Ensuring coordination with respect to 3rd party icons such as from Facebook / Youtube .. (contd)

I wrote a post about this topic in a previous post (using icons from external services such as Facebook or Twitter). One of the unsaid conclusions from the previous post was that it is essential that such planning be done well in advance, so that one does not run into issues near the end of the schedule - tracking of such items where multiple parties are involved can be time consuming and frustrating when getting into the ending stage of a schedule. So what are some of the points to keep involved when dealing with using icons from 3rd party services such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter:
- If you have used the icons in a previous version of the software, ensure that when you get into a new version of the software, you verify about whether there is a requirement to update the icon. If not, then it would be easiest to just ensure that you continue with the old icon.
- When you are doing some re-design on your end, and need to get a different icon, many of these have multiple icons available with different sizes also available for use. However, if none of these icons really fit into the UI of your application, things can get tricky. The terms and conditions of most of these services do not allow you to use an icon other than the ones that they have supplied, so modify your UI accordingly.
- If there are multiple products within the organization that use these services, then it would make sense to ensure that these products collaborate with each other to understand their use of these services. We had a classic case where one team had a relationship with the product manager of one of these services (through one of the team-members, and this contact helped in refining the use of some icons).
- Make sure that the legal team is well conversant with the usage of these icons (and also overall with the incorporation of connectivity with these services). Even though these services seem present everywhere, they do come with their terms and conditions, which need to be met by the products that are interacting with these services.
- Most of these services have an active development community. It is important to ensure that atleast one of the development team members is on this community since these communities are the first places to be notified when there are any change in policies of the external service provider. This is pretty important. We were connecting with one of these services, and then it turned out that there was a notification about a change in the API that was being used, and we did not know about this; when did we get to know ? When our connectivity to the service was lost.

Ensuring coordination with respect to 3rd party icons such as from Facebook / Youtube ..

The process of software product development is a complex one, with a number of different items to manage. In addition to the many internal complexities that need to be managed (requirements / development and testing schedules, etc), there are a whole load of external dependencies that need to be managed, and the amount of complications involved in these external dependencies are greater than than those of the internal kind. One of the complications that need to be handled has increased with the usage of more and more 3rd party services. With the increasing use of social networks by people all over the world, they being Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google+, and numerous other social and sharing sites, life is more complicated now.
One cannot build applications without the connection with such sharing sites, but the actual logistics of getting this done can be complex. One of these areas revolve around all the icons and others used in the application. Now, for the most part, most applications with a large number of user interfaces use their own customs icons and graphics, these having been made to seem to fit with the application (in terms of the image that the application seeks to present, the customer profile that it tries to fit, as well as the functionality that is being done in the application - an application that is dealing with money or finances would have more icons that have some sort of representation of money or cash, while applications dealing with images would show more of cameras or images, etc). Another use of these custom icons is that they present the same set even if the application is installed on Windows or on the Mac (while the application system icons on these different OS's are very different).
However, when interfacing with these 3rd party icons, there needs to be careful coordination with the team that is developing the custom icons. As part of the public API's available for most of these networks, they also have a list of icons that client applications need to use, and in some cases, the icon may drastically vary from the icons used in the application. It is typically not possible to get variations in the icons provided by these 3rd party services, although some of them will provide multiple icon sets at different sizes to ensure that one of them is suitable, but that may not be the case. Further, the team designing the custom icons may not be aware that there is a legal requirement to use only the service icons, and they should be kept informed so that they do not try to develop customs icons for these networks when only the service provided icons can be used.
In addition, if the icons provided by the services are striking on their own and different from those in the application, it would help if the designer team already knows this in advance, and hence can ensure that the icon set that they are designing for the application is made in a way that the service provided icons fit with the service. But, from time to time, these 3rd party services also go in for a rebranding, and require all clients using their services to also change the icons that they are using, which means that somebody needs to keep track of communication from the external services regarding their branding and icons.

Checking for updates on social networking sites, and deciding whether to go ahead with them or not ..

Around 15 years back, the ease of getting user feedback on a software product was not easy, even for the large ones such as MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, or Photoshop. The principle way of getting this feedback was through the tech support route where users would call up tech support or deal with the support through email, primarily to provide some sort of complaint in a feature or look for some sort of health. Through this process, the support team could also get some sort of feedback on the product and the performance of the product with respect to the needs of the users. As for forums such as social networking, there was hardly anything that was available.
However, if you look at the current day situation, the forums where users can report problems (or more rarely, come out in praise of a product) are widespread. There are user forums, there are Facebook pages, there are email discussion groups, there are Twitter accounts that are used by users for reporting their feedback. When you consider a large product such as the ones in the first paragraph, the number of such forums and comments within them can be awfully large. Even for a team that puts in dedicated attention to looking, consolidating such feedback and respond to feedback that may not be so positive, it can be hard to catch up and respond to such feedback.
And therein lies the danger. When there is feedback and yet no reaction from somebody from the product team, it can seem odd, and lead to complaints that the organization and the product team do not care about user feedback, and so on, leading to something that is negative in terms of perception. Does this mean that you should put in a lot of effort on monitoring and responding to such kind of feedback ? Well, it sounds good, but monitoring and responding to feedback across different social networking forum can be pretty difficult and time consuming, and you might not have enough resources dedicated for this work (and resources with some amount of expertise in such new generation forums can be expensive, since it is not just monitoring, but actually feeding them into a system that lets the team figure out responses and strategies).
The idea situation would be where you have a broad user base that takes on most of the work of responding to such feedback. If you take Photoshop, complaints and criticism from users are many times responded to by other users, which also has a high ring of authenticity to the responses, and shows the commitment of members of the user base. In that sense, a committed user base is worth a large amount of effort and money.
However, there does need to be effort put in for building up such a committed user base. The team needs to be prompt in responding to issues that are gathering track (it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to respond to each and every issue) and show some quick responses. The team also needs to make the users feel that the product and support teams are responsible and geared towards the needs and concerns of the users (this may seem subjective, but it is necessary for this kind of feeling to be generated, as projecting such a feeling through actions inspires confidence in the team from the user community and every satisfied user can then become another committed member of the user community).
Other actions would be for the product to have its own specific Facebook page and Twitter account, maintained by somebody who has an appetite for the kind of enthusiasm and social skills that are required for social networking (if there are no tweets for many days or no Facebook updates, it tends to put off users and also seems to show the product and organization in a poor light). Further, members of the product team who are more well know can also have their own social profiles and send out updates of their own, and these also help.