How The Like Button Revolutionized UX Forever

Read The Transcript:

We’re trying out transcribing our podcasts using a software program. Please forgive any typos as the bot isn’t correct 100% of the time.

Hannah Clark: It feels like we’ve been asking people to follow, and subscribe since the dawn of time. But when we take a step back, we can see that these seemingly ubiquitous ways of interacting online have evolved over a relatively short timeline. Even in the B2B software world, virtually all the UX features that we rely on today for communication and collaboration can be traced back to the primordial soup of the early internet.

My guest today is Nimrod Priell, the Founder and CEO of Cord, who you’ll soon discover is like a human encyclopedia of this collaborative UX continuum. We dug into the origins of the like button, the rise of emojis, the impact of the pandemic on collaborative software features, and how to think of your product not just in terms of its individual users, but in terms of its role in your customers’ ecosystem. Let’s jump in.

I am so honoured to have you here with us today, Nimrod. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are at Cord?

Nimrod Priell: Thanks for having me. I’m honored to be here. I love the podcast. Yeah. So look, I started out as an engineer, I think like 25 or so years ago, started building my own website.

It was what you did back then was copy like a forum system like /. which is to the listeners today, the most closest thing would be Reddit. So I built this kind of social software and when you build your own website, you’re the PM, you’re the designer, you’re the like everything.

And it really I think, gave me very raw first experiences that kind of caring about the experience for users, but like trading it off with what could I build and how fast could I build and stuff like that. Obviously didn’t have a lot of users, a lot of success was mostly for my friends. Then I got I did some work engineering in the military and then in some startups.

And I ended up in 2013 being acquired into Facebook. The company that I worked for was acquired and there I started basically PMing this small subsidiary of Facebook that was fairly independent. We had a couple of apps in the app store, the play store, and we had an internal service that was used by a few thousand Facebook employees.

And so I also got that experience of kind of being very close to the users, having enough of them for it to matter to be able to survey them. And Paul has to do these trade offs, but also being close enough that you can really get raw kind of direct feedback about everything.

When I left Facebook in 2018, the end of 2018, I started advising friends of mine who had B2B SaaS companies. And then the sort of experience I had at Facebook together with what I’ve seen at these B2B SaaS was the crystallizing moment for starting Cord. So basically, the realization was, Okta says the average SME today uses 97 different SaaS tools and it keeps growing every year.

And if you look at certain segments, there’s like thousands of Martech tools. For example, there’s hundreds of DevOps tools. A lot of us kind of knowledge workers pass our time day to day in one or a couple of tools where we basically do these transactions that make work happen, that makes the whole thing take a long, but we’re not alone, right?

We’re in teams where this is why I keep stressing kind of B2B SaaS. We work in a business, work with other people and we need help. We need approval. We need to pass on the baton when we’re done with our piece of work and pass it to the next person in line, we need feedback. And invariably we do all of that by copying and pasting links and screenshots into something like Slack or email.

And we do that and there’s a lot of kind of friction with that little tiny interaction. When you command tab into the Slack window, you have to find the right channel or the right kind of DM group that you targeting this to. There’s a lot of them that are already white bolded because there were other messages.

If click one, you don’t want to lose track of which messages you read or didn’t as you put the question that you have had. And so you skim through it, read it. You’ve already lost track. You can see how this process makes you lose track of the work, context switch.

And the second kind of bit that’s problematic about it is something people don’t often consider, which is now Slack becomes this like source of truth and source of knowledge about all the, questions people had and decisions that were made and feedback about stuff and so on. And you can’t go back to the kind of tool where the actual context is, where the actual item that’s being discussed, maybe it’s an email kind of newsletter that you want to send out, or maybe it’s a kind of DevOps configuration that you’re setting or whatever, there’s no record of a conversation there.

So people have to do this pattern, except when it’s Figma, or Google Docs, or like a handful of tools that have collaboration built in and a high enough quality that they can discuss there and then what they wanted to discuss. And so this is what led to Cord, don’t want to overfocus on that.

We have lots of other interesting topics that I picked up from, over a decade of PMing and, over two decades in software in general, nerding out and geeking out about UX patterns we can talk about, but that was the impetus to starting Cord.

Hannah Clark: Amazing. So just to dial back a little bit to your time at Facebook, you were there during a period when they were making some really formative UX decisions. Can you tell us a little bit about what you witnessed and how that came about and where that is today?

Nimrod Priell: Yeah, absolutely. I think, look, these stories are not my own. I’m just here to retell them. I’m a very good sort of collector of anecdotes and it’s something that I love. So I will try and mention the people involved when I know or remember who it is. But I think, in these like kind of formative years of, first of all, the bringing a lot of people onto the web and kind of building these web experiences that become so ubiquitous today, I guess would be the word and then in mobile, there was this kind of window of opportunity where a lot of new UX was formed that we now take for granted.

And I think it’s very interesting to dig into how that spark was created. What brought up this idea? I think the very first story that I know about this comes from the person who invented the like button. And so back before the like button with the very beginning of Facebook, before the like button, became a thing, people would have posts and or posts on their walls that used to be a thing and they would get lots of comments.

They would post maybe a photo or just like an update. And people would comment on it and you’d see that a lot of posts would get these just sort of comments that were like, awesome, cool, that’s great to hear, they didn’t have a lot of content in a way, they were just affirming the person. And it was going really well, but then, they realized that this is very good for the site metrics.

It looks like, a lot of people are commenting and stuff like that, but actually what happens are two effects. One is that the actual substantive comments, the ones that are interesting and people actually want to read, they’re all hidden. You have to read through a whole lot of kind of just generic affirmation to get to something meaty and interesting.

And also that when you are trying to give your friends, this kind of approval, the sense that you’ve seen, you’ve heard them, it’s very important as basic human social connection that it’s hard and it gets tiring coming up one post after the other with another way to just express awesome or whatever.

So you’re a PM and you come up with this idea of something that’s very counter intuitive. How will you ship a feature that is going to tank the metrics that you were so far used to considering is the success and the proof of success to the company, to investors, to everyone about the product, right, which is commenting like active engagement.

But they made this bold decision to basically provide people this outlet, just click and express this sort of affirmation without having to type something. And guess what? Comments were down, but likes, as its own kind of measure, way up. Because now people don’t get bogged down in the comments, they can read a lot more content, and it engages them with something deeper that’s more interesting that’s like novel, new things.

So I think there’s something very interesting in the story. But I think if you track it even further, there’s more interesting things about it along the way. So I think, I remember it as Slack being, but I might be wrong here, as Slack being the first one to say, well, why should a person be just limited to or, other systems that copied the idea of like often had a and “dislike” or stuff like that, or upvote and downvote like you see in Reddit.

Why can’t people just express like a way broader range of emotions? And taking this idea that emojis were anyway, by itself, a very interesting kind of development in UX, right? Emojis were exploding and seen a whole lot of use, especially I think it started mostly in Asia. Where the languages, the scripts are very complicated and you sometimes have to like, look for a specific way to express a word, build this hieroglyphic of a word.

And it’s actually shorter and easier to just express something visually this way. That’s at least how I heard it was popularized. But then obviously getting back to the West and Slack kind of brings up this option of any kind of emoji reaction. Which I think by now is taken for granted and WhatsApp has it and a couple of other products.

I haven’t actually looked at Facebook in a long time. I think they might have that or maybe it’s running as an experiment, but definitely it took Facebook ages and there were huge internal debates on expanding the range of emotions. And then figuring out which are the right five that they started out with.

There was the like, the love, the funny, the, all of these. And then actually this idea that, well, why do you even have to limit to these? Why not let people just break that sort of limitation. So I think there’s, I just, this is one example, there’s the infinite feed, there’s the stories, an innovation that Snapchat made and now became a part and parcel or carousels.

There’s a lot of these kind of rudiments of product design that once they get discovered, they just take over. And I think this is one of the most impactful things actually you can do as a PM is not just build your own product, but you leave some really unquestionable legacy, if you happen to be one of these people who innovated on this like fundamental kind of UX design or flow or idea.

Hannah Clark: I had no idea, by the way, that makes so much sense about how emojis became popularized first in the East and then in the West, but really interesting trajectory about how those things build on each other. Curious about how the pandemic might have played a factor in influencing not just UX trends, but also collaborative features and software.

Nimrod Priell: Yeah, I think that’s very interesting and obviously something that we’ve explored a lot. When I started pitching Cord, it was just before the pandemic and I pulled out these kind of research sort of memos or papers from the US Department of Work or something like that. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but there were statistics about how many people work remotely.

And I wanted to pull these up so that I can justify you know, to investors and so on, why are we building this kind of idea of collaboration everywhere? Figma was already getting further and being famous for its collaboration, but still within a pretty niche circle. And this is, 2019 way before they became, a multi-billion dollar company.

And the statistics were that 7% of the U.S. I think were working remotely and it was growing quite fast for the, for, at the time. We turned out to be completely lucky, right? Working on collaboration in the pandemic and how much it put remote work to the forefront. But I think it’s definitely, made users expect software to be, enabling them to work remotely, to work asynchronously.

I think one of the interesting things there was actually the rise of Loom because that’s another one of these things where, there’s a lot of kind of resistance to the idea that video messaging would work out. Because a lot of people tried it early on in the noughts and in the early 2010s, and it always felt very awkward and very weird and unrealistic that it’ll take over.

And I think one of the things that we, when you think about the evolution of UX trends, one thing to remember is how in the end of the day, it’s about the users and the user population changes over time. And so things, I’m nearly 40, when I grew up, it was very weird to even hear your own voice.

I remember making, not really podcasts, we’d like record sort of audio on tape recorders in friends houses. It was always embarrassing to hear yourself back. Definitely seeing yourself always on I don’t know, birthday kind of parents taking videos always seemed weird. But when I look at my daughter or my nieces and nephews, it’s second nature to them.

They’re on FaceTime with the grandparents from age zero. There’s a million more videos of them taken. And then they very soon adopted stuff like, Snapchat and so on. They’re very used to being on camera and seeing other people that are like them, that are not for us, the model of someone on video was a TV or a movie kind of star, and it’s very well produced.

And there’s a certain way you speak in a certain way you carry yourself, but seeing all the, YouTube or TikTok videos. And I think that enabled Loom to sort of come to play in the workplace. And it’s suddenly very natural for a whole host of people that are, close to my age and not too far from my age.

It was just on that verge where it’s just, and once it takes over, it on camera a lot and I got used to it and everything. So I think, that was a very interesting trend from the pandemic that I think was waiting for that trigger moment to become popular.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, I really see what you’re saying. It’s almost like Zoom and Google Meets and FaceTime really walked so that something like Loom could run and set this, that kind of prepared the user for that experience and get them comfortable with that kind of interaction. I think they’re really spot on with that.

So coming back to the idea of collaborative features and software, and I totally agree that Slack has really become a repository and single source of truth for a lot of organizations, even if you have another repository of company information. Why do you think it is that so many SaaS tools are dragging their feet to develop these more collaborative features?

Nimrod Priell: Well, it’s a good question where they’re dragging their feet. I do think it’s hard. I think there’s a lot of details to get it right, right? So if you think of exactly the kind of stuff we’re talking about, the user’s expectations are for a pretty rich experience.

If you’re by now used to WhatsApp and Slack and the best kind of communication software out there, it’s a pretty hard sell to use something that has the advantage of being in line in the product, but not being able to act mention anyone or not having it work in real time or not have it notify you on email or, if you can’t do markdown or emojis. There’s just this like rich plethora of features that are by now table stakes for what good communication is.

And I think you can’t really ship it without that and expect to see kind of success. And you can, we did a lot of analysis on this sort of showing kind of the Vitruvian man of messaging. What is a great, first class kind of messaging experience composed of? It’s composed of a lot of new ones that we don’t think of when we think of chat, anything from like scene indicators, right?

Knowing whether the person saw my message or not is one of these things, which again, reduces messaging as a metric, right? The like button. If I know you saw the message, I don’t have to ask you, did you see it or not? And it’s still very, despite lowering the metric, it is actually, fundamentally useful thing to know the presence, to know whether someone saw the message, to be able to react to it and so on, to get confidence in the fact was delivered.

So all of these little things take a lot of time to develop. I do think the ones that have developed it, benefit a lot. And Figma’s story is remarkable in that regard. They grew, it was a market where there were very kind of stable incumbents. Everyone, was using either InVision or Sketch or Adobe XD or a handful of other apps.

It was a $40 billion market. It’s not like a, you know, new kind of growing thing. And they had, I think at 2016 or something, 8% of that market. And they grew to 58% in just three years, just overtook all the other companies. And they mainly pin this on collaboration. And they show, they have an amazing blog describing kind of the journey and some of the things that happened and what happened is they started with agencies and it was actually the agencies that kind of kick started this process.

Because if you think of an agency, when they want feedback from their team, they can’t even go, to the person to see them and ask them and show them something on the screen. Their clients often don’t have, if they use Sketch or whatever, or Photoshop, their clients often don’t even have that software installed.

They can’t just go and send them the file. And they don’t even have Slack, right? They, with their clients, the agencies mostly talk over email and email is just, you can do a full podcast on just the disadvantages of email as a communication tool. And so, it that was the initial spread.

Now, agencies are super spreaders, right? If we’re talking about like the pandemic, because agencies have just loads of clients and so they would kind of invite clients to a web version where without a login, they can just see the file and leave comments in line and they’re in the right place. That was part of the growth.

Then they show how even within companies, essentially the fact that more people than just the designers knew how to use the software led to that kind of viral growth and the copying to other companies. Because if you had a small startup with one designer that used Sketch and that designer leaves and you hire a new designer and the new designer says, well, I know XD, there’s absolutely no real reason you wouldn’t move to XD and just switch over.

But if in that company, the PMs and the engineers and the discussions about the design have already all happened in Figma, you’ll go to the new designer and say, sorry, mate, you’re going to have to learn Figma. And that’s pretty much, that’s how it spread around.

Hannah Clark: So, with that being said, and I can understand and respect that these are features that take a long time to develop. Are there any cases that you can think of in which collaborative features don’t make sense for a product or shouldn’t be developed for a product?

Nimrod Priell: Yes, I think there are. I think the places where we found that these collaborative features don’t work, there’s some idiosyncratic cases and weird cases where actually, it’s B2B software, but there’s only a single user kind of by definition.

Or you even don’t want there to be communication. I’ve heard from one sort of person that I interviewed early on when we were doing user interviews to research the market for Cord, they work in a company, it’s like a real estate investment firm. And they build the SaaS for these kind of real estate investors and the real estate investors are competing with each other.

They aren’t meant to know that someone next to them, even in the same company, right, is looking at a specific property, let alone communicate about it. Because they’re actually all trying to like their model, their business model, their commission model is all based on competing with each other.

Sounds weird to me and that’s idiosyncratic. But what we’ve found that’s more generic is that if you look at the frequency of use as one kind of axis and the amount that the, how many people are using it as a company, you can find some software that is used fairly infrequently by fairly few people. And that’s probably just not a good sort of candidate for communication.

So all kinds of examples from like Carta, right? The sort of cap table management software. They’re an amazing, amazing product. I use it. I like it a lot. I think it does its job excellently, but you as the average user there, you go there once every three to six months to accept your new grant of equity and you will not need to communicate there.

I do think maybe in some small use case for people managing a whole lot of portfolios of Carta, maybe there’s a reason for them to use it and overall that wouldn’t be a great use case.

Hannah Clark: That makes sense. So all things being equal and assuming, the majority of products that are being used in these larger enterprise situations or by agencies or product teams or, all the many different situations where one could benefit from collaboration.

What criteria should product leaders for those products use to evaluate whether the product could benefit from either more collaborative features, better collaborative features, or just an overall of the collaborative features they already have?

Nimrod Priell: Yeah, I think it’s a good one. A framework here that helped me was a framework that I saw with Canva.

So Canva is another kind of design tool. And there’s a reason a lot of design tools end up kind of focusing on collaboration, which we’ll talk about a little bit as one of the criterias. But what Canva did in one of their decks is they elucidated really clearly and really nicely what are the jobs in the entire process beyond their software that like the entire journey that a person that ends up using Canva goes through?

And so their target audience is an SMB, or at least it wasn’t an SMB. So someone may be having like an ice cream parlor, right? And they want to print a poster for their ice cream parlor. And so their job goes from Oh, I want to design it. I need to find a designer. I need to like work with that design.

I need to give them a quote, figure out how much I can pay or whatever. I need to then receive and send him a brief and to receive, there’s like a lot of steps, most of which don’t even happen in Canva, right? Like the step that happens in Canva is like one design step out of it. But when they were talking about this, they were asking themselves, well, how do we grow? How do we grow the functionality of the software to more of the jobs that are around the kind of core use case for us?

Because presumably if, and when we do grow our, the value of our offering, we make it simpler for the user instead of going through all of these 25 steps. They don’t even know, don’t even have time. They’re busy running their ice cream parlor. They don’t even have time to figure out. We can bring them all in and have a one stop shop. And first part of this was a lot of the back and forth.

A lot of the back and forth between the designer and the kind of person finally approving that project. So I think one criteria or one good practice in general for PMs and this is like really cliched, but I think putting into practice is one of the hardest things as a PM and we all know it and we all sacrifice a lot of the, we have to juggle around a lot of responsibilities and find a time to do it, but speaking to your users and when you speak to them, not focusing on your app, focusing on their higher kind of life cycle around it.

So this way, when we started talking with a company that’s now, it’s a product that’s a part of bill.com that has collaboration in it in Cord. A lot of it wasn’t about, the job of kind of the finance analyst, analyzing and running models in this software. It was actually about the fact that investors wanted access to the company’s dashboard to ask questions and whatever.

And for the sort of CEO or the financial analyst to send out these screenshots of charts was annoying, and it didn’t, it wasn’t as powerful and so on. So these jobs around what you think the core of the product is, are often an opportunity. And if you want to grow there, if you’re ready to grow there, if you’ve really got the opportunity that the core of the product kind of working, then this is a great way to expand seats, expand users expose.

There’s still more people and as a result, retention and grow engagement and so on. So I think that’s one criteria. The other is what we’ve found is there’s often again, these four things that people need. They need help, approval, feedback, or to pass on the baton to the next person in line. And when you look at, okay, so who needs these things? I think there’s a few categories, but one of the prominent ones is there’s a creator. There’s someone who owns a document and just like in Google doc, and this is why again, design tools, there’s often a person who is very capable and knows how to create something very complex in that specific tool.

It might be an analysis in like a BI tool or a product analytics tool, some kind of query and chart might be a design. It might be a deck in a kind of, we have a few tools that are for designing kind of sales pitches and sales decks and so on. And now they need to present it, right? They need the next person to give feedback on it.

And that’s a point at which collaboration is very natural. So I’d use that criteria as well.

Hannah Clark: This is so fascinating. I feel like we could go on for hours. But given that we have a little bit of limited time, I think we should end it off with putting on our futurist hats a little bit. And, whether you’re right or wrong, it’ll be interesting to look back a year from now and see, how did your predictions stack up.

But what do you feel is the next big trend or maybe trends in user collaboration?

Nimrod Priell: Fascinating question. Yeah. I’d love to do that experiment though. Yeah. I, I’m historically looking at my batting average. I wouldn’t bet on my forecast. But I think, if I look back at this trend and we talked about, videos, we mentioned the kind of emojis taking over.

I think there was this kind of way to frame this that’s consumerization of enterprise. So what we could count on is, or the past has shown that we can count on is that trends that are very strong in B2C will end up penetrating work, even though they originally look very unprofessional or like wasteful or time wasting or not relevant for work or that kind of stuff.

And I think that’s true. And I think we can expect some of the stuff that’s strongest in kind of gaming circles or in some of the new apps that we see for consumers to eventually penetrate the workplace. What is it exactly? Very tempting for me, I can’t predict a specific kind of UX pattern.

It’s very tempting for me to say AR and VR. I think it feels super awkward today at work. It feels like all the attempts are just, not really cutting it, not really there yet, not really penetrating it. Give it 10 years. Slack was started off the back of 15 years or so of trying to replace email with something better for workplaces, a lot of different kind of chat apps.

It became a kind of a meme almost amongst VCs every entrepreneur, just like the first failed attempt is trying to replace email with something else. It was so cliched. And eventually, they got the right concoction of things together with the right timing, right, and the right distribution.

And so I think, ARVR will be having this podcast in 10 years, maybe, and, kind of virtual room.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, and we’ll hopefully have a whole body figured out by that point.

Nimrod Priell: That’ll be great. Yeah.

Hannah Clark: They’ve been the current Metaverse. I’m really curious to see if that pans out and who knows I feel like I’m there with most users where AR and VR does not feel natural to me, but I thought that before Ikea rolled out their AR house staging tool and now I’m a bit of a convert. So we’ll see how it goes.

Nimrod, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. So if folks are curious about more of your insights or want to follow your work, where can they find you?

Nimrod Priell: Well, I do have outside of Cord and talking about collaboration and stuff, I do have a new Substack that’s called the Product-Obsessed.

I’ll put up the link. It’s eduguess.substack.com. And I basically write about these kinds of stories about a lot of deep dives into products and their UX and UX patterns and how to do badging right, or how to do notifications right, or what are we seeing coming from all the experiments now in the UX for how users and bots, AI chat bots, communicate with each other?

How does that differ from regular chat between two users and so on? And just really digging into that. So if you’re interested in all that kind of product nerdish stuff, then you’re welcome to follow there.

Hannah Clark: I think that this is definitely the audience to be interested in nerding out with you. So thank you so much for your time and we really appreciate you coming on the show.

Nimrod Priell: All right. Thanks for having me.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The CPO Club, wherever you get your podcasts.