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Business problem

Parents aren’t adding contacts for their kids after onboarding. This is a problem for the Growth team because we want to retain new users and connections is one of the biggest factors controlling retention. Kids who aren’t connected to their friends and family will use the app less and are likely to switch to another app or service where they can reach all of their close contacts.

Solution

Make friending more discoverable for Parents to reduce the effort required for parents to add friends and know who is available to add on Messenger Kids.

REDUCING THE CHURN RATE OF NEW USERS

Company: Meta (Facebook)

Team: Messenger, Growth

Initial user research

Before diving into ideation and design, as a first step, I wanted to understand why parents stop adding contacts for their kids after onboarding. To do so, I ran two user studies: 1) a survey with employees who use Messenger Kids and 2) interviews with external Messenger Kids users.

Findings

Parents would like their kids to be connected with more of their friends, however, they found connecting kids to be challenging because they don't know where to do so or who is available.

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Tools

  • Figma

  • Sketch

  • Framer

  • Zeplin

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Team

  • 1 product designer

  • 1 product manager

  • 2 developers

  • 1 data scientist

  • 1 UX researcher

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My role

  • UX/UI design

  • UX research

  • Content strategy

  • Product management

  • Product strategy

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Timeline

  • Overall: 4+ weeks

  • Discovery & research: 1+ weeks

  • Design & testing: 3 weeks

My design process

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Defining problem, solution, & goals

User problem

Kids have friends that they want to add and parents want to add friends for their kids, however, kids and parents are finding it difficult to know who is on the app and how to add them.

Solution

Based on our user research findings, in order to solve this problem we need to make friending more discoverable for parents so that it's easier for them to add friends for their kids and know who is available on Messenger Kids.

Goal

Determine whether or not increasing the discoverability of friending for parents will lead to increased friend requests sent after onboarding, more contacts for kids, and ultimately lead to higher retention.

Performance metrics

Number of friend requests sent, number of connections made, monthly active users.

Ideate & align

Choosing a lever to explore

I wanted to identify the highest impact, lowest effort option in order to validate the solution and efficiently use resources. After evaluating all of the options, I chose to explore the Parent's Facebook Feed as the focus area for this project.

Updated design question​

How might we leverage the Parent's Facebook Feed to increase the discoverability of friending and encourage parents to add contacts for their kids?

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Optimal upsell type & format

There are numerous types of Facebook Feed upsells (i.e. Full Page Popover, Footer, etc.) and for each upsell type there are many different variants. Selecting the appropriate upsell type depends on our Team's goal (adding contacts) and the the specific variant depends on our content needs (image, text, etc.). With our Team goal and content needs in mind, we identified the 'Simple Feed Unit' and 'H-Scroll Feed Unit' as the best options for our upsell.

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Existing Flow for Parents to Add Contacts

After onboarding, friending for parents is only located in the Parental Controls Dashboard, which is buried within the Facebook Menu and difficult to find.

Understand & define

Ideate

Align on design direction

Test, iterate, & finalize designs

Eng handoff & design QA

Post-launch analysis & iteration

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Proposed design

After designing high-fidelity prototypes, aligning with product partners, and getting all of the necessary approvals, this is the design I proposed, ready to be tested with users...

Final design & launch

After implementing the design improvements and finalizing the designs, I worked with Engineering to build out this feature and conduct QA to ensure the build matched the mocks. Below is the final product that we launched!

Brainstorming solutions

I lead a brainstorming session with the growth team members to source and discuss ideas to for how we can increase friending discoverability. As a team, we identified many different potential levers to explore that would solve this problem.

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A/B test for privacy notice

The privacy notice addresses parents’ concern over seeing kid information in feed and helps them feel more comfortable sending out the connection requests.

Design

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Developing the high fidelity prototype

After aligning on the design direction to pursue with product and XFN partners, it was now time to start designing the high-fidelity prototype for the H-Scroll Feed Unit. During this process I used the Constraints, Principles, and User Needs identified in the Understand and Ideate phases to guide my design decisions.

Choosing a design direction

Based on these findings, the direction we chose to move forward with is the H-Scroll Feed Unit Focused on Kids using an Avatar to represent the user.

Moving forward

Build off of the success of this initial version of the feed unit. Address the areas for improvement identified above to optimize the performance.

  • Click-through rate (~6%) is at an acceptable level when compared to similar upsells, however, it is still lower than expected, highlighting opportunities to improve contextuality, candidate list, and candidate ranking.

  • The overall conversion rate of impressions to monthly active users for this experiment is low. However, breaking down the data by user segments, we found that the impact of the upsell on needy users (users with < 5 friends) was more than 2x for monthly active users, highlighting opportunities to improve targeting.

Once the feed unit is optimized, the plan is to convert this to an Evergreen Upsell (no expiration) due to its impact and importance to the growth and success of Messenger Kids.

Next case study

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CASE STUDY

DESIGNING A PLAYER PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS & MANAGEMENT TOOL

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Company
New York Mets
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Team
Performance Tech
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Duration
10 months
Image by nemo

Reducing the Churn Rate of New Users

Company: Meta (Facebook)

Team: Messenger, Growth

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The problem by the numbers

83%

of friend requests are sent during onboarding

48%

of new users w/out Kid-to-Kid connections churn within the 1 week

Feed unit container

The container needs to be FDS compliant and meet our team’s content needs:

  1. Space to explain purpose of feed unit

  2. Space for privacy / visibility info

  3. Space for Messenger Kids branding

  4. Compatible with H-scroll cards

  5. Button leading users to friending page in Parent Dashboard

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H-Scroll Card

The card needs to be FDS compliant, optimized for performance, and meet all of the team’s content needs:

  1. Maximizes # of cards in single screen

  2. Space for small profile picture

  3. Space for kid name

  4. Space for parent name

  5. Button for adding friend

  6. Card is dismissible

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Profile picture

Research showed that parents are sensitive about profile pictures, so we wanted to ensure that our designs addressed those concerns:

  1. Utilizes existing, approved artwork

  2. Establishes brand identity

  3. No gender or bias with outfit / action

  4. Differentiates contact suggestions

  5. Optimized for small, round picture

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Design considerations

Before starting my explorations I met with key stakeholders to identify any design constraints and principles that I should be aware of...

  1. I met with the relevant Facebook and Messenger Kids product teams to discuss relevant product standards and guidelines since this project involves both products

  2. I met with Legal, Privacy, and Safety XFN to learn about any relevant regulations and risk areas since this project involves sharing kid information

Design constraints

  • Legal requirements - can’t show kid profile picture in feed, only kid name allowed

  • Design system compliance - compliant with Facebook and Messenger Kids design systems

  • Time and resource limitations - fast turnaround required, so utilize and / or modify existing Facebook feed elements as much as possible

Design principles

  • Maintain parent trust and kid safety - protect sensitive kid information and ensure that parents are comfortable with this info in Facebook feed