Revealed: He modified Facebook's "secret formula" for success

This is a pair 1.6 billion users click more than 6 billion times a day Stories of "Like" button improvements.

About a year ago, outside the Four Seasons Hotel, about a 10-minute drive from Facebook headquarters, a big change was about to come. In the conference room, Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox was organizing a big discussion, and he asked six executives to each list the three projects they wanted to deal with most in 2015. When it was Cox's turn, he dropped an atomic bomb: Facebook was going to make some adjustments to the "Like" button.

Like

The Like button is the engine of Facebook and its most recognized symbol. The entrance to Facebook's Menlo Park, California, campus is decorated with a huge "Like" sign. 1.6 billion users click "Like" more than 6 billion times a day, more frequently than people search on Google, and it affects billions of dollars in revenue every quarter. Brands, publishers, and individuals continue to share what they like, and there is also strategic thinking in it. The more people share, the more "Likes" they get. It is it that drives social activities. Couples show perfect selfies to prove that they love each other; news organizations provide interesting things, and they hope that "Likes" will spread the content. All these "Likes" tell Facebook what is popular and what content should be displayed first in the news feed.

The “like” is also an imperfect tool. When someone announces their divorce online, their friends grit their teeth and “like” the news. When a devastating earthquake hits Nepal, there are always some people who give a thumbs-up.

Changing the button is as important as changing Coca-Cola's secret formula . Cox tried to change "Like" several times, but eventually found that the new product was not good enough to meet the standards of public testing. "People use Facebook in a certain way, and the Like function is at the core of this way. It must be well executed and cannot destroy the experience or make a mess of the experience. All other attempts have failed." The "Dislike" button was once the most promising solution, but it was eventually rejected because it spread too much negative information.

Cox told the executives meeting at the Four Seasons that it was finally time to change, now that Facebook had successfully moved most of its business to mobile phones. Cox's first assistant, Adam Mosseri, took a deep breath and said solemnly, "I support you."

That same week, Cox proposed his project to his boss and old friend Zuckerberg. Like was Facebook's most important service, and Cox was taking a risk with it. Zuckerberg's reaction showed how much wiggle room Cox had. "He said something like, 'Okay, do it.' He was completely supportive," Cox said. "Very lucky." He remembered Zuckerberg telling him, "This is not going to be easy."

The solution, eventually named Reactions, will be available soon. Facebook originally supported just one emoticon, but now supports six.

Cox is not a founder, does not serve as a director of other companies, and has not written any best-selling books. He is not a billionaire, but only worth 10 million. He joined Facebook in 2005, but came too late to catch the feast; director David Fincher made a movie called "The Social Network" about the story of Facebook's early entrepreneurship, which Cox missed. Zuckerberg manages more and more businesses and projects, including: Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus Rift virtual reality helmet, and carbon fiber drones as big as Boeing 737. Cox runs "THE BIG BLUE APP" - a term that refers to Facebook, which we browse dozens of times a day. Every Monday morning at 9 o'clock, a "cultural ambassador" will give a passionate speech to new employees, and Cox has to manage these speakers. So few of Facebook's 12,000 employees don't know him.

Cox's team manages the News Feed, the never-ending scroll of Facebook's latest updates. What users see is determined by an invisible formula that evaluates photos of children and prevents political outrage. "Cox is the voice of the user," said Bret Taylor, Facebook's chief technology officer. "He can sit in the room with Zuckerberg and explain how users will react to changes. He is the right person."

sad

Cox's rise to prominence has been gradual, and people outside the company have seen it clearly over the past few years. Many people first saw him during the IPO roadshow in 2012, when Facebook released a video in which a group of executives explained the company's goals. Standing with Facebook Chairman and CEO Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg was Cox. He stared earnestly into the camera that approached him and said seriously, "We are changing the way a generation communicates with itself."

Cox has always been by Zuckerberg's side, and the two are close friends. Zuckerberg considers him "one of the people who made Facebook a special place." He also talked about Cox's IQ and EQ, saying "it's hard to find someone who has both as high as him." Cox is as cool as Zuckerberg. He is a keyboard player in a reggae dance group and wears stylish clothes, often leaving one button undone on his neat work shirt.

If you look deeper, Cox's record isn't pretty. He's been responsible for some of Facebook's biggest products: Paper, a smartphone news-reading app that no one used; a major overhaul of the News Feed that failed because it didn't work well on small screens. If you look at the products that have provided Facebook with its biggest growth opportunities (Instagram and WhatsApp, for example, are the biggest contributors), almost all of them were acquired, not invented by Facebook itself.

In Silicon Valley, Cox is willing to revisit past mistakes and treat them as beneficial experiments and valuable learning experiences. "I think any good company will try new things and force itself to try new things. You have to put the problem out there, try it, and learn." Cox said, "Sometimes people get into trouble because they are just unwilling to face failure honestly."

Cox first heard about Facebook's hiring when he was studying for a master's degree in human-computer interaction at Stanford. One of his roommates had already joined Facebook, and it was he who asked Cox to interview because of the $5,000 recruiting bonus. Cox was skeptical. Wasn't Facebook a dating site?

At that time, Facebook's headquarters was located on University Avenue in Palo Alto, an area where drug dealers and prostitutes often operated. After arriving at the company, co-founder Dustin Moskovitz described Facebook as a crowdsourced directory for everyone. He drew several circles on the whiteboard, and the lines connecting the circles represented the friendships on the website. The first five minutes of a conversation between two strangers are quite awkward. People often ask some blunt questions, such as "Where are you from?" By checking each other's information, you can avoid the initial embarrassment and make it easier to make in-depth connections. Cox was deeply attracted.

He dropped out of Stanford and joined Facebook when the company had about 30 employees. His first job was to develop the News Feed, the feature that made Facebook popular around the world. He and Zuckerberg misjudged the user reaction: Users hated the News Feed. Many people felt that their private information was exposed. "It was not very successful when it was launched," Cox said.

like

In late 2007, when Facebook had 100 employees, Zuckerberg decided to pick someone he trusted to run HR. Cox's career took a dramatic turn: Zuckerberg asked him to be Facebook's head of human resources. Zuckerberg explained what he thought at the time: an opportunity to take a different approach, an opportunity to define different aspects of the company's culture with a technical spirit.

Cox met with all employees one-on-one, becoming an in-house therapist. “He had to take in the endless complaints from across the company, and he handled it without being cynical or distracted,” one early Facebook employee wrote on Quora.

Cox himself said that his HR job allowed him to see things through other people's eyes. He also had the opportunity to think about Facebook's mission to the world, and at that time he began to read the works of communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, who believed that every media technology change would be met with anger and distrust at the beginning.

The words brought comfort to Cox, explaining why Facebook was attacked by some people. "People didn't really understand Facebook at the time, and they didn't believe it would get better." He also said, "McLuhan put these issues in a broader perspective."

Cox returned to engineering in 2008, but he remains the company's cultural ambassador. He cited McLuhan's theory when he addressed new employees on Monday. His speeches usually start with a question: "What is Facebook?" The hall is silent until someone bravely says: "It's a social network." Wrong. Facebook is the medium, Cox said, and then he quoted McLuhan's famous saying: "The medium is the message." In other words, how to present content and how users are allowed to read, watch, comment on and like it is Facebook, which will affect the way 1.6 billion members see the world.

Wow

Most of the time, Cox spends his days at Building 20, a Frank Gehry-designed building on Facebook's Menlo Park campus. The rectangular building covers 430,000 square feet. There's a grassy courtyard on the roof, a hot dog stand on one side and a soda fountain on the other. Throughout the cavernous space, which is filled with folk art and chalkboard walls, Facebook employees tie silver balloons to their mobile standing desks, which are given to employees on their anniversary. Last year, Cox received a 10th anniversary balloon.

As Cox walked into the conference room on a Wednesday in November, he admitted that he had broken a rule: Facebook didn’t want executives to schedule meetings on Wednesdays, a day that didn’t interfere with the work of engineers and designers.

Cox needs to meet with the team to discuss the modification plan of Facebook India smartphone APP. There is a display screen in front of the conference room with a statistical chart of Indian Android mobile phone users. Users are classified and marked with the speed of their commonly used mobile networks, such as 2G and 3G speeds.

“Can you keep this chart up for a little longer?” Cox asked, squatting on the ground, resting his elbows on his knees, staring at the chart intently. “4G only accounts for 0.2% of the market.”

"It's just a picture someone put up," said product manager Chris Struhar.

The team couldn’t wait for India to improve its mobile network speeds; by then frustrated users would have already abandoned Facebook. Struhar suggested reducing the amount of data used in the app, such as reusing some old data so that content didn’t need to be updated and downloaded.

Cox agrees: “My gut tells me people want more content, but I’m probably wrong.”

anger

Towards the end of the meeting, Cox spoke out loud about his confusion about how to get other Facebook employees to think about one thing: developing features for the old networks that are still used in many parts of the world. Someone suggested that the company's employees use 2G networks once a week. Cox liked the idea. "This is the network we use for 'EmPathy'," he said. "Happy Wednesday, everyone. You've arrived in Delhi." Two weeks later, the company deployed "2G Tuesdays."

"Empathy" is a word Cox often uses, and his colleagues also like to use this word to describe him. Facebook has made some big mistakes in the past because it did not understand its users well. In the past, if the product team wanted to test features in New Zealand, it would favor native English speakers, who did not accurately represent the world as a whole. Under Cox's leadership, Facebook's product team began to study some more sensitive issues, such as turning an account into a memorial when a user passed away, and allowing users to block photos of their ex after a breakup.

Cox's goal has not yet been achieved. He wants to make "News Feed" a personalized product. The top 10 posts that users see should be the same as the ones they have selected themselves, and the order of arrangement should be the same. Making the operation easier for users has another benefit - pleasing advertisers. Under Cox's leadership, Facebook found a way to display ads in smartphone apps, and they launched ads that can play automatically.

Since Cox became chief product officer in 2014, his team has consulted with about 1,000 Facebook users outside the company, who rate and respond to every story in the feed. Scattered around Facebook's offices are product testing stations, which resemble interrogation rooms: small rooms with lights shining on tables. A camera connected to a test phone records the subject's movements, while Facebook employees stand behind one-way glass and observe. Conversations sometimes last for hours and are sometimes live-streamed to an audience of dozens of employees.

Cox used the testing system to promote the innovation of the Like button. The Facebook team developed the Like button from 2007 to 2009, and Cox was not a member of the team. According to Andrew Bosworth, a senior Facebook executive, there were many questions about the button. Is Like for the public or for individuals? Will it lead to a decrease in the number of comments and stories? Many people also believed that the Like function was doomed to fail. Even the team's supervisors did not know what impact the Like would have on the company's fate. Like makes interaction easier. If someone posts that they have found a new job, click it instead of waiting in line until No. 15 just to say congratulations.

How does Facebook use technology to determine what users see? In the end, the Like button became a key part of the answer. If a friend shares a post from Kardashian (American entertainment star, designer, actor) or someone else, and you click "Like", the software will recommend ads or articles from People Magazine or Sephora to you. Gartner analyst Brian Blau said: "The value it brings to Facebook is immeasurable."

It may be superficial, but it does create a connection. If users "like" a Red Cross relief post, they feel like they've helped a little. If you haven't seen someone in years, you can "like" their photo, which makes the connection less awkward.

Facebook researchers also launched a project to collect the most common reactions of users to posts, such as "Haha", "LOL" and "omg so funny", which were classified into the category of "laugh". Finally, Facebook divided the expressions into six categories: anger, sadness, wow (WOW), haha, Yay (yeah), love.

The team also consulted outside sociologists on human emotions, just to make sure everything was right. Experience has taught Cox that he doesn’t know everything: When the company redesigned the News Feed in 2013, it looked great on iMacs at Facebook headquarters but was terrible for use in the rest of the world. “There are a million potholes in the road that can trip you up,” Cox said.

Facebook's "Reactions" will not abandon Like, it will become an extended product. There was a debate within the company: How to increase options without crowding the links on the post? The simpler Facebook is, the more people will use it. Zuckerberg found a solution: only display the common thumbs-up icon under each post, and if the user pulls down the article when reading on a smartphone, other options will be displayed. Cox's team is responsible for developing these features, and they also use animation to distinguish the meaning of the icons.

It seems that these new features are not important. All the team has done is to increase clickable responses. Users already comment on posts with emojis or text, and new features can make Facebook more attractive. It can also provide Cox with more information to facilitate the development of News Feed algorithms, and ultimately make content more relevant to users and, of course, advertisers.

Yay

In October, as Facebook neared final design and Zuckerberg took his time talking about the project in public, Cox worried that the time was not right to talk about emojis. Ultimately, "Yay" was scrapped because it wasn't universally understood.

A few weeks later, the team began testing Reactions in Spain, Ireland, Chile, the Philippines, Portugal, and Colombia. In early January, Cox flew to Tokyo to sell Reactions to Japan. He told reporters at Facebook's office in Roppongi, Japan: "You may love something, you may be sad about something, and you may laugh at something. We know that people don't like to use keyboards on their phones, and we know that the Like button sometimes can't fully express what you mean."

He explained Facebook’s goal: to allow users to express emotions with universal words as they scroll through their feeds. In a sense, Reactions is an adaptation to Asian digital culture, where Line and WeChat already have a complex set of emojis and elaborate stickers.

Cox also said that Reactions received its biggest test during the Paris terrorist attacks in November, when users in the test countries were able to choose emojis other than "Like" to respond.

When will Reactions be available in the U.S. and other parts of the world? Facebook didn't give a specific timeline, saying only that it will be available in the coming weeks. Cox said the data looks good and that users like Reactions, but he tried to keep a low profile. "We are very cautious when launching products and services," Cox said. "This is something we have learned from many setbacks."

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