Stripe’s grown a bunch over the last few years. While most things change at scale—you can’t, say, have every API call sent to your inbox anymore—there are some particular values we’ve worked hard to keep. Learning from our users is at the forefront of those values.
In this talk, I’ll dive into some things we’ve tried early on and recently to keep our users’ needs in mind. At the core of all this is the premise that our users’ happiness is everyone’s job at Stripe. Our support team helps make that possible so we all stay in touch with what’ll benefit our users as we grow.
Hope you enjoy the talk – I’d love to hear from you either way! I’m @sch or michael@stripe.com.
When I first started learning to code I’d hang out in the PHP freenode room, look out for questions I didn’t know the answer to, then try to figure out how to answer them. People who knew way more than me were already generously helping people, so I turned it into a sort of personal game—could I get the answer before anyone else? But it was a low stakes game: even when I ‘lost’, I still won, 'cause I’d get to learn the answer anyway.
I’ve had the opportunity over the years to keep doing this, and the fringe benefits are plentiful. Back in that PHP room, I got my first paid programming gig just because I was helping so much1. Hanging out in the Stripe Campfire room many years later, I learned ColdFusion on-the-fly to help get someone’s site up and running2. And now internally at Stripe, where I like to spend my downtime paging through Slack rooms and looking for questions, answering questions helps me meet people I otherwise wouldn’t work with much, and get a glimpse into how they work.
All told, I usually learn at least as much as the person whose question I’m answering. Every question teaches me how to become a better researcher, shows me the different types of questions I could be asking, and lets me to take on a wider variety of projects than I’d otherwise know how.
Next time you find yourself with some downtime, consider giving hobbyist helping a whirl! (I’ve found it to be an especially good substitute for triaging my inbox a third time :-) And if you want to chat more about any of this, I’d love to hear from you! Drop me a line @sch or m@mschade.me.
Incidentally, and at the time very embarrassingly, the client figured out a couple weeks in that I was 13—turns out it was pretty obvious over the phone 😳 But hey, they still paid me! I owe them a ton for giving me the confidence to pursue engineering as a career. ↩
Aaand am now listed in our internal dev support documents as a ColdFusion expert >.< ↩
How tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time
that your youth will last–such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither,
but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now.
In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the
green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back
our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our
limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the
memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite
temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.
I recently ended up on a two week vacation, took some photos, and was excited to share them. I went straight to Facebook since all my friends are there – turns out, Facebook isn’t so great for photographers!
We all know it’s fine for people just posting snapshots, but as someone who spends a bunch of time practicing photography, Facebook makes it hard to build a body of work. Flickr solved this problem a decade ago, yet people like my friends aren’t checking Flickr these days. If you’re not actively into photography itself, you probably aren’t either.
I tried a compromise—organizing all my photos on Flickr and sharing them to Facebook—but that’s no good either. The best option involves posting links to Flickr one-by-one on Facebook, which divides conversation and loses all the viewing and sharing UI—and engagement—Facebook has honed in on. Similar services don’t seem to address these problems yet either.
It seems having the best audience doesn’t mean having the best tools. But I think Facebook could get there:
Let users pick the highlights. Facebook picks the 5 photos they highlight in your timeline for you, and those may not be the best of the album. Flickr used to send a daily digest email showing off the first 5 photos you uploaded that day; photographers would usually upload their best 5 first to take advantage of that. First impressions matter.
Offer influence over thumbnail cropping. Photographers seldom put the most important part of the photo in the center, yet Facebook auto crops to the center. It’s probably not feasible to give photographers complete control as Facebook has a multitude of devices to support and regularly experiments with their interfaces, but influence over preferred cropping would go a long way.
Sort albums in bulk. The best view for an album is often to have the most recent photos at the top, so folks visiting your album can find your latest work. Photos added to a Facebook album are placed at the bottom. To fix that, you have to drag each photo one-by-one from the bottom of the album to the top. The longer the album gets, the harder it is to sort.
In contrast, Flickr has bulk photo editing. One click and the whole album is sorted however you specify. And as you upload more photos, they stay sorted.
Make public albums truly public. Unless I’m simply inept at navigating Facebook privacy controls, my album is set to public, yet this only means public among Facebook users. From a photographer’s perspective, getting someone to click through to your work is a huge win, so it’s crazy to turn them away. For whatever reason someone isn’t logged into Facebook, it’s critical they can still see a photographer’s album.
Don’t bury comments under infinite scrolling. Even in an album with just 100 photos, finding the comments is a pain. As you scroll you’ll see a glimpse of the comments before infinite scrolling kicks in, adds more photos, and pushes the comments out of view. Making it easy for viewers to add and read top-level comments is important when portraying a body of work.
Help photographers embed their album or photo stream elsewhere. Many photographers have blogs or appear on other sites. The best options available right now are to embed photos one-by-one or to use clunky, limited third-party services. Having a more content-rich embed option would make life significantly simpler on photographers and feed engagement back into Facebook. Surprisingly, none of Facebook, Flickr, 500px, or other photo services seem to have solved this.
Even just making a few of these changes would give photographers reason to take Facebook as a medium seriously. And if Facebook can get this right, things like Graph Search—which offers an unprecedented way to find content through your network—would be killer for professional photography discovery. Add advertising and commerce to the mix, and you have a real platform for photography businesses.
