Reinventing Facebook's Home
A generative UX case study exploring futuristic opportunities for Facebook's home page, focusing on innovative research methodologies to understand user needs and preferences, especially among younger demographics.
Project Overview
My Role
- UX Researcher
- Product Design (Conceptual)
- UX Writing
Team
- 1 Researcher (Myself)
- 1 Internship Manager
Duration
- 3 Months
- (Jun 2022 - Sep 2022)
Tools & Methods
- Figma
- Time Loop Method (Developed)
- Feeling Cues Method (Developed)
- Semi-Structured Interviews
The Challenge: Evolving Facebook Home for the Future
Facebook's home feed serves as a central hub, integrating numerous features and services. To ensure its continued relevance and appeal, especially to younger users whose digital habits are constantly evolving, Facebook needs to explore futuristic opportunities and potentially new design paradigms for this core space.
The challenge during my internship was to conduct generative research to uncover these future opportunities, understanding latent user needs and desires that could inform the next evolution of Facebook Home.
Approach: Innovative Methodology
Due to the confidential nature of the project and NDA requirements, I cannot share the specific insights, outcomes, or design prototypes generated during this internship.
However, this case study will focus on detailing metods I developed and used to answer the above challenges:
Research Methods
To uncover forward-looking user needs related to context (time) and emotion, I developed and applied the following two methods:
Method 1: Time Loop - Understanding Temporal Needs
Guiding Question: What do users want to see, and when?
Rationale: Intuitive interfaces often align with users' daily rhythms. This method aimed to understand how Facebook Home could better integrate into users' lives by exploring their needs and preferences at different times of the day.
Execution: Participants were presented with visual cues representing various times/scenarios throughout a typical day (e.g., waking up, commuting, evening relaxation). For each cue, we discussed how Facebook Home could be most helpful or relevant at that specific moment using prompts like:
Interviews were semi-structured and adapted based on the participant's context (e.g., student vs. working professional).
Pros
- Emphasizes user routines, revealing opportunities for seamless integration (e.g., "I'd like to see the weather on Facebook Home first thing in the morning")
- Facilitates pattern identification across diverse user needs and desired features
- Strongly user-centered, empowering participants to articulate specific desires
- Unveils secondary contextual factors beyond time (e.g., location/activity affecting content preference)
Cons
- Risk of reticence: If participants aren't vocal, prompting them to walk through their entire day can help
- Potential for feature overload: Participants might suggest including too much. Focus on gathering ideas initially and prioritize during analysis
Method 2: Feeling Cues - Connecting Content to Emotion
Guiding Question: How do you feel, and what content resonates?
Rationale: Facebook serves diverse emotional needs beyond just entertainment or connection. This method aimed to understand how content on Facebook Home could better align with or support users' various emotional states and intents.
Execution: We presented participants with visual cues representing different feelings or emotional states (e.g., connected, informed, relaxed, inspired). For each cue, we explored what kind of content or features on Facebook Home could evoke or support that feeling, asking questions like:
Pros
- Identifies content types and formats that resonate emotionally (e.g., connecting feelings of love/security to seeing content from close friends/family)
- Helps curate themes based on participant interests that support desired emotional states
Cons
- Requires deep probing: Brief answers need follow-up questions about preferred format and the underlying 'why'
- Subjectivity challenges theming: Defining universal themes from subjective emotional responses can be complex
- Focus on 'What', not 'When': Better suited for identifying types of emotionally resonant experiences rather than timing
Key Learnings
Method Development Insights
- Visual Cues are Powerful: Both methods relied heavily on visual prompts to help participants think beyond their current usage patterns
- Context Matters: Time-based and emotion-based contexts revealed different aspects of user needs that traditional methods might miss
- Flexibility is Essential: Semi-structured approaches allowed for deeper exploration when participants provided rich responses
- Pattern Recognition: Both methods excelled at revealing patterns across different user types and scenarios
Research Process Insights
- Generative Research Requires Patience: Future-focused research takes time to yield actionable insights
- Multiple Perspectives Needed: Combining temporal and emotional lenses provided a more complete picture
- Documentation is Crucial: Novel methods require careful documentation for replication and refinement
Few Outcomes Generated as a result of Co-design process
As illustarted in the above image, the co-design process taken with Facebook users allowed us to understand what they desire to see on the Top of Home. In this process we discovered new features. The Sports scorecard and Spotify connect are features that are currently deployed and used by millions of users across products of Meta.
Conclusion
While specific project outcomes remain confidential, the development and application of the "Time Loop" and "Feeling Cues" methods provided valuable frameworks for exploring future-facing user needs in a nuanced way.
These methods allowed us to move beyond current usage patterns and delve into how Facebook Home could proactively integrate into users' lives based on temporal context and emotional state, generating rich qualitative data even when exploring abstract future possibilities. They represent adaptable techniques for generative research in product development.