Mobile-first experiences are disrupting incumbents as companies like eBay, ESPN, and Uber have built mobile-first designs and seen significant growth and revenue from their mobile apps and experiences. Social experiences are also moving towards being mobile-first as apps like Fancy focus on personalized recommendations and inherently social sharing features. There is a trend towards social becoming a platform strategy on mobile where the core experiences like the inbox, camera, maps and payments are being rethought and aggregated to be social and connected by default across a user's devices and interactions. This represents a re-imagination of nearly everything as new behaviors emerge and new types of apps, technologies and interactions are built for the next billion mobile users.

1. Becoming Social By Default

2. Part 1:
A Mobile-First Mindset

3. DESIGN + BUILD MOBILE-FIRST
The market is going to be mobile-first.
Where do you want to be?
Don’t use your existing web services as a
starting point. It is easy to make this mistake.
Start from scratch. Do it as a cohesive team
and a cohesive experience.
Compromises are focused around mobile,
instead of ‘legacy’.

4. DESIGNING IN MEANS DESIGNING OUT
Design decisions are drastic on mobile.
Every decision matters.
Less is always more:
Mobile: less features, more focus, less data, faster, etc.
“Last night, a typeface saved my life”
Every decision matters: MIT AgeLab research shows
that better typefaces can reduce car crashes

5. Design decisions impact trust on mobile
Once you share something inappropriate,
you can lose trust
Personalization, when you share (you also expose),
your actions have explicit and implicit consequences
Every action can amplify or nullify
Your hypotheses are probably wrong. Measure.
DESIGNING IN MEANS DESIGNING OUT

6. LATENCY KILLS
10 / 100 / 1000 ms – map out your interactions to these
buckets and make sure they align with the UI/UX
To win: mobile-friendly design, great engineering, and magic.
[translation: focuses your user, help them quickly, and hide
this complexity]
Do things at the right time. Measure. Don’t miss.
Responsive! = Fast

7. EMBRACE BEAUTY
Aesthetics matter
Polish is expected
Design for the next billion users.
Don’t use a floppy disk icon.
Caring about design should be everyone’s job
This is even more important for social apps because
you are building a trust relationship

8. EMBRACE TOUCH
Sometimes, this is what people mean when
they say mobile-first:
- Touch-friendly targets
- Not too much functionality on small screens
- Paradigms that are touch-friendly (but gestures are not
discoverable if designed poorly)
This should make you redesign your interactions from scratch
(important to not reply too much on past for social apps)

9. BUILD AROUND A-HA!
Know what your product value actually is
Know what actually makes your users happy
Once you know this, then you can focus your design,
testing, engineering to make this better
Remember that a user will only use your app briefly.
This is how you get this to come back.

10. CACHE IS KING
Web Stack: Building for scale still applies,
but focus is now on latency and building
MVC + Network Requests stack
Syncing device to servers
Offline scenarios
Graceful connectivity

11. “All things entail rising and
falling timing. You must be able
to discern this.”
Miyamoto Musashi
Have perfect timing

12. HAVE PERFECT TIMING
Reach out to your users: Passbook, etc.
Social really helps with this.
Do things at the right time
(this helps hide loading times)
Little things that connect users are way more
important on mobile
Slice at the right time to kill it.

13. SHOULD YOU BUILD A MOBILE TEAM?
Get to YES / NO ASAP
Build initial product + kickstart operations around process,
project execution, training and hiring
Adopt process that helps you ramp up fast - Pair
programming, Agile, etc.
Do you want to build a team that knows native? Then you
need iOS and Android leads.
Go with your strengths. If you’re much faster at web, build
a dev team with mobile web stack knowledge.

14. WHAT YOU SHOULD LOOK FOR
Generalist + Design-Minded: you need people who do not see
UI and polish as dirty work
Young/Fast-Learner: you need people who learn new platforms
and stack quickly without set ways
Strong SE Fundamentals: helps pick up and learn platforms
quickly and establish good practices
Pair Programming-Friendly: you need people who can
communicate if you’re creating a team that can onboard consistently
Previous Experience (Optional): background in application/
mobile app development is helpful

15. KNOW YOUR USERS
Build a great agile engineering process…
Crash reporting: Bugsense, Crashlytics, Crittercism, etc.
Minimal: email your logs and catch your crashes
Analytics: Flurry, GA (for web), Kontagent (games), need
data before you can test. Lots of tools.
Review/Feedback loop (lets users rate your app when
happy, send you feedback when sad)
A/B Testing: Pre-launch in smaller markets – may be
very time-consuming to build A/B

16. Now we’re in a mobile-first
state of mind

17. Part 2:
Hard Lessons Learned the Easy Way

18. WHAT HAPPENED?
People use their phones to share a lot more
iPhone era: Silos created by apps. Existing models.
500+ MM Mobile FB users, OS integration with FB /
Twitter / G+, etc.
People are using their phones to communicate and share
stories: trillions of SMS messages sent annually

19. What we talk about in
general when it comes to
social networking
integration

20. AUTHENTICATION (KNOW THE REAL YOU)
Tying authentication to social
networking can make it easier to sign
up for your service
Single Sign-On
Easier to get user’s information and
profile filled out
When connected to their social
networks, you have users with
authenticity
Can think about new use cases like
social-proofing

21. DISCOVERY AND DISTRIBUTION
Growth and user acquisition is often the main reason to
have social network integration
But don’t do this as a starting point!
Apps that are social by design will have this user
acquisition loop built in!
Goal is to be aware so that you can optimize
Best: You actions are related to personalization and
doing things with friends
Worst: Getting friends to participate out-of-app / Just
inviting friend to try the app

22. DISCOVERY AND DISTRIBUTION

23. PERSONALIZATION
Making things social by default means making it theirs
Personalized content is about increasing relevancy
Think about music: the interests of a user and the
interests of the friends of users can make Rdio or Spotify
a more satisfying experience
Recommendations based on past context

24. USING SOCIAL NETWORKING DATA
Not just about getting users, about getting useful
Using Foursquare or FB places for a location-based app
Uniting people with common interests, location and other
connections
Provide context: these signals can make you do this better
Beware of public sharing vs. private sharing (think open graph)
- Designing in and out – let’s revisit frictionless

25. We are getting better SDKs
now that native is a focus

26. SOCIAL BY DESIGN =
SOCIAL BY DEFAULT

27. Rdio – MAKING MUSIC SOCIAL

28. Rdio – MAKING MUSIC SOCIAL
Personalization is a perfect fit
for music
Thinking mobile-first is a
must: streaming / offline
syncing / consistent
experience across devices

29. Instagram – MOBILE-FIRST
Sharing and story telling
Focused on experience
Makes you want to share more

30. Oversharing leads to
no sharing

31. Draw Something – GROWTH
Growth was great
A-ha moment was great…(fun
to send silly photos to friends)
Still fun? (sometimes)
Too many ‘friends’

32. “Absolute silence leads to
sadness. It is the image of
death.”
-Rousseau
So make sure you get it right!

33. Revisiting Designing In
and Designing Out
(for our private parts)

34. Then you can start to
make it better

35. Path – INTIMATE SOCIAL NETWORKING

36. SimplyUs
Shared Calendar
Pair
Communication App for Couples

37. Part 3:
Trends of the Near Future

38. Mobile-First Experiences
are Disrupting Incumbents

39. eBay MOBILE
Billions in revenue annually
100M+ downloads,
100M+ items listed
eBay app launched in 2008

40. ESPN
Mobile streaming rights to all
their major sport partners
Users over minute over 100K
(increase of over 48% this year)
70% of sport content consumed
on mobile devices are on one of
ESPN’s mobile apps

41. UBER
Mobile-first UI: You see a map,
hail a car, it comes, driver calls
your phone
Removes paying at the end from
the experience

42. Social-First Experiences
are also being moving to
towards mobile

43. FANCY
Show off things you like and maybe
even buy them
- Over $50K weekly sales
Social by Default
- Personalized tastes and
recommendations
- Fancying something is
inherently social
- Connects to social networks
Recently launched suite of apps

44. Where becoming social by
default on mobile happens

45. Social as a Platform
Strategy on Mobile

46. RETHINKING THE INBOX

47. PEOPLE-CENTRIC DESIGN

48. EVERYTHING YOU DO
IN ONE PLACE

49. OUR RETHINKING OF THE INBOX

50. CARAMEL – SOCIAL INBOX
Everything is connected to your inbox

51. iOS - PASSBOOK

52. Android Jelly Bean (4.1) Google Now

53. BlackBerry 10 – Blackberry Hub and Peek

54. Facebook Messenger - Android

55. RETHINKING THE
CAMERA

56. JUST ONE PRESS

57. WHAT IF IT WAS AUTOMATIC?
What if there was no more storage?

59. This will happen with every
core experience on mobile.
And it will be aggregated.

60. You will have to think about how
to build at the platform level.
This is where we are headed.

61. SOCIAL AS A PLATFORM STRATEGY ON ANDROID

62. LAUNCHER + SOCIAL INBOX

63. CAMERA

64. MAPS

65. PAYMENTS

66. MAKING ANDROID YOUR OWN: XIAOMI / MIUI

67. MAKING ANDROID YOUR OWN: KINDLE FIRE

68. MAKING ANDROID YOUR OWN: BAIDU YI

69. MAKING ANDROID YOUR OWN: SHARP FEEL UX

70. NOT JUST PHONES AND TABLETS AND PHABLETS…

71. “Re-imagination of nearly everything”
Mary Meeker

72. NEW BEHAVIOR
= NEW APPS, NEW TECH, NEW INTERACTIONS

73. What does social by default look
like for the next billion users?