Facebook Groups

Context

In 2017, Facebook has outgrown its founding mission of strengthening the offline connections of friends and families online. It has become an online community of its own where people build new connections and sometimes meet with them in real life. To reflect where the opportunity led, in the 2017 Facebook Community Summit, the CEO revealed the company’s new mission, “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

As the product owner of Facebook Groups, our team has become the conduit for delivering this new mission. A re-imagination of the Groups product was pressingly needed.

Identifying opportunities

Looking at the existing Groups experience in the FB app, it was obvious that it has been left in its bootstrapping state. First, the entry point was buried deep down in the app menu as an afterthought. Moreover, the design of the Groups Tab was pure navigation and uninspiring, which didn’t reflect the company’s new mission. As a result, very low activities happened on the Groups Tab. For heavy users, they just used the Groups tab as a jumping-off point to their groups. For light groups users, they would just navigate to their groups from the Newsfeed. Most of them are not aware of the Groups Tab.

Tying back to the mission, to empower communities, the newly-framed question arose — “how might we make Groups the true first-class citizen in the Facebook App?” To translate this statement into a more tactical goal for our team, the challenge then became “How might we design a high quality Groups Tab that brings value to Facebook’s ecosystem?”

Defining success

Instead of focusing purely on surface-level metrics like click-through rates and conversions, the team had an ambition to define and grow “meaningful communities” that has true impact on users lives. As a result of cross-functional collaboration among Product, Data Scientist, and User Research, a new set of “meaningful “metrics were identified, taking deeper-level interactions into account, such as commenting, reacting, friending, etc. This effort enabled the team to be date-driven while focusing on the mission.

Design highlight

Landing page | A modular design that evolves with the user journey

One of the key design challenges was to strike a balance between two main use cases — new group discovery and existing group engagement — both are essential to grow the meaningful metrics. We also knew that the two use cases are not needed evenly by a single user all the time. A new user would need to discover and join some groups before they could start feeling the benefit of Groups, whereas a heavy user would need ways to keep track of group content easily in order to meaningfully participate in multiple communities. Thus, to optimize the limited real estate on the landing page of the Groups Tab, we landed on a modular design that leans towards group discovery for users with light activities on Groups. The UI gradually shifts towards group engagement, introducing a group navigation and content feed, as the user joins and participates in more groups.

Discovery experience | Principle-led integration between Search and Browse

Zooming in on the design of the group discovery experience, originally our team had a debate between two different approaches — search-oriented v.s. browse-oriented. Since we hadn’t launched the Groups Tab surface where we could verify concepts via experiments, the team had to rely on our intuition. To resolve the situation, I did a competitive analysis among other online communities and e-commerce sites. Along with insights from qualitative research, I proposed and got the team to align on several design principles, which helped the team be proactive in direct the conversation in leadership reviews.

Onboarding experience | A versatile design that minimizes interruption

To convey the new mission of building communities, I worked with the Marketing team on designing the in-product onboarding experience that worked along with off-platform ads when introducing the Groups Tab to new users. Depending on the impression, the marketing messages were introduced as various UI elements with difference prominence to minimize interruption.

Result and reflection

With the launch of the newly-designed Groups Tab, “community” was elevated into one of the core parts of the app experience. As of 2019, there were over 1 billion active users around the world involving in “meaningful communities” on Facebook.

As a designer working on a company-wide strategy-led initiative, I found the high visibility was a blessing and a curse. It was rewarding knowing that the design will likely make a difference in real people lives. Yet it was challenging to get alignment among scrutinies from multiple top-down voices. Looking back, I think identifying key stakeholders and get them to align on high-level design principles is a good way to build shared languages on what we agree and disagree. With this approach, we could focus on getting relevant product feedback without being sidetracked on trivial UI details.