Enhancing the Pages Experience for Public Figures

In 2021, Facebook introduced a new Pages experience designed to help public figures and businesses connect more effectively with their audiences.

As a Product Designer on the Discovery & Distribution team, I contributed to two key features:

• Admin Notifications Center: An entry point to custom settings, tabs, and highlights to allow admins of public figure accounts to have more control over their notifications and make it easier to find.
• Top Fans: An incentive to make it easier for fans to stand out when engaging with public figure content.

These features aimed to address significant challenges in managing notifications and fostering deeper audience connections. Collaborating with designers, researchers, engineers, PMs, and a Product Design Manager, I was responsible for designing, testing, and delivering impactful solutions that aligned with Facebook's design principles.

Understanding Previous Efforts

Immediately after joining the team, I dove into previous research projects that were conducted around public figures to better understand the needs of the admins and audiences.

In doing so, I found research projects from 2019 around features for Facebook Stories. Some of those features were launched, and others were never shipped. I talked to several designers who had worked on those previous efforts and gained a better understanding as to why we were now pushing for admin controls and specific features for the fans.

Admin Notifications Center

Public figure accounts often receive tens of thousands of notifications daily, making it challenging for admins to manage them efficiently. My role was to create a centralized command center with customizable settings, tabs, and highlights, helping admins prioritize and organize notifications effectively.

To start, I reviewed the relevant research project with the UX Researcher to understand the pain points first-hand. Using these insights, I sketched potential layouts, focusing on questions like which notification types should take priority and how to streamline access to key updates. Collaboration with engineers early in the process helped mitigate technical risks, such as implementing highlights for high-priority notifications.

Over two weeks, I developed six design variants, refining them with team feedback before settling on a final concept.

Research Collaboration

I worked closed with our UX Researcher to design the test, and with our PM to understand the metrics we were testing against.

For the Admin Notifications Center, our PM set a goal to measure the percentage increase of interactions between the public figure page and their audience, directly coming from the notifications panel. Historically, this number sat around 22%. With the mountain of notifications a public figure account received every day, it became easy for admins to mark their notifications as "read" after interacting with only a few fans.

The makeup of the interactions included:

• Replying to a fan's comment
• Liking a fan's comment
• Responding to a fan message

Working with the UX Researcher, we decided on A/B testing the new notifications panel through gradual rollout to our most active public figure admins.

Engineering Handoff

With Facebook's robust design system, documenting the components used in the new notifications center was straightforward, especially with the help I received from the design system team.

My main goal during the handoff was to provide extremely detailed documentation and any edge cases they should be aware of. Once in the hands of the developers, I made myself available at all times to answer further questions they had about the design.

Top Fans Feature

Top Fans was designed to incentivize loyalty by recognizing the most engaged followers of public figures. Research showed that fans felt more valued and engaged when acknowledged for their support. My role for Top Fans was that of a production designer; finalizing the prototype and prepping the script for usability testing.

The biggest decision in question was which symbol to use to visualize "top fans" on the platform. Working closely with the visual design team, I developed several version that could potentially be used to visualize Top Fans and presented the work to my design partner.

The final design included a subtle badge displayed next to a fan’s name to ensure it didn’t obstruct the main content. I prototyped the remaining key screens in Figma, and the team tested it with users through a combination of qualitative interviews and quantitative analysis.

Results & Impact

Over the course of four weeks, the Admin Notifications Center saw a 7% increase in engagement with the fans. The team ultimately decided not to fully rollout of this feature.

The Top Fans feature saw a stronger increase of 25% in fan interactions and an 11% rise in overall engagement between public figures and their audiences.

These results highlighted the importance of balancing task-focused features with those that directly foster engagement.

Lessons Learned

Working on this project at Facebook taught me valuable lessons about collaboration, design constraints, and user-focused innovation. Effective communication across multidisciplinary teams proved essential in navigating the challenges of designing within a large-scale ecosystem like Facebook.

This experience reinforced the importance of sticking to established design systems while finding room for creativity and innovation. Had I stayed on the project longer, I would have liked to dive deeper into qualitative research to further optimize the Admin Notifications Center.