Building identity flexibility for Facebook Groups
How might we lower the barrier to entry and encourage participation in groups while always make a user’s choices clear?
My role
As the content design manager across Groups, I oversaw the creation and launch of our identity features, for both pseudonymity (“nicknames”) and anonymity.
My role involved partnering with other leads to sign off on a product vision, define the design strategy, and I was responsible for ensuring clarity and feature adoption through our content design choices.
Design leadership
I partnered with other Groups Design leads to run a design sprint for our identity features, which included communicating across the Design team, reviewing strategic narratives for leadership sign-off, and giving regular UX feedback on proposed designs, for both content and product design.
Content design strategy
I directly supported an IC working across our identity features, providing regular feedback and sign-off on the work, which was highly legally sensitive. We were relied on rolling user research to inform the value props used to frame the feature and underpin the content design strategy as a whole.
We also needed to be clear about the distinction between pseudonymity and anonymity in the product. Facing differences in opinion about how we would do this, I guided the team on clear, standardized, in-product terms to distinguish the two, which resulted in proper terminology usage, better feature positioning, and an unblocked team.
Outcome
The feature exceeded goals for adoption, participation rates and retention. It also received highly positive press.
Further expansion of nicknames
