We are constantly changing our software, and we sometimes don't do enough to make everyone happy about that. When this happens, we say we failed like how Facebook used to fail at rolling out changes. Fortunately, Facebook improved how to roll out changes, and later this week will be IPOing for about $100 billion.

Big Changes

First, we are unapologetic for change. We maintain an extremely rapid software development cycle, and if anything, I want to increase that. Companies that don't follow this model will quickly become obsolete and go out of business, leaving their customers stranded.

Most of our contracts are three years long, so let's compare the website landscape between when someone signed a contract in May 2009 with the landscape as of May 2012:

What I'm talking about is not the small changes — the new report or the additional column or a new small feature.  What I'm talking is when we make massive changes to the look and feel.

Challenge

The key challenge is how to roll out changes.  This is a challenge that Facebook has had to deal with, and its mistakes led to articles in the New York Times and antagonistic fan pages on Facebook that had millions of supporters.

Adam Moserri, the Facebook product manager responsible for the failed Facebook redesign in 2010, described how he came to understand why he got so much hate mail:

"I had trouble understanding the magnitude of the reaction. To wrap my head around it, I thought, if I spent 45 minutes organizing my desk every day, organizing my photos, messaging my friends, coming up to speed with what I thought was important, I'd probably feel a pretty significant sense of ownership over that space. And, if someone just rearranged that desk, it would be startling; it would be frustrating."

You can watch the full video of his talk about this at the end of the post.

We're changing how we change

We're looking at three things that Facebook did when it approached big changes:

1. Gradual changes - rather than make the site look one way one day and totally different the next, change is easier when it's gradual. Facebook regularly is rearranging their top navigation, but they rarely move more than one thing at once. This minimizes the confusion and pain users feel. This is how we've approached most changes, but it doesn't always fit.
2. Preview the change - when you hit a new change, Facebook now starts by showing pop-up windows that walk you through the new interface. This way you can get a simple introduction to the new look and feel, rather than stare frustrated and angry for 15 seconds before you start clicking randomly. We had been trying this with direct emails to users, blog posts and other social media, but none of those were substitutes for having something there for that first impression when a user actually hits a change for the first time. We're working this summer on how to do this for major new features.
3. Let user time the change - for the biggest changes, Facebook began letting you decide when you wanted to have this change occur. You could preview it but then decide that you weren't ready for the change today. Simply giving you the control goes a long way towards making you feel like this is still your desk. We'll consider this if we ever make huge changes, like a big change to the Browse page or a big change to the event editor.

We'll continue to improve within these three areas so that you feel more comfortable with the changes and everyone can be as excited as we are about the pace of change.

Related media

Here's that full video of the Facebook product manager talking about how he learned to manage change: