Instagram understands a secret of Facebook’s success: Visuals

As Facebook gets ready for its monster IPO, which will likely value the company at more than $100 billion, I thought it would be valuable to take a look at some of the critical product decisions that have led to its success.

In this second part of a four-part series on how Facebook made small design decisions that had a tremendous impact, I’ll focus on visuals, which is especially relevant with the news of Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram. (See links to the rest of the series below).

Last week, I was in New York, visiting Alex, my 4-year-old second cousin (that’s him in the photo). As he played with my iPad, I was struck by how he quickly grasped every element of it. He can’t read, but he understands what he needs to on the iPad. We also played with some of his toy cars. I asked him to pick out the tow truck, the school bus and the bulldozer. He didn’t know what a bulldozer was, but he could pick out all of the others.

It’s a fundamental truth about humans that we are visual creatures. We know how to see and identify objects well before we can read. It’s also something that too many startups ignore. But Facebook didn’t — and the visual nature of Facebook is one of the keys to its success.

Today, Facebook announced that it is doubling down on that success with the acquisition of Instagram, the rapidly growing mobile photo service. Photo sharing was a key driver of Facebook’s growth.

But photo sharing dates back a decade before Facebook, all the way back to one of the pioneers of the Web, Marc Andreessen.

Andreessen has done a lot of great things for the internet, but one of the most significant was this email he wrote while at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in 1993:

I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

IMG

Required argument is SRC=”url”.

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull
over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text
at the point of the tag’s occurrence.

An example is:

<IMG SRC=”file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm“>

(There is no closing tag; this is just a standalone tag.)

The IMG tag is one of the reasons the World Wide Web took off. There were interconnected computer networks before the Web, but none achieved the massive success the Web did, and visuals are a key reason why.

There are many examples of how visuals drive adoption. The hugely popular Pinterest is basically a visual version of Delicious. (After a disastrous tenure at Yahoo!, delicious was spun off and is itself trying to be more visual.)

Slideshows are among the most popular features on blogs. On VentureBeat, every story has a lead image.

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One of the most popular posts I’ve written about Groupon didn’t take days worth of research or analysis. I grabbed one set of numbers from Groupon’s S-1 and created a chart in Excel that showed that despite its claims, Groupon is not a technology company: