Should Facebook require users to upload profile photos during onboarding? How would you go about deciding this?

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Should Facebook require users to upload profile photos during onboarding? How would you go about deciding this?

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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Raj · Answer 1 · 2020-10-23T18:56:50+0000

Facebook mission is to connect people in a more meaninignful way.

So to me, this is a tradeoff situation. One 1 hand we want users to upload the photos in the signup process and make it a mandatory step before proceeding , on the other hand we are thinking of making this step as optional and let user proceed even without uploading the pic.

I would like to :

1. Define Pros-Cons of Pic Uplaod during signup process(tieing back to company's goal and strategy)

2. Define Hypothesis based on which option I see more Pros

3. Run A/B Test for 5% of Random Traffic from users follwoing same steps from a geography of equal activity.

4. Tradeoff and Evaluate : Define 2-3 key Metrics which I would like to track to make a decision along with keeping 'User' as my focus with 'Impact on Users' as a criteria

5. Give my recommendation

Hope this strcuture works for you IW:

Lets start:

Scenarios	Mandatory: Upload Profile Photo	Optional: Upload Profile Photo
Pros	1. Validate User's Identity to some extent for the overall Fb community & keep it safe and trust worthy 2. Increase recognizable/familiarity and acceptablity by friends, family and potential 'new connection' 3.Gives users a platform to oopen up and express themselves with the profile photo(remove shyness among people onboarding 1st time) 4. Increased engagement with connections and Groups	1. Lesser friction to the sign up process 2.Faster Onboarding 3. Higher Activation Rate( customer who registered and completed sign-up process) 4.1st time onboarders will have the felxiblity to upload the Profile Pic based on their own comfortness
Cons	1.Brings Friction to the sign-up Process 2.Few 1st Time onboarders may have some reservations/shyness uploading personal photo 3. Few 1st time onboarders may not trust FB or FB community with keep the Profile Picture Safe( fear of it getting morphed) 4. Few 1st timers may also fear on their identity revealation(ex. few regions where women are not allowed to use technology or keep their face covered)	1. User might not be able to engage with others much since they dont have any profile and the user/group on other side might not receognize or trust based on Name and few personal details 2. User might become frustrated with lesser acceptabity by other and may churn off

Hypothesis: Keeping Fb's mission in mind and upload picture' as a feature, the goal seems to be driving engagement.
My hypothesis based on the pros and cons is that I feel that we should keep profile pic as 'mandatory' step ,because long term, it will drive more enagement for the users and they will feel more motivate to continue returning on FB more often.

We can test this hypothesis by running a quick A/B testing for a 4-week period on a random traffic size of 5% from same geography with similar level of user activities. In my asumption 4 weeks should be give us good enough data to run validation to monitor:

1. Conversion Rate(How many customer are completing this step in sign-up process) per day/week/month

2. Churn Rate(Opposite of #1) per day/week/month

3. DAU/MAU( Users login in to FB and atleast do 1 activity- view,like, comment,share etc)

4. Average Session time per user per day/week/month

5.Average number of 'friend request or join group request' accepted per user by others (Risk : It could also include the users who are senidng random friend requests to unknown people and getting denied. One way to mitigate this is to funnel it out for users who sent friends request to 2nd or 3rd connections only) per day/week/month

5. Average number of interactions(comments or DMs) per user with other FB members/group per day/week/month

I am assuming that we will see higher validation for users with uploaded profile pic and DAU/MAU will be higher for them. My recoemmendation is to continue keeping profile pic as 'mandatory' as FB would like to keep more engaged users than just the count of total users. If user without progfile pic arent able to engage with other on Fb community, then they are probably not the righ target segment for FB for now.

Aravinthganesh GM · Answer 2 · 2020-06-02T12:18:10+0000

Hypothesis:

Before we need to decide about upload profile photo during onboarding, we need to figure out what impact this feature will create. The hypothesis here is, upload profile picture during onboarding will create an effect on the activation rate.

Reason for Hypothesis:

The uploading profile photo is part of the initial signup process. Since signup occurs on the facebook homepage, It won't create an impact on User Acquisition.
According to facebook, the users will stay in the platform once they added a minimum of 7 friends in 10 days.
These are some possible scenarios the upload profile may create
- Profile picture makes user identification easy, so the users can add more friends in a shorter time which will increase their engagement in the platform.
- Users discontinue the signup process in between which will reduce the activation rate.

How to decide?

Create an A/B test with the upload profile picture during the signup as a variable.
Run the test with two equal and randomized set of users.
Monitor the change in activation rate (No of users created account/No of users come to the home page) and engagement level in initial days (Time spent by users in the platform on first ten days).
Make the final decision based on the below matrix.

Initial Engagement Level - Increase

Initial Engagement Level - Decrease

Activation Rate - Increase

Add Upload Photo during Signup

If Activation Rate Change > Engagement Rate Change,

Don't add the feature

Else

Add the feature

Activation Rate - Decrease

If Activation Rate Change > Engagement Rate Change,
Don't add the feature
Else
Add the feature

Don't add the feature.

PM Guru · Answer 3 · 2022-06-14T16:21:25+0000

Mission of Facebook is to enable people to build community and bring world closer together. I see pros/cons of this trade off. So Mr Interviewer, I will answer this way :

1. Define Pros/Cons

2. List Questions to answer

3. Leverage Existing FB data to answer questions(before running any additional A/B test)

4. Recommendation

1. Define Pros/Cons

Pros: Picture is worth 1000 words, so adding your picture to the profile gives a legitimacy to the account (same name multiple people) & builds a certain level of trust within other FB users - trust is a must to drive engagement in a healthy community.

Cons: But, this creates an added friction in the Onboarding process (may not have a recent picture, shy to share picture) or cultural biases (not considered correct to share pic in an open forum) and could result in churn.

2. Questions

a. Do FB accounts that have a profile picture have higher levels of engagement vs. accounts that dont have a profile picture?

Engagement = Posts, Reactions, Comments, Shares, Saves, DMs, Groups joined etc. If this is too long, we can only focus on first 4.

b. What is the distribution by time for when FB accounts add a profile picture ? (example - 80% within 1mo of onboarding, 10% within 6months, 10% never)

c. What is the net churn due to making profile picture mandatory

d. What is the net harm of having a user without profile picture?

3. Answers

a. I expect answer to be yes. [ If Answer = No, then we can keep it optional]

b. I expect answer to be 80% add profile picture within 1 month. So at this point, I would propose to make it mandatory (say that at signup and state that have 1 month to signup. After a month, take action. Action could be limit functionality on account/ terminate account etc.)

c. This will need A/B test to know adoption churn. I will let data scientist decide size, duration, timing. I expect answer to be >20% churn (not acceptable)

d. On one hand, a user without pic is a less engaged user. But isnt a less engaged user better than no user? I see two downsides: This is like an empty seat at a party because guest didnt show up and the risk of accounts without picture being fake/bot accounts. I expect there to be a strong coorelation.

4. Recommendation

Make it mandatory to have a profile picture but allow a period of 1month.
In that month, add a picture of the FB logo as the profile picture (maybe drives peer pressure to add a profile picture)
After month, decide action to take. If bots/fake account is real risk, limit functionality like ability to share/post/react that can cause net harm from fake accounts to the bigger community.

Joe_riley · Answer 4 · 2022-06-01T20:04:12+0000

Context

First off, let's just establish a common understanding of what Facebook profiles are and how users use them. When signing up for Facebook you create a profile, this profile describes you and contains a bunch of information about you. It is a form of self expression. When there is activity related to you on the platform, other users can click on your profile or search for your profile to view it.

To further frame this, Facebook's mission statement is to bring the the world closer together and give people the power to build community. Facebook profiles help bring users together by allowing users to both express themselves online and gain a better sense of the other individuals they are interacting with and connecting online. The goal of profile pictures is to let users do this in a visual manner.

Tradeoffs

Very few changes are often purely good or purely bad and requiring profile photos during onboarding is no different, let's go ahead and list out some of the potential pros and cons of doing so:

Pros

More likely to begin engaging with other users
Easier for users to know if they are connecting with the right person and engage with that user
Decrease in the number of fake accounts

Cons

Takes longer to sign up
Not all users have a recent picture of themselves
Not all users are happy with the way they look / may be shy
Users may be skeptical of giving FB more information / rights to their photo

Testing

We've done a good job of theorizing some potential positive and negative tradeoffs of requiring users to upload profile pictures during the sign up process, now the next step is to perform some testing to provide a quantitative assessment of the impact those tradeoffs make.

What we would do is perform an A/B test with 2% total of new users signing up to FB, where 1% would not be required to upload a profile picture and the other 1% would. We would then monitor and analyze the following metrics to help assess the impact of some trade offs:

% of users who start the sign up process and but don't finish -> This would help us assess whether or not the additional friction of having to upload a profile picture actually results in less users signing up. This addresses most of our cons.
# of those new sign ups reported for suspicious activity or flagged by our automated system
Average # of friends per account created -> This would assess our assumption that having a profile would make accounts more likely to have their friend requests accepted and have more requests sent to them.
% of new accounts last week that also returned this week and performed at least one interaction - We are assessing retention here and further confirming the belief that that increased engagement as measured by point #3 will lead to increased retention.

Summary

FB Profile Pictures both help users express themselves and aid in letting other users know who they are connecting with. We theorize that requiring a profile picture during the sign up process would introduce some more friction into the process, but result in users who complete the would have a better FB experience and stick around. In order to quantitative measure the impacts we've theorized, we would perform a a/b test and monitor the metrics listed above.