Facebook

LEAD DESIGNER • END OF FEED Experience

introducing explore feed

with two billion unique views/day & one hour of total session time on news feed daily, content is created and consumed real fast.

when familiar posts start to show up on news feed, users take it as a cue to refresh the feed for more new content &/or leave because there’s nothing new to see.

pivoting from news feed into a new tab called explore feed could help close this gap while differentiating connected content from unconnected content.

there are three ways to pivot, below is an exploration set of the possibilities.

learnings

keeping users oriented during this pivot is challenging. users need to know where they are, otherwise they feel a distrust &/or a confusion about what’s connected/unconnected content.

tap based pivots are high friction. it feels like a dead end & there’s high cognitive load to make a decision without knowing what’s on the other side.

scroll based pivots are misleading, because the system is taking you to another tab and yet it feels like you’re scrolling deeper inside of news feed. also, it’s not deterministic, you can’t get back to that point where you’ve “scrolled into explore feed” in a new session easily.

swipe based pivots are the most promising. the interaction matches what’s happening in the ui. you are swiping over into another tab. overall, this gesture mapped more naturally for our android users then it did for our ios users. swiping between tabs was already a mental model android users leveraged to navigate tabs in other apps.