Design a Facebook news product.

FB's mission is to help connect people in various ways and build communities with the help of the products they build for them. With the help of News as a product, we will be able to allow people to read what is going around them in terms of events and elsewhere. People being able to share current events and discussing about them would bring them closer, share opinions and even educated each other.

Approach:

At this time - I'd like to discuss the users for News and the platform, then proceed to discuss their pain points with prioritization, list out potential solutions and then discuss some success defining metrics.

User Types:

1. News Providers (High content volume, lower volume in terms of people)

2. News Readers (Massive Volume)

Here, I'd like to focus on News Readers and a part of FB app because of the sheer volume of people that are on FB that usually like to read about what is going on around them and elsewhere, and are usually found on the FB app rather than on the web.

Pain Points:

1. Being a reader myself, I think it would be hard to distinguish between valid and fake news, because there is too much information out there without validation and can mislead people.

2. Unstructured content in the news feed, because topics change based on who shared what – potentially creates an emotional conundrum?

3. Don’t know or understand what might be a valuable bit of information to share with others in the network, because some information is quite sensitive or crude or graphic that others may not appreciate.

4. Too much clutter on one topic alone. Ex: What did President Trump say today and how people reacted towards it.

Prioritization Matrix (Pain Amount / Priority):

1. H / H -- Because, knowing what is real and what isn’t is very important as the information eventually lead to actions and reactions

2. H / H -- Because, people in different moods like to read different things and it becomes important what is presented in front of them. After social media is deeply tied with emotions.

3. M / L – because most people don’t understand their audience really well. While the pain point is real, but may not be urgent.

4. L / L – because while people may get bored of seeing the same information often, this acts very much as a news channel – as multiple people in their network may share the same news – therefore, it may not be very high on priority.

Solution(s):

Since the high amount of 'Pain' and impact is associated with emotions, my proposed solution would revolve around structured content with prioritization Matrix (Impact / Effort / Priority):

1. Ask the user for topics they may be interested in (M / M / 4) . Potential risk: It may require permissions to showcase specific content that may make people uncomfortable due to privacy issues.

2. Suggest reading/topics based on recent readings shared by peers (H / L / 1). Potential risk: Privacy issues in terms of what all is being tracked. Reason for priority would be the social sharing of content, which would bring people together.

3. Curate content based on people’s likes (M / L / 3). Potential risk: Likes may not be accurate and change over time.

4. Allow categories of topics as filters (H / M / 2). Potential risk: Multiple tags on the content may create noise for the user.

5. Provide notifications of “Stories you may be interested in” (M / H / 5). Potential risk: Privacy concerns

Priority should be given to solution with suggesting the reading suggested based on recent readings shared by peers as sharing within the network will still happen if content is liked.

Success Metrics

1. # of views on the content

2. Session length of a user on the content shared by their peer

3. Session length of a user on similar content that wasn’t shared by their peer (North star metric)

4. # of views of the post

5. # of reactions on the post

6. # of comments on the post

7. # of Clicks

8. # of days the post stayed in circulation due to engagement (got reacted or commented on).

Summary:

My role was to design Facebook News product. The goal was to design a news product that provided information to people while allowing them to connect with each other. I narrowed down the product as part of the FB app, and then the user type to News reader due to the sheer volume of people that read content on Facebook. I narrowed down the pain point having unstructured on content based on prioritization.

I proceeded to put multiple solutions on the table, and based on impact - I prioritized making “suggest reading/topics based on recent readings” as the MVP with a north star metric of session length of a user on similar content that wasn’t shared by a peer.

Lokesh Kumar R · Answer 2 · 2020-08-23T07:20:40+0000

What exactly do we mean by news product? A product where users can get to know the latest news

Do we plan to have this as a feature in our core-app or a separate version? That's something I would like you to decide

Do we have any preference in terms of location or user segment? In terms of location, we are plan to launching it at single geography and later expand it in the future.

So with this clarity, I would like to tackle the problem in parts. First, I would like to see what's the goal of Facebook as a whole and what would be a reasonable goal for the product. With that decided, Next, let me check out the different types of users. Prioritize one among them and then, list out their needs and then come up with solutions for a particular need. Finally, would prioritize the solutions and then list out a few probable pitfalls and metrics that could be checked to decide the success of the product.

GOAL:

The goal of Facebook is to empower people to build a meaningful community and bring the World closer every day.

So with this in mind, I feel that the most suitable goal for the product will be to

"Build a Product that gives away the latest news and helps people to connect with each other and thus finally to form a Happier more meaningful community".

USERS:

People above 50 years
People between 25 years and 50 years
People between 18 and 25 years
People below 18 years

Of the above-said groups, it is 3 that I would like to focus on due to various reasons with respect to FB's Major goal. They are

People between 25 years & 50 years are working folks who love to network in terms of professional-level more than a discussion on the current affairs and stuff that happen around them in a place like FB
While People below 18 years are officially kids, whose aim is to spend their time lavishly with fun and won't want a product like news as they feel its too boring and something unfit for time passing
People above 50 years could be another right segment to focus on as they are mostly retired or working at some managerial role and thus tend to gather news about the whole sector where they are working so as to improve their company to match the rising competition.
Coming to our selected segment, People between 18 years and 25 years, they are college-going students who are pretty free compared to others and tend to be too tech-savvy who try to adapt to the changes pretty easily. They also try to make friends in their college and try to get to know what's happening around them.

So with the above reasons, I would like to conclude once again that the Selected segment will be 18 years - 25 years segment.

Needs/ Painpoints:

Users in the said segment get easily bored while reading long paragraphs of news even though they are interested in the topic
They find it difficult to get to know the happenings in their own campus.
Find the usual way of news showcased in the app to be too monotonous

Of these said Points I would love to prioritize the second one ass our goal was to showcase the recent happenings and help the user to build their own community.

Probable Solutions:

Incorporate a new section in the official pages of colleges titled "NEWS", where the users associated with the page could enter the news which could be showcased as tiles. They will receive a notification once a new tile gets posted.
FB could build a new feature where the entered news gets shortened automatically using NLP Algorithms and shown as tiles.
Have a standalone app where the college can post their news in a short crisp form.

All the above-mentioned solutions will also have the usual abilities given to the users such as reacting, commenting, and sharing.

Of all these solutions, Let's prioritize right away.

Prioritization Matrix On a Sclae of 5 (Reach/ Impact/ Confidence/ Effort)

Solutions 1: (4/3/2/2)

Net Score: 4 * 3 * 2 /2 = 12

Due to the fact that the news gets posted in a tile version and notification being sent, the reach gets increased, which automatically improves the impact as every college student will be interested in knowing what is happening on his campus. Confidence is a bit medium as there might be various other organizations within the campus trying to achieve the same, and thus a simple crisp version might not get the planned reach.

Solutions 2: (4/3/3/4)

Net Score: 4 * 3 * 3 /4 = 9

The implementations of NLP will give us the news in the most concise form and save the time of both the reader and the news aggregator. This will thus have a great level of Reach, Impact, and Confidence. However, the effort needed to create one is too high.

Solutions 3: (1/3/2/3)

Net Score: 1 * 3 * 2 /3 = 2

The usage of a standalone app will decrease the reach significantly due to the fact that no one will be ready to install a separate app just to know about the happenings of the college. However, the impact will be good as there will be no distraction and the effort will be high as building an app will consume a lot of time and effort

Thus, it is pretty clear that Solution 1 should be implemented.

Pitfalls:

For the said solution, the user has to post a concise version on his own and thus might not know if the concise version is as effective as it is compared to the new one.
The user still might get distracted pretty easily.

Metrics:

# of News articles posted/ page
# of interactions news received (different weights for commenting, liking, and sharing)/ article
# of increased reach of a page post the implementation of news
# of DAU/MAU.

Caavi · Answer 3 · 2020-07-28T23:25:28+0000

Clarification:

When you say News Product, you mean News around the world / local news, Correct?

Yes

Alright. Let's define the user persona and their need for this product

Students - Who wants to be upto date with current affairs
General Public - Who wants to be aware of whats going on around them and around the world
Business owners - Who wants to understand how certain news could affect the business (positively or negatively)

The common need across all these user groups is to get a real news and not fake news. With the social media, the fake news is also growing rapidly causing unnecessary, fear, anger or sadness.

Let's look at the list of solution

News feed with AI generated headlines
- Eleminates articles that have flashy headlines for clickbaits
News feed snippet to show how many local users validated the authenticity of the news
- Eleminates fake news and fake forwards
News feed with Images tested by AI for Fake or altered images
- Eleminates strong emotions triggered due to false news
News feed with local population sentiment analysis
- How one feels reading a news v/s how local population feels makes the news content more relatable.

MVP or Prioritized List:

News feed with AI generated headlines that eleminates articles that have flashy headlines for clickbaits - FB HeadLines
News feed snippet to show how many local users validated the authenticity of the news that eleminates fake news and fake forwards - FBAuth Score (Anything greater than 75 is generally authentic)
- Current users can quicly react to fake vs non fake that generates the score

Summary: Build a news product that is authentic and the one that communicates the real news instead of generating a sensationalized content. The above discussed two features also alligns very well with the Facebook's mission statement: Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.