During my time on the Facebook Integrity team, I redesigned the user controls menu with the goal of helping people feel more in control of the content they see.
Role: Design lead. Worked with PM, engineers, UXR, and content design from News Feed Integrity.
Accomplishments: Aligned designers from multiple teams across FB. Shared design vision and proposal with VP of Design and secured top-down alignment from FB App Leadership.
Timeline: May 2020 - May 2021
Control menus across FB are cluttered, inconsistent, and difficult to use. The current design doesn’t scale with density and doesn’t align with people’s expectations. This broken experience hurts Facebook’s ability to build and maintain trust and legitimacy with our users.
An example of all the different control surfaces across FB.
At first, News Feed was the only product with a content feed, so controls were sparse and minimal.
Over time, other product surfaces emerged and began to build controls independently of News Feed. Because of the culture of heavy experimentation, these new products began to optimize their own controls individually. Furthermore, Facebook's "move fast" culture discouraged a centralized process to standardize this design, since it would have introduced more headwind and slowed development speed.
At the same time, our central design system team introduced a new design language, which led to more variation as different surfaces decided independently to migrate.
Working with a UX researcher, we identified key metrics from our team's studies that support the necessity of a redesigned controls menu. These responses were surveyed from 12,000 people across 7 countries.
of people say lack of control is their #1 problem with News Feed.
“Difficulty controlling what you see in News Feed” is the 10th most severe Lorax UX pain.
of people find that reporting a post does not work as expected.