As part of Facebook's broader effort to revamp the Pages experience, I led design for a new Notifications Center to help public figure page admins manage overwhelming notification volume and prioritize fan engagement more effectively.
As part of Facebook's initiative to modernize the Pages experience for public figures, we identified a major bottleneck: notification overload.
Pages used by celebrities like Beyoncé and Lionel Messi receive tens of thousands of notifications per day; ranging from comments, mentions, tags, and reactions. For their teams, sifting through this volume was chaotic and unscalable, often leading to missed fan interactions or PR opportunities.
The overwhelming volume of notifications that admins had to manage daily
"It's impossible to sift through thousands of notifications to find the most important ones."
This feedback came directly from our discovery interviews with social media managers who were struggling with the current notification system.
After evaluating several feature directions, our PM prioritized notifications as the most immediate opportunity to drive value without overhauling existing workflows.
The goal was to make notifications more actionable, helping admins quickly identify meaningful interactions and cut down on time spent scrolling. We believed that by reducing friction in daily triage, we could unlock more consistent and higher-quality engagement between public figures and their fans.
Key insights from discovery interviews depicted in sketches
Once notifications were identified as a strategic priority, our design and research teams kicked off a focused discovery phase to better understand how public figure admins actually interact with them day to day.
While the product direction had already been validated at a high level, we needed to unpack the real friction points:
Through interviews with social media managers and page admins, we uncovered several recurring issues around prioritizing, filtering, and missed opportunities to surface high-value interactions.
Based on the feedback received during the user interviews, I designed a few different variants for what a notification command center could look like for these users. Each variant tackled the problem from a slightly different angle, exploring different layouts and filtering mechanisms.
To understand the complexity of each variant, I met with an engineer to assess early technical feasibility and timeline estimates. Based on their feedback, I iterated on the designs and presented those versions to my design team during a design critique session.
Four design variants exploring different approaches to the notification center
My PM and I landed on two final designs that would serve as the A/B test for this project. Over the course of two weeks, I worked closely with our engineering team to implement the A/B test designs and slowly roll them out to a subset of active public figure admins.
We measured every action taken within the notification panel that would get us closer to seeing a percentage increase in interactions between public figure pages and their fans. We also gathered qualitative feedback through moderated usability tests to refine microcopy and visual hierarchy.
On the left, the traditional Facebook notificaiotns. On the right, a priority-based layout.
The redesigned admin notifications center achieved a 7% increase in overall fan interactions from the notifications panel.
"I think the highlights section is really cool. I like how it knows who else is famous and it gives me those notifications first."
Although the qualitative user feedback was overwhelmingly positive, the redesign did not prove as effective when measured at scale. Based on further user interviews, it seemed more of a nice-to-have feature for them.We measured every action taken within the notification panel that would get us closer to seeing a percentage increase in interactions between public figure pages and their fans. We also gathered qualitative feedback through moderated usability tests to refine microcopy and visual hierarchy.
Final design for Public Figure notifications
Despite the improvements, the team decided not to proceed with a full rollout of the notification center.
This project ultimately highlighted a tension in our broader Pages strategy: building smarter tools is only half the battle—admins' behavioral ceilings (e.g. only acting on a fixed number of notifs per day) often cap the impact of even great UX. We took this learning into our next iteration of Pages tooling with a sharper focus on motivation, not just mechanics.
Instead, we went back to the drawing board to understand anything we might have missed during our discovery interviews and user flow mapping. This taught us valuable lessons about user behavior and the importance of deeply understanding user motivations beyond surface-level pain points.