What is Facebook's secret to keeping the world's largest user base content? Sticking to well-proven software design principles, one study has concluded.

University of Washington graduate student Parmit Chilana worked as an intern at the social networking giant last year, and, during her time there, interviewed Facebook engineers and design specialists to learn about how they build and deploy new features for the service. Chilana discussed her report, which she co-authored with other researchers at the University of Washington and Facebook itself, at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, being held this week in Austin, Texas.

Facebook has an audience that would make user bases of even the largest software products seem small in comparison, Chilana explained. As of latest count, the social networking service has over 845 million users. And it is an audience as diverse as it large: Facebook supports over 70 different languages. About 80 percent of its users live outside of the U.S. and Canada.

"Even if only 1 percent of the users were dissatisfied, that would still represent close to 10 million users," Chilana said. "Most software companies don't even have a user base of 10 million users. So you can imagine the impact of [Facebook's] design choices can be enormous."

Excerpted from article by Joab Jackson of IDG News Service. Read the entire article.