Society and globalization is built on trying to make the strange familiar. Believe it or not many of us feel comfortable when we visit odd places but see logos and structures that are familiar to us. It is the rule of standardization that has been used to maintain and develop social institutions for centuries. It comes down to social psychology and the thought that people will facilitate their interactions and actions based on how they perceive their environment — it is why we have red, green, and yellow lights on every road in the United States.

Making the experience familiar across a network increases usability, isn’t that the key point?

For those of you who I’ve talked to about Facebook and its Platform know how much of an aficionado I am of applications that resemble and imitate the Facebook experience. The design team at Facebook has put a lot of time into standardizing their user experience throughout the site. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t necessarily mean that your app should look and feel exactly like Facebook in order to be successful and have an impact — there are many apps that have proven otherwise. What I mean is that I have noticed many successful applications start to create their own Mini Feeds / News Feeds within their applications as a means to help users engage and navigate through the application.

Facebook users are now almost certainly trained to navigate through profiles via the Feeds, I know I do. Feeds made a big impact on Facebook because users didn’t have to think about what to do or whose profile to look at — that information was put right in front of them. It is a familiar interaction for users and thus should be imitated within Platform applications to increase engagement. I have added links to a few images of feeds within third-party applications which I thought were particularly interesting.

Packrat
Friends for Sale
Flixster - Movies
(fluff)Friends
Facebook Marketplace