Design a learning solution for Facebook.

Question

Design a learning solution for Facebook.

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

1.7k views

Product Design category

Asked at

1.7k views

How to answer Product Design questions

Interview Guide

Top Meta (Facebook) interview questions

What is your favorite product? Why?89 answers | 263k views
How would you design a bicycle renting app for tourists?62 answers | 82.5k views
Build a product to buy and sell antiques.54 answers | 66.8k views
See Meta (Facebook) PM Interview Questions

Design a learning solution for Facebook

C: I have a couple of quick clarification questions. By learning solution, do you mean a product where the user can take lessons/courses on a wide variety of subjects?

I: Yes

C: Awesome. I’d like to start with listing out a few user segments, narrow it down and then walk through their pain points and brainstorm solutions. Does that sound good?

I: Yes

C: I can see how this ties into Facebook’s mission which is to empower people to share something that matters to them and to build communities. A learning solution would be a super helpful way for communities to share learning/study material.

C: Also, just re-thinking about the concept of “learning” as a whole, I don’t want to be limited to a narrow classroom teacher-student view and also to think outside of that.

Problem statement: Design a learning solution for Facebook
Goal: Empower users to learn/teach through facebook
Users:There are two main users. The content creators and the learners. In addition, a few other stakeholders come to mind.

#	User/Stakeholder	Priority
1.	Content creators: Those who put up courses online. Example: school teachers	2
2.	Students: Those who learn through those courses.	1
3.	Universities/ School Management/ Other academic institutions	3
4.	Legal: Ensuring copyright rules Trust & Safety: Ensuring safety of content Moderated content:	4

Prioritized user: Let’s pick students as priority 1 (since they are the largest population) and creators as priority 2. Large academic institutions are an interesting market for more professional courses; but for this product, let’s focus on everyday students. Let’s deprioritize all other users and stakeholders for now.
Pain Points/Use Cases:

#	Category	Pain point	Priority
1.	Content	Students cannot access content online.	high
2	Motivation	Students are distracted and don’t feel motivated.	high
3.	Progress	Teachers need a way to see how students are progressing.	med
4.	Communication	Students need a way to ask questions; Teachers need a way to answer student’s questions	low
5.	Testing	Teachers need a way to conduct exams	med

Criteria + Prioritized pain points: Since Facebook provides an easy way for students of a class to form a community, I would like to focus on #1and #2.
Solutions

#	Solution	Priority
1	Give teachers the ability to create online classrooms and add students to the classrooms.	high
2	Give teachers the ability to add lessons with videos, assignments and tests.	high
3	Student motivation: Break up courses into bite sizes chunks, Make courses easily accessible over the app.	low
4	Students can earn badges and share course completion within their classroom comm	med

Criteria + Prioritized solution: Using the criteria of impact to user, I would like to prioritize #1 and #2.
Merics/Goals:
1. Awareness - Surveys to see if students and teachers know about this feature/product.
2. Activation - # of classrooms, teachers who are atleast in 1 classroom.
3. Engagement - # of active classrooms (with at least 1 teacher and 1 student),Retention - DAU, MAU using the product, Increase in time spent on Facebook
4. Monetization - Deprioritizing for now

I would like to prioritize “# of active classrooms” as the main metric indicates students watching/interacting with content.

Vision: Online classrooms for Students & Teachers
Assumptions/Risks:
1. Ensuring quality and safe content : While Facebook has some built in moderation; videos may need to go through review.
2. Working with school boards and registered teachers to prevent mis-use

Abhinav Chitre · Answer 3 · 2020-07-03T13:39:41+0000

Design a learning solution for Facebook

Clarifying Questions

Why does Facebook want to build a learning solution? Assuming the interviewer asks us to tell why.

Any specific market ? Not really Facebook wants to create a product on a global scale.

Within Facebook or as a separate app. ? within Facebook.

What kind of learning videos? Can be for anything.

How it is aligned with the mission of Facebook?

Mission of Facebook is to build communities by bringing world closer. I think by building a large audience which learns on Facebook, you can build a large community and bring the world closer

Goal

The goal of this product is to increase engagement on the platform and make users come back to the platform again and again so Facebook can show more ads.

Users

There are two categories of users :-

Content Creators(who create the content) - which can be further classified into various types

Educational institutions
Ed tech platforms
Subject Matter Experts
Individual Teaching Professionals

Users - (who consume the content)

Kids
College Students
Working Professionals

I think we would choose the second type of users because that is how we will generate the most revenue when these people will consume the content and be shown ads or they click on ads.

Painpoints and Use Cases

Users would want to search for learning video or course by topic or creator name or course name

Users would want to get video recommendations based on their profile, interests etc.

Users would want to create learning videos themselves

Users would want to know more about the learning videos - creator name, topic, play time, certificate if applicable, course instructor , syllabus

Users would want to continue watching from where they left in case of learning videos or know courses they’ve started

Users would want to know what courses they completed and show case those courses on their profile.

Prioritize Painpoints

		Level of Painpoint	Impact to the Goal	Total Score
	Use case	Rate between 1 to 5	Rate between 1 to 5
1	Search videos	5	5	10
2	Recommendations	5	5	10
3	Create learning Videos or Learning Course	4	4	8
4	Know more about course or a learning video	2	2	4
5	Progress of videos being consumed our courses started	1	1	4
6	Showcase courses completed	3	3	6

We will focus on 1, 2 and 3 for the MVP.

Solutions

Learning Course Creator

This will allow the user to upload learning videos and put together a course by linking multiple videos from Facebook watch or uploading new videos as well as providing a sequence and description for each video.

The user can see the course content and videos which are a part of the course. The instructor can also add new videos or go live to start a new video which gets recorded and becomes a part of the course.

We can also leverage features such as Facebook Live and Facebook Watch to make courses available

Facebook Learning Page

We can create a page where the user can see all the courses currently being taken by him/her.

He can search for courses by topic, course instructor, course name or video title.

He can also see different sections such as

Most Liked Learning Videos on Topics that user has searched for. For example Most Liked Videos on Agile, Most liked Videos on Product Management

Most Taken Courses

Courses with a Certificate

Courses taken or learning videos watched by friends

Facebook Learning Videos on News Feed

News Feed will display recommended learning videos based on user interests, past videos watched

This initial content can be created by Facebook with the help of subject matter experts in various fields

I would go ahead with a hybrid solution combining 2 and 3rd solutions

To maintain the quality of learning content, Facebook would generate the content by collaborating with subject matter experts or skilled people from various areas.

On Facebook there would be a Facebook Learning Page/App where user can search for learning videos or courses. User can see different courses on various topics as well as courses that he has afready taken or are currently ongoing.

How to Measure the success of this solution?

Number of Courses completed per user per week

Number of learning videos watched per user per week

Minutes of content watched per user per week

Breakup of Topics most searched

% of users watching learning videos more than once per week

Daily active users / Monthly active users

Time spent on the platform browsing learning videos or courses.