LEAD DESIGNER • ONLINE STATUS EXPERIENCE

meaningful social interactions

one of the core values on news feed is the ability to support and enable meaningful social interactions.

in its simplest form, this could be a comment on a news feed post. comments can become conversations & conversations can become direct messages which can then become irl connections.

online status

one of the challenges with this new ui was the need to respect & maintain all other existing states on news feed at any given time.

elements such as profile pics, reactions, nested chats, & account privacy settings between varying degrees of social connections needed to be respected.

designing for different platforms

when these designs were being considered, facebook still had square profile images- remember those? ios was testing circular profile images & android was support square images.

additionally, fb messenger had its own variation of online status which also integrated with news feed. but sometimes messenger folks didn’t use news feed & vice versa.

it was critical to account for all these scenarios throughout the designs.

learnings

ultimately we learned that online status drove meaningful social interactions, when you see a friend online- you’re more likely to send them a message & more likely to receive a message.

this back & forth of comments became the beginnings of a conversation that led to direct messages. over time those direct messages become irl connections that cycle through the News Feed experience & give it deeper meaning.