Celebrate your Rock Stars

Posted by Jay Goldman, Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

35120 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/12/02/celebrate-your-rock-stars/Celebrate+your+Rock+Stars2009-12-02+19%3A21%3A53Jay+Goldman

Every business has a few rock stars on staff, whether they’re your craftiest coder, most accurate accountant, or best baker. We all know performance reviews don’t really deliver performance, so how do you find ways to inspire them? Hint: it’s not an Employee of the Month plaque on the wall.

If you’re Intel, you make them into rock stars.

How can the rest of us promote our best without access to million dollar ad budgets? Here’s a few tips:

• Outsource to the Pros: I Love Rewards, a fellow Toronto-based startup, is all about rewarding your people. Their web-based app is all about employee and sales incentives. Check out their video demo for more information.
• Be an equal opportunity rewarder: make sure that everyone on your team is eligible to be recognized and that you’re not singling people out before you’ve even started. Also make sure that everyone who meets your criteria gets the prize, not just the first person across the line. Competition is good, but being fair will earn you more loyalty in the long run.
• Be timely: this applies to recognition as well as it does to feedback. We’re big fans of giving people feedback as close to the event as possible, and recognition works the same way. Keep a bunch of $20 movie theater gift certificates on hand and pass them out whenever someone does something over and above the call.
• Be appropriately public: most people like to have a chunk of the limelight from time to time, but really don’t like being awkwardly thrust into it. Be sensitive to people’s personalities when you’re choosing how to reward them; some people love standing up in front of their colleagues and accepting a reward, shy-er folks would rather be mentioned in an employee newsletter, and the wallflowers in your crowd shrink away from the very idea that anyone knows who they are. Make sure that people who want peer recognition get it, but don’t force it on everyone.

Tags: employee of the month, equal opportunity, i love rewards, intel, rock stars, timely

Tie Tuesdays, Pt. II

Posted by Jay Goldman, Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

35380 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/12/02/tie-tuesdays-pt-ii/Tie+Tuesdays%2C+Pt.+II2009-12-02+17%3A06%3A11Jay+Goldman

We’ve instituted a new Tie Tuesdays policy here at Rypple HQ, which is slowly catching on with the team. Tie Tuesday Pt. I had a few of us wearing them, this time around we hit six tie-bearing-Rypplers!

The naysayers say “photo or it didn’t happen”. I say:

L to R: Wes, yours truly, Iurie, James T, Jordan, Alex

Observant readers might note that Iurie appears to have no tie on, but I can swear to his full but camouflaged skinny-euro-tie participation. You might also note that Jordan’s tie is a tad too short. That’s nothing! You should have seen his first attempt:

Optimizing for Introverts

Posted by Jay Goldman, Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

35100 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/12/01/optimizing-for-introverts/Optimizing+for+Introverts2009-12-01+15%3A12%3A06Jay+Goldman

I did a Myers Briggs personality test a long time ago, though I can’t remember the final outcome. I can say with some certainty that I was more at home on the Extrovert side of the Attitudes dichotomy than on the Introvert side.

Turns out that Es like me have it easy. Penelope Trunk has a great post up today about Leverage the advantages of being an introvert at work that references Laurie Helgoe’s book Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life is Your Hidden Strength. Unfortunately for all the Is out there, who apparently make up 57% of the workforce, the workplace is heavily optimized for extroverts like me. (Not sure what you are? Penelope provides a link to a great little Am I an Introvert? quiz).

Penelope has five great tips for optimizing your workplace for introverts. My favorite:

5. Take control of your work.
One of the most popular professions for introverts is being a writer. What this means is that there is a lot of information written about what work is well-suited for an introvert. Here is a list of ways to make an office that will help introverts excel.

There’s almost nothing as important as doing what you love and are well suited to. Life is too short to spend hating every day. Find your sweet spot and, as Gary Vaynerchuk would say, CRUSH IT!

The Benefits of Pissing People Off

Posted by Jay Goldman, Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

35070 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/11/30/the-benefits-of-pissing-people-off/The+Benefits+of+Pissing+People+Off2009-11-30+21%3A36%3A35Jay+Goldman

Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Workweek, has a great post up today about The Benefits of Pissing People Off. I had the privilege of having dinner with Tim a few years ago in San Francisco (along with my good friend Jason DeFillippo), and learned a huge amount about the nutritional supplement industry. I particularly liked the quote he included from Colin Powell:

Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity: you’ll avoid the tough decisions, you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you’ll avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset.

This applies as much to managing people as it does to baseball agents and four star generals. Even the smallest teams face tough decisions and you need to be able to face them, make a call, and deal with the consequences.

Gazing through my Johari Window

Posted by Jay Goldman, Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

27520 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/10/22/gazing-through-my-johari-window/Gazing+through+my+Johari+Window2009-10-22+18%3A37%3A47Jay+Goldman

This is part two in the Johari Windows posts, covering the results of the experiment. You should start with Check Your Blind Spot: Rypple and the Johari Window to get the context for this second half.

So! You’re probably wondering how it all went down. Well let me tell you! It’s no easy task whittling down a list of 56 adjectives into a shopping list of self-selected descriptors. My six advisers selected a total set of 19 adjectives, which I’ve listed as a tag cloud to show their relative weights:

Able, Adaptable, Calm, Cheerful, Clever, Confident, Energetic, Extroverted, Friendly, Happy, Helpful, Idealistic, Intelligent, Kind, Knowledgeable, Relaxed, Responsive, Self-Assertive, Witty

I picked six adjectives to describe myself: bold, caring, clever, friendly, happy, witty.

Here are the full set of results plotted into the Johari quadrants:

Johari Window Results

Here’s what I learned:

• The Johari list is almost entirely ‘positive’ words. Sometimes positivity is in the eye of the beholder. Is being complex a good thing? My meaning of it might be entirely different from yours. The few generally negative terms are nervous, self-conscious, and tense, though I’d argue that you could probably include introverted and idealistic. Also worth noting: this makes it impossible to write this post without sounding insufferably conceited. (I only used to be insufferably conceited – now I’m perfect. Ha!).
• A number of the terms are very closely related. It can be hard to decide between things like friendly and extroverted or cheerful and happy. They aren’t exactly the same but there really isn’t space for both of them in a short list of six terms. More on this below.
• Our team rocks the response rate. I sent the request for feedback to all 16 of my fellow Rypplers and I got 10 responses, which is a 63% rate. Four of my advisers took advantage of the “Nothing to add” link, giving me real responses from six of my colleagues. That’s really impressive considering that the task required a fair bit of time to complete.
• Make sure your advisers know if you’re going to blog the results. Even though Rypple will never reveal their identity to you, it’s only fair that you disclose your intentions in advance so they know what they’re getting into.
• Kaizen: would be a stronger exercise if you included the Nohari list. The Nohari list is made up of negative antonyms of the original, positive terms, so including it would give a more balanced perspective.
• Kaizen: asking exclusively work colleagues gives a slanted perspective. Although we spend more time with them than anyone else, including only your teammates doesn’t excludes the more personal perspectives of friends and family.

Checking the Blind Spots

As stated in the previous post, this exercise was all about checking my blind spots. Here’s what I found:

• A few of the Blind Spots were actually on my short list but I had to choose between them and their almost-synonyms (e.g.: I picked friendly over extroverted). The near synonyms are valid blind spots by the letter of the Johari law but not really by the spirit of it.
• Only two of the Blind Spots are actually surprising to me: calm and kind. Although it’s definitely nice to be thought of as calm, I would describe myself as being more at the excitable end of the spectrum. And it’s not that I don’t think of myself as kind, but rather that I would never have thought it to be such a defining characteristic that it made my top six.
• You’ll also note that idealistic made it in there, leaving me wondering if it was meant in the good “stands up for his beliefs!” or bad “One whose conduct is influenced by ideals that often conflict with practical considerations” sense. Luckily, Rypple has an awesome Comment on Feedback feature that let me ask my anonymous adviser which sense they meant. He or she replied “In the positive (in most circumstances. But in some circumstances, a loosening of the “idealistic” standard would be helpful).” That’s the most useful thing I learned about myself and confirms something I sort of knew already: standing by your ideals is important but it’s more important to pick your battles wisely.

This was a really useful exercise for me and I highly recommend it. Well worth the roughly 30 minutes I’ve invested to date in asking the question and analyzing the results. Another win for Rypple!

Tags: able, adaptable, adjectives, bold, calm, caring, cheerful, clever, conceited, confident, customer outreach, decision support, energetic, extroverted, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, friendly, happy, helpful, idealistic, intelligent, johari window, kind, knowledgeable, negative, nohari, peer review, perfect, personal review, positive, professional development, quick polls, relaxed, response rate, responsive, Rypple, self-assertive, team review, witty

Check Your Blind Spot: Rypple and the Johari Window

Posted by Jay Goldman, Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

24420 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/09/29/johari-window-blind-spots/Check+Your+Blind+Spot%3A+Rypple+and+the+Johari+Window2009-09-29+18%3A20%3A36Jay+Goldman

This is part one in the Johari Windows posts. You should start here and then read the follow-up Gazing through my Johari Window for the results of the exercise.

Those of you who took any psychology courses in university probably remember needing to have someone wrench you from the depths of a self-induced  self-diagnosis abyss. I clearly remember paging through my Psych 101 textbook and becoming increasingly anxious with each turned page as I realized that I was suffering from an unbelievable combination of manic depression, multiple personality disorder, ADD, sociopathic tendencies, and a litany of other debilitating disorders. If you were looking for me by the end of the semester, you would have found me curled in the fetal position under my desk, crying and breathing shallowly into a paper bag.

Which brings us to the most important thing I learned in that class: self-diagnosis is useless. There’s a good reason your doctor rolls her eyes when you walk in with a sheaf of ‘medical’ information from the Internets, ranting and raving about how you’ve only got a few minutes to live. It’s the same reason that we all need feedback from our colleagues, clients, and mentors to properly understand our own performance. Marshall Goldsmith, renown executive coach, wrote an excellent book about the value of feedback called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Among many, many other excellent points, Marshall has this to say on the topic of self-diagnosis:

For one thing, I’m a little skeptical of self-diagnosis. Just as people tend to overestimate their strengths, they also tend to overrate their weaknesses. They think they’re really bad at something at which they’re only mediocre or slightly poor — an F when they’re really a C minus. In other words, they see cancer where a professional would see a muscle pull.

The book obviously has a lot to say about feedback, which is where it gets really interesting for us. Section three (How We Can Change for the Better) starts off with a description of Johari Windows:

Psychologists have all sorts of schemata to explain us to ourselves. One of the more interesting ones is a simple four-pane grid known as the Johari Window (named after two real characters, Joe and Harry). It divides our self-awareness into four parts, based on what is known and unknown about us to other people and what is known and unknown about us to ourselves.

Turns out that Johari Windows were created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham back in 1955 to help people better understand their interpersonal communication and relationships (more info). The window is divided into four panes — or rooms — as follows:

Johari Window

The actual exercise is conducted by giving the subject a list of 55 adjectives (e.g.: bold, dependable, ingenious — see the full list) and asking him or her to pick five that describe themselves. Their peers are then given the same list and asked to pick the same number of adjectives to describe the subject. The resulting set of words is then plotted onto the grid, with shared adjectives in Public, asker-only ones in Private, and peer-only ones in Blind Spots.

Blind Spots (the circled pane) is the most interesting one and the premise that Rypple is built on. The people around you — your colleagues and clients, your family and friends — know things about you that you don’t know and those things may be holding you back. Think about how powerful the knowledge in the Blind Spots box really is and about how much more successful it would make you to tap into it (not necessarily in the monetary sense). A small sample of the kinds of things you can learn:

• From your team: your real value as a team member or leader. The ways you could be a better contributor and your team could be more efficient and productive. The things you already do well and don’t realize make a difference.
• From your clients: real visibility into the status of your accounts. Honest assessments of your sales staff. Real understanding of competitors and opportunities.
• From friends, family, coworkers: the annoying habits you have and don’t know about. The ways in which you could be a better friend, spouse, or parent. The strengths you may not know you posses or ways in which you’re hard on yourself when other people aren’t.

Those are just a few examples to give a sense of the possibilities. I’m sure you have no trouble thinking of things you’d like to know!

The Great Rypple Johari Experiment

I was inspired by this new found knowledge and decided to conduct a little experiment. I’ve sent a Rypple to the whole team and asked them to visit the Wikipedia page and choose six adjectives that describe me, and I’m doing the same while I wait for their responses. I’ll plot out what comes back to build my grid and will report back on the results as soon as I have them.

Results are up! Check out the follow-up Gazing through my Johari Window for more Johari goodness.

Tags: arenas, blind spots, customer outreach, decision support, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, harry ingham, johari windows, josephy luft, marshall goldsmith, peer review, personal review, private knowledge, professional development, psychology 101, public knowledge, quick polls, rooms, Rypple, self-diagnosis, team review, unknowable, what got you here won't get you there

Business Week Gives Performance Reviews Low Grades

Posted by Jay Goldman, Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

12610 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/07/28/business-week-gives-performance-reviews-low-grades/Business+Week+Gives+Performance+Reviews+Low+Grades2009-07-28+17%3A25%3A17Jay+Goldman

You may have guessed that we’re not huge fans of the old school performance review process: there’s lots of value in doing reviews at the end of the year, but the 364 days in between leave people without anything to work from. It’s always nice when experts agree with you, so it was with great delight that we came across Jeffrey Pfeffer’s article Business Week: Low Grades for Performance Reviews. Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, so he knows a thing or two (hundred) about this stuff.

Professor Pfeffer presents a good list of reasons performance reviews don’t actually review:

• Managers who hired specific employees give them higher scores when reviewing them later
• Gender and race affect outcomes, with employees who share a manager’s socioeconomic background scoring higher
• Reviews tend to reflect employees’ ability to suck up to the boss for jobs that are harder to assess (R&D, management)
• They don’t provide useful or timely feedback that people can use to improve
• The focus on individuals masks bigger reasons companies may not be successful (e.g.: inferior technology)

So how do we fix this mess?

What should you do if you’re locked into performance appraisals for now? To reduce supervisor bias, make evaluation criteria more explicit and objective and involve more people in each review. Encourage managers to have frequent, ongoing conversations with their staff about performance… Annual reviews rely on hazy recall, with managers remembering recent events and overlooking what was done earlier in a review cycle.

Call me crazy, but that sounds a whole lot like using Rypple. Give it a try if you’re stuck in the mid-year performance review doldrums!

Tags: business week, customer outreach, decision support, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, graduate school of business, jeffrey pfeffer, low grades for performance reviews, peer review, personal review, professional development, quick polls, Rypple, stanford, team review

What’s Your 5 Runs?

Posted by Jay Goldman, Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

116710 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/07/22/whats-your-5-runs/What%27s+Your+5+Runs%3F2009-07-22+13%3A30%3A57Jay+Goldman

Nike+

I’ve been thinking a lot about user engagement lately, which might be why Nike+ Experiment article in last month’s Wired caught my attention. Although the article only briefly touches on the topic, there’s a lot that can be learned by studying very successful products. I’m going to head out on a brief tangent to take a look at three valuable lessons, then circle back at the end to look at how you can apply their Magic Number to your own applications.

For those not familiar, the Nike+ is a sensor you put in your shoe that pairs with compatible iPod/iPhones to display stats about your run or cardio, play motivational music, and upload stats to your NikePlus.com account for analysis. The article is part of Wired’s Living by Numbers feature, which covers technology’s pretty remarkable ability to provide tools for tracking every detail of your life and using that data for constant self-improvement (sound familiar? ). Nike would love for you to buy a pair of their Nike+ compatible shoes with a sensor pocket, but you can also use Nike+ with any shoe by duct taping the sensor to the top of your shoe or buying a special pocket that attaches to your laces.

There’s a lot of really interesting stuff in there about the Apple/Nike collaboration on the iPod/Nike+ sensor and where it came from, including:

• Nike is compiling rich data about more than 1.2 million people running on their sensors. They’ve collectively tracked more than 130 million miles and burned more than 13 billion calories. This real-time data about runners has never been gathered before and is shedding all kinds of insights into the habits of that population on an international scale (e.g.: people in the US run more often than those in Europe and Africa in wintertime, the average run is 35 minutes). Air Miles and other loyalty programs work on the same principle (although their rewards are arguably much less valuable): aggregated data has value greater than the sum of its parts.
  • Lesson: look for patterns that might unexpectedly emerge when you aggregate smaller pieces together. They can often inform your product design decisions much more strongly than individual data points.
• Hard data and a real time feedback loop have turned the adage “people hate exercising” upside down. This is revolutionary for anyone who builds a product in a space that people need but don’t necessarily want (versus something like chocolate, which everyone wants but doesn’t need). Technology is great at reversing long held paradigms (Wikinomics, the Long Tail, etc.), and this is no exception. This is technology mediating one human behavior (couch potativity) by leveraging another (ego flattery).
  • Lesson: you can motivate people to do surprising things when the payoff is big enough, and it’s hard to get bigger than ego. Add features inspired by the world of video games to your product as a powerful carrot.
• Simple, easy to use products will always kick the ass of complex, product rich beasts. The Nike+ doesn’t include GPS or heart rate sensors, two of the most common features in other running accessories. Although most people might think those are indispensable must-haves — and Nike is thinking of adding them in later versions — the product has outsold almost everything in its market without them.
  • Lesson: KISS! Keep It Simple Stupid. In the words of Antoine De Saint-Exuprey: “You know you’ve achieved perfection in design not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.“

The most interesting statistic for me is the Nike+ Magic Number: 5. To quote from the article:

Nike has discovered that there’s a magic number for a Nike+ user: five. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they’re massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they’ve gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves.

Here’s where we come back to user engagement. All products have a magic number — a 5 Runs equivalent — but figuring it out can be tricky. Consider this engagement model (note that all curves are approximate and not based on real math):

User Engagement Model

A quick guide:

• A: the first exposure a user has to your product. Their engagement (or awareness) is zero until that point.
• A – B: their awareness grows as they hear about your product on Twitter, see news stories about it, spot your ads in Wired, etc.
• B: user’s first actual experience with the product. They are fully engaged during this experience so make the most of it!
• B – C1: engagement degrades immediately after they stop using the product. C1 is an arbitrary point at which you can still make them a permanent user.
• C1 – D: engagement eventually returns to basically where it started at as they slowly forget all about you.

Man is that line ever depressing. But all is not lost! Consider the crazy wave coming out of C1. For most products, particularly web apps, you can turn the sinking Engagement ship around by taking action at each C point, be it a Facebook “You’ve been bitten by a vampire!” notice, a Flickr invitation to add your photos to a group pool, or a Rypple from one of your colleagues. Sustaining engagement means routinely drawing users back into your world with carefully designed touch points, timed to arrive before they drop below a C point. Nike uses the social features on NikePlus.com as that draw: emails that Nike misses you, challenges from your friends (fastest 5km run, most km over 20 days, etc.), and the ability to have your friends and family cheer you on to goals you share with them.

Let’s take a look at the curve from a Nike+ user’s perspective:

Nike+ User Engagement Model

I’ve made their A-B curve a little steeper to reflect Nike’s and Apple’s combined ad budget. C1 through C5 here are basically your first five runs, interspersed with reminders from NikePlus to keep at it. Based on the article, the curve takes off sharply after that as people become heavily hooked on the stats.

What’s Your 5 Runs?

Think about your product or application. What’s your inflection point from casual to engaged users? My instinct says that it needs to be a simple number so that you can actively drive users to it; you can expend a lot of resource if you know you only need to get them to their fifth run. We’ve been spending some time figuring it out for Rypple and we have a few ideas around the number of Rypples you send, the number of replies you receive, the quality of the advice, etc. We’d love to hear from you: share your 5 Runs below. There’s value in learning from each other. Let’s discuss!

Tags: customer outreach, decision support, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, five runs, habits, nike+, peer review, personal review, professional development, quick polls, Rypple, team review, wired

Rypple Meets Facebook

Posted by Jay Goldman, Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

4691 commenthttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/02/24/rypple-meets-facebook/Rypple+Meets+Facebook2009-02-24+17%3A04%3A15Jay+Goldman

I joined the Rypple team about a month ago to work on all things social media-related, with a particular emphasis on Facebook. It’s been a whirlwind job so far and we’ve done a lot in a really short time, which makes me really proud to announce today’s launch of the Rypple NOW! Facebook Page, timed perfectly with FacebookCamp5 in Toronto!

People Want to Talk about Feedback

You learn something pretty quickly when you start working here: the ideas behind Rypple touch people in a very personal way. Every time I explain what we do or how we do it, people are catalyzed into in-depth conversations, often full of stories from their own lives. We’ve seen the same response online and in the media, with tons of user and blogger buzz, big media interest, and academic discussions sparked all over the world.

It’s become pretty obvious to us that people really want to talk about their experiences with feedback.  We’re really grateful for all the emails us, calls, blog posts, and tweets because they help us better understand you. And we’ve learned a lot from the process! You really want to discuss the implications of a workplace filled with quick, specific, and useful feedback that’s easy to give and get, which is awesome. We want to show you how to do it, so let’s share!

Which led us to the question: what better place to Share than Facebook, a service that “helps you connect and share with the people in your life”?

We were so inspired by all the grassroots feedback you’ve given us that we’ve decided to take these conversation to a more social place and to invite many more people to join in the dialog.

Rypple NOW!

Our Facebook strategy is built around the idea of providing an open, community-driven space for people to discuss feedback, learn how to give and receive it, and to reduce their stress and be more successful by using it as a powerful tool.

The other key element of our Facebook strategy is real people. Our awesome Intern Nat has been busy pre-populating our Page with interesting articles, links, and videos to get the conversation flowing.  And, as it grows, he’s going to stay focused on adding value to the participants and getting the rest of the Rypple Team involved. This is where you come in, of course. Real people talking about real things is what makes this a reality, so join us!

Community Through Tools

The Rypple NOW! Page is about community first and foremost. We’re hoping to spark an ongoing conversation about feedback by incorporating a number of existing Facebook community applications, including Video, Photos, Events, and Discussion Boards. Since we want to foster a vibrant movement full of people participating, we carefully examined each for what it would bring, how easily we could seed it with initial conversation starting content, and how simple it would be to garden as it grew. We picked out the best of the standard apps, then planned out the rest of the strategy on a handful of custom components.

Custom Components

In addition to the more simplistic Movement Buzz box, which displays logos of media sources who have covered the growing movement and provides details in pop-up Facebook dialogs, we decided to build two custom apps: Ask Rypple NOW! and What’s Ryppling NOW!, both based on functionality from the Rypple homepage.

Ask Rypple NOW!

It was very important for us to create an easy entry point into the world of Rypple for members of the movement who wanted to get their feet wet without jumping straight in. Using the same functionality on the Rypple homepage as a model, we built a mini-app that presents a question box with countdown character counter and then uses a series of Facebook Dialogs with FBJS Ajax to prompt for more information and create the Rypple.

The custom Ask Rypple NOW! app for the Rypple NOW! Facebook Page

One of the best things to come out of this app, beyond giving users a way to try Rypple without leaving Facebook, is the emergence of a Rypple API. The incredibly capable Austin Tam whipped up a basic RESTful API for us to build against, paving the way for third party developers to eventually  add Rypple functionality to their own apps. Leave a comment if you’d like to know more about the API!

What’s Ryppling NOW!

One of the most important observations about feedback is also one of the simplest: ask good questions and you’ll get good feedback.

The questions in the What’s Ryppling NOW! box, as well as on the Rypple homepage, reflect that statement by highlighting some of the best questions people have shared with us and allowed us to share with you. The mini-app uses FBJS Animation to move the bubbles all the way up and back down again, looping until the user clicks to stop (the clicking to start and stop is a requirement for profile boxes, which can’t display any animation or interactivity until activated).

The custom What's Ryppling NOW app for the Rypple NOW! Facebook Page

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list. Think we’ve missed a particularly great question? Add it to the comments!

Come on in! The water’s great!

Come and join us in the Rypple NOW! movement! You too deserve better feedback in the workplace, so become a fan of the Rypple NOW! Facebook Page and help us spread the word. As loyal readers of the Rypple blog, we’d be particularly pleased if you’d join the discussion, add a video, or write on our wall. See you on Facebook!

Tags: facebook, facebook cookbook, facebook page, jay goldman, Rypple, rypple now