Design research

Facebook Inc.

Facebook user Experience REsearch

Facebook Events Product Team

When I joined the Facebook Events team at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, I was thrilled to witness the organization’s deep commitment to design research. After joining daily team meetings and spending time with the product managers, it became clear that the cross-functional team needed an updated understanding of the user experience journey to inform a new suite of products.

Problem: The team was working off an outdated user experience journey that didn’t consider mobile-first users.

When I joined the team, there were so many interesting research questions within the team, which is very common and great, but you have to prioritize. After learning about various priorities for the cross-functional events product team, meeting with events researchers, and reviewing prior work, I determined that the team really needed to understand the entire user experience for attending public events found via Facebook. Prior work conducted by the research team was considered outdated, and also focused on individual phases of the user experience research journey (e.g., discovery, planning, coordination, attending, reflection). The product manager and I agreed that by examining the user experience from start to finish, we could gain useful insights into the transitions between phases in order to reduce pain points and promote a delightful end-to-end experience.

Method: 40-participant Diary Story (US participants, representative of average FB Public Events products)

In order to gain access into the user experience journey from start to finish (i.e. from the discovery of a public event on Facebook through attendance), I needed to conduct a diary study, which would allow me to collect in-context data about our users over a week. To aid data collection, I used Dscout, a virtual diary study platform that allowed users to easily track their experience using Facebook Events products to discover an event to attend. Using D-scout I set up a week’s worth of provocations/or prompts, some required open-ended responses. Intermittently, I asked for media responses, like pictures or video reflections, allowing me to collect high-fidelity responses.

As a bonus data point that led to my next study, I asked participants at the end of the 7-day study period (after they had attended an event), to create their own user experience roadmaps using paper and pen or digital tools and submit them to me via the app. The results were really incredibly informative and later I created a gallery of poster-sized user-generated experience journey roadmaps. I then led the cross-functional team in a design workshop within the gallery to identify insights that directly informed their work.

Key Finding: Data collected during the diary study revealed a previously unknown stage of the user experience journey that I called “The Bump”

Analysis of the diary study data revealed emotional affect highs and lows. I referred to it as “the experiential roller coaster”. There were emotional highs during the discovery and attendance phases. Emotional lows were revealed during the planning and coordination phases. And most interestingly a positive emotional “bump” between the planning and coordination stages was revealed. The bump happens right after participants had confirmed they would attend an event (commonly through buying tickets or confirming with a friend that they would absolutely attend a particular event) and before truly setting the plan to attend in motion (commonly performed by deciding aspects like whose driving/where’s parking).

Most importantly for the broader cross-functional team, The Bump revealed new product opportunities. For instance, The Bump stage could be a prime opportunity to encourage “sharing” (via making a post on Facebook) that can lead others to discover the event and know someone who is attending (prior research demonstrates that knowing someone who is attending an event makes one more likely to attend).

Two other key findings were revealed, including more detailed information about two common kinds of public events: community events (e.g., farmers’ markets, food markets, craft markets, etc.) and “special” events (e.g., concerts, sport events, etc.). Essentially, community events have few barriers to entry and result in pleasant experiences, but are not immensely memorable. Special events result in high pain points along the planning and coordination stages but result in highly memorable experiences that users want to share and revisit at later dates. These insights led to product brainstorming about ways to get users to community events using “day-of-event” notifications (since little planning and coordination needed to happen ahead of time). Findings also point to opportunities to reduce pain points experienced by users attempting to attend “special” events, such as building in features that ease planning and coordination tensions (e.g., in-app ticket buying options, in-app directions and tips for parking, etc.)

Impact: Revealing the previously unknown “Bump” stage of the user experience journey led to a new feature (in partnership with Eventbrite) that would prompt a call-to-action for users to share that they had purchased tickets to a public event.

Moreover, The “Public Events Journey Roller Coaster” became the model for understanding the UX journey for public events. This model was presented at Facebook’s quarterly all-hands meeting. The “Bump” aspect of the user experience journey became the subject of a design sprint, which led to a new feature (integrated with Eventbrite). The User Generated roadmap gallery installation was visited by every research group at Menlo Park and highlighted in UX research year-end highlights.