders, coupled with what seems to be real bugs, that are just making a large quantity of developers very angry.

I hate being inundated with application requests as much as the next person, but facebook are not solving the problem as a social network. They are solving it as the overlord over the users. Here’s the problem with how they’re doing it:

• It’s my friends that matter – not the applications. I have certain friends in my social circle that really do matter to me. If they send me something, even if it’s inane crap… I want to see it. Some friends, I want to block requests from full stop (if I wasn’t worried about bumping in to them in Tesco, I’d just remove them anyway!).
• They don’t solve the problem of spam at the root of the problem, when the developer gets the data. This is easy to fix. Only provide the developer with the data for users that are happy to be sent stuff. At the moment, they serve up complete lists of friends regardless of whether any of those people have objected to an application.
  You can ONLY mark a notification as spam – you can’t remove it.
• User’s have no choice if they want to hide a notification. Facebook say they are actively working to find a resolution (and the bug report does have a high priority) but when you’re running a short campaign it’s very frustrating to be at the mercy of their release cycle.

I don’t want this to come across as totally negative, because there’s no doubt that facebook have done an amazing job creating their application framework. They have problems to deal with that only a handful of companies will ever have to face, and they do a very good job of it generally. I just wish they would look at a more social ‘out of the box’ solution to deal with the issue of spam rather than just ruling with an iron rod. (facebook, if you’re reading… we’re happy to fly economy and come out there and help you sort it out! :)

In summary

This has been a fun project to work on. Fat Face have been accepting of our agile approach to development and are, from all indications, very happy with the end result. They have been forward thinking in their approach to the project and we look forward to working with them in the future in new and exciting ways.