Context
On Facebook, people can engage with public figures that matter to them — from creators, authors, athletes and sports teams, to musicians, bands, journalists and celebrities.
These public figures use a range of Facebook tools to connect with their communities. For example,
Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes announced her debut solo album via a personal Note. Video creator
David Dobrik has grown his fan base rapidly on Facebook through interacting with fans on his latest videos and building a connected fan group. And ABC News Chief Meteorologist
Ginger Zee goes live often to share real-time updates with followers, covering major weather events like the recent heat waves.
My Role
At Facebook, I had the opportunity to build new features and improve existing tools to help public figures achieve their goals. Some notable features I worked on were:
- Notification Center: An entry point to custom settings, tabs, and highlights to allow public figures to have more control of their notifications and make it easier to find.
- Cross-Profile Notifications: A brand new concept, allowing admins of multiple public figures to view all their notifications at once.
- Top Fans: A new incentive to make it easier for fans to stand out when engaging with public figure content.
Within these projects,
I worked alongside UX Researchers, PMs, and a Product Design Manager who oversaw the work our team was completing.
One initial challenge was striking the right balance between design exploration and recycling existing components from our Facebook Design System. After all, one of Facebook's design principles is to
"reduce, reuse, don't redesign."
Before diving head-first into my projects, I also had to understand any previous efforts that were made from others to bring these projects to life. If any were made, I needed to understand why those efforts worked or didn't work.
Notifications Center
Public figure accounts could receive upwards of 20,000 notifications in a single day, a tall order for anyone running that account. Our team tested a new command center for notifications that would allow these admins to have an entry point to custom settings, tabs, and highlights designed just for them.
Before putting anything in front of users to test, I put together 10 explorations that were reviewed during our Crit sessions to start defining the general direction.
Three concepts made the final cut for A/B testing:
- A dropdown menu for filtering notifications
- Horizontal scrolling (H-Scroll) sub-tabs
- Static sub-tabs
A/B testing these designs involved a lot of collaboration with the UX Researchers to nail down the script as well as the data synthesizing process. At Facebook, we used our own version of Slack, Zoom, and Dovetail to communicate our findings.
We eventually got our qualitative results from user testing:
- The dropdown menu for filtering notifications was useful, but not intuitive for users.
- The horizontal scrolling tab improved on the usability, but had discoverability issues.
- The prominent, clearly labeled static sub-tabs was easy to understand for users.
Cross Profile Notifications (CPN)
Through our user testing of the Notification Center, we also found a unique opportunity to deliver even more meaningful tools to these public figure admins. Cross Profile Notifications (CPN) were designed to help admins manage multiple accounts using the same command center. For example, if Josephine were the account admin for J. Cole, Will Smith, and Selena Gomez, all of their respective notifications would be broken down for her in these cross-profile notifications.
Qualitative tests on these designs left us to believe the user base that manages multiple public figure accounts may not be that high. This brought a pause to this specific spin-off project. Since public figure accounts are technically Pages, this opened the door to expand this feature to all admins of any Pages in the future.
Top Fans
The Top Fans feature was designed to incentivize and highlight dedicated followers of public figures on Facebook. This initiative aimed to make it easier for fans to stand out when engaging with content from their favorite public figures.
Key components of the Top Fans feature include:
- Top Fan badges: Visual indicators displayed next to usernames of highly engaged followers
- Admin controls: Allowing public figures to manage their Top Fans, including options to remove or ban users
- User controls: Enabling fans to display or remove their Top Fan badge
- Notifications: Alerting users when they achieve Top Fan status
Through further user testing and design Crits, we refined the Top Fans feature to meet the needs of both public figures and their followers. The end-to-end flow was carefully mapped out to ensure a seamless experience for all users.
Anecdotally, we were getting lots of promising feedback from users, so we decided to move forward with more testing, including both qualitative and quantitive testing.
Metrics & Impact
Our streamlined notifications center resulted in a 15% increase in engagement between public figures and their audiences. Our data showed that users who interacted with these suggestions were 30% more likely to follow new public figures.
The "Top Fans" feature saw even more impressive results, with a 25% increase in comments and reactions from designated top fans, creating a more vibrant community around public figures.
Reflections and Next Steps
This project significantly enhanced my skills in designing for complex, multi-user systems. I learned the importance of considering various user types within a single ecosystem and how to balance their sometimes conflicting needs.
Looking ahead, there are several areas where we could further improve these features. We're also considering expanding the "Top Fans" feature to include more granular levels of fan engagement, potentially creating a tiered system that could offer different perks or interaction opportunities based on engagement levels. Additionally, we're investigating ways to make the Notification Center more streamlined by analyzing users' platform behavior when sifting through notifications.
