How would you improve FB profiles and how would you determine its success?

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How would you improve FB profiles and how would you determine its success?

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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Leonardo Fernandes · Answer 1 · 2021-12-21T23:13:54+0000

1) Describe the product

FB profiles is the feature where people can share their personal and profissional information. For instance, they can share their educational path, professional roles, marital status, and birthdays. Moreover, they also change some settings in their profile such as privacy, sharing and tagging rules, and many others. Is that right?

2) Clarify the Scope

Great! So definetely we can improve this feature by many ways, such as for specific geographical locations, user segmentation, or platforms, such as mobile and web. I would assume that we not focusing on any of these in particular, we are just trying to improve in a more general way. Does it sound good?

Nice! One last thing. There are a lot of improvements we can also do in Profiles by looking at specific actions and decisions an user can make. I would like to assume that we are not looking at any specific one, such as Birthdays for example. Is that ok?

3) Choosing the Goal

Ok, so looking at Meta's goal of connecting people all over the world, I believe that the improvement goal should be towards something like it. For instance, we could focus on engagement/usage of Facebook Profiles, because if people use more this feature, they can provide more information to others, therefore increasing and enriching connections. What do you think about it?

--> Ok, perfect! So, just be on the same page, we are going to improve FB Profiles in a general way, without looking at any specifics, whose goal is to increase engagement with this tool, thus with the entire platform.

4) User Groups

- Complete Users: have completed all information in the profiles. Constantly visit his/her profile to make adjustments and insert new information. This user is aware of the settings, such as privacy and tagging.

- Average Users: have completed part of the information in profiles. Do not visit this page very often, and do not have changed settings for a while.

- Not-Complete Users: have not completed any part of their profiles, if they have, just one or two parts. Do not know how to change settings, and do not visit this page at all.

--> I would like to focus on the Average Users. I believe this group are more active in the platform, which would help us achieve better results with ideas we can come up with rather than the Not-Complete Users, who tend to be not so active, demonstrating that they might need more engagement from other means.

5) Pain Points

Some pain points for the Average User are:

- they do not have much time on a daily basis

- they do not like to waste time with stuff other than interactions

- they do not have patiente to complete information

- they can be skeptical about sharing too much information

In terms of prioritization, I believe that we can tackle the first 3 together, since they are connected with filling up information in a faster way.

6) Solutions

a) Show on newsfeed a profile field to be completed without changing page;

b) Make suggestions to the user regarding that blank field;

c) Show benefits of having fields completed and changing in settings;

d) Send regular notifications to the user reminding him to complete the fields;

e) Show statistics of their friends who have that field completed;

7) Prioritization

I would use the RICE method, baucase it integrates user impact and also cost of development into one score. Looking at our solutions, I would say that implementing c,d,e would be low cost with medium to low impact. However, in terms of impact and reach, I believe that a,b would extract the most benefit to our goal, and that's where we should focus on, even though the cost is higher.

8) Metrics of Success

After implementing a) and b), we can come up with some metrics of success, such as:

- % change in completing field on Profiles from peopel who use directly in the newsfeed versus who dont

- % change in interactions/engagement of these users who used the new feature vs those who dont

- % change in session time of these users who used the new feature vs those who dont

- % users who accept the suggestion versus who dont vs who change it

9) Summary

We are trying to improve FB profiles in a general way. The goal is to increase engagement in the platform by motivating users to fill their profiles fields. Selecting Average-Users who have not completed all the information on their profiles, I selected two solutions to implement based on impact, reach, and cost, which are a) and b), and their metrics of success if implemented.

Danielle Terk · Answer 2 · 2021-11-29T16:42:16+0000

Describe the product

I assume you mean the profile page of a Facebook user.

This page allows a user to set what is and is not shown publicly. It also gives the user quick access to add and view friends, view and edit posts, and edit personal information.

Do I understand the product and its purpose correctly?

Clarify scope

Is there a specific improvement you have in mind? More engagement, or monetization for example?

Or a specific user segment or device? App users vs site users or US users vs emerging markets for example?)

(Assuming no)

Goal

Facebook’s goal is to bring people together. The richer a customer’s profile is, the richer the experience is for the user viewing it. As a goal I’d like to choose an increased level of information completed.

User groups

There are two distinct user groups. The user editing his own profile page, and the user viewing someone else’s profile.

Within the user editing its own page, there are groups as well.

1. Power users (a user who updates their profile regularly)

2. Casual users (a user who sometimes updates their profile)

3. One time users (a user who set up a profile when creating a Facebook account the first time, but did not edit it since)

Then for groups 1 and 2, we can further divide users who are updating their personal info and cover photos and users who mainly use the profile page to edit posts that appear on their wall

I’d like to pick the one-time user group. I am assuming this group is large, so the reach will be large. And assuming for most of these users there is very little content on their profile, the impact to increased content will be the greatest for this group.

User pain points

· The user is eager to get started with Facebook, adding information during sign up is delaying the user from getting started. (I am assuming that adding at least basic level of information is mandatory to complete sign up)

· The value of adding this information is not clear

· Deciding which photo to use for your profile is difficult especially for first-time users

I would prioritize them in this order. I think for a first-time user, getting started is the most important goal of signing up.

Solutions

1. Reduce mandatory fields to complete sign up. But prompt the user after x times or x minutes to complete the profile, where more fields are mandatory

2. During signup, show the user a rich dummy profile as an example to clearly communicate the value of this step

3. Using visual ML to understand the most common type of profile photo for the user’s demographic, suggest a few photos from the user’s library

4. Autocomplete several fields based on the contact information in phone and other public information

5. Prompt the user to complete the profile at a later date, showing what it would look like to others when current blank fields would be filled out

6. Provide an incentive to complete profile, such as an in-game reward if the user plays games

7. Have a contest for the user with the most creative profile

I think #3 is interesting but costly to implement. It also only addresses the profile photo, not the other items in the user’s profile.

I think #4 would be helpful to the user and will result in a higher completion rate, but accuracy may be a problem, also the user would need to provide access to other apps which could a blocker for some users

I’d like to prioritize #2, as it will be easy to implement, and can quickly show the user the value of a filled-in profile, plus provide inspiration for profile or background photo. This would only apply to users signing up. I am assuming this group is still large today as Facebook expands into developing worlds.

I’d like to prioritize #5 as well, which is essentially the same solution but after a user already signed up. The risk with prompting at a later time is that it can be disruptive if the user is completing other tasks on Facebook at the time.

#6 has a greater cost associated with it, but for those users who play games it will have a high impact. (Assuming most users play some mobile game where Facebook can buy in-app currency)

Metrics

Broken down by user type and device

Primary

· Overall % of profile completion

Secondary

· % of profile completion within the first 30 days

· Engagement with profile page (edit or view any item)

Summary

The goal is to enrich the user’s profile information by including more and higher quality information. I selected first-time users as I assume they have the lowest quality profile page and thus will have the biggest impact. The biggest pain point is the delay in the sign up process. As a solution, we will show the user a very rich dummy profile page as inspiration, but that can be easily clicked away. Then additionally we will prompt the user to complete the profile page periodically, potentially offering incentives to do so.

Gaurav · Answer 3 · 2018-08-29T02:01:28+0000

Assuming it's a personal profile page and not a business one.

On taking a quick scan, there are several components that are part of the profile page:

Profile & Cover Picture
Ability to see whether the person is a friend or not and to send the message
Editor to write on the person's wall
Intro, Photos, and Friends bricks
Timeline

Now coming back to the improvement of the page, what is the end goal we're trying to achieve? There could be many:

Increase revenue by increasing the number of connections made for each profile view by x%. More friends in the network will lead to more time spent on FB and thus more ads revenue
Increase direct engagement by increasing the number of messages sent both through messenger and on the user's wall

I'm inclined towards picking up the first.

Next, I want to have a user in mind for which we need to improve the page. A few of the personas that visit the profile pages are:

A user that visits the profile page of a friend already in the network to connect or check info
A user that searches for an old friend or acquaintance with which she might have a few mutual friends
A user that wants to add a newly met acquaintance to the network

The first persona is not relevant to our goal and of the 2nd and 3rd persona, 2nd is the one I'm more inclined to focus on.

In both friends and photos sections, we've 9 tiles each in the 3*3 matrix. Thus, we can show only a limited number of mutual friends and photos.

Right now, photos chosen are based on reverse chronological order and 9 mutual friends are randomly picked from the big list.

My hypothesis is that if in the friends' section we show friends that I recently had any kind of positive interaction through comments/messages/likes, the user will be more inclined to add the user to the network. And similarly, in the photos section giving priority to photos with your mutual friends, if there are any, will yield the similar result. As it increases the likeability towards the person whose profile I'm checking out.