If you are the product manager for new user registration at Facebook, and user research comes to you with a suggestion to remove picture requirement, how would you decide what to do?

Let me once clarify the picture requirement during user registration à We are assuming that currently, when a new user is coming to Facebook and signing up, to complete the signup he/she needs to upload a profile picture. The suggestion is to make this profile picture requirement optional (not mandatory) to complete the registration or sign-up process.

Was the user research carried out for any specific region or user segment? à No

Is there any business objective or user research key takeaways I should be aware of before proceeding? à None

I will structure my answer by developing an A/B test, looking at the user actions, discussing the corresponding metrics which will matter in the decision making and ultimately brainstorm the metric tradeoffs which will help us decide the next step to be taken.

The mission of Meta and Facebook is give people the power to build communities and bring the people closer together. Off late, Meta has been facing competition from other social media apps such as TikTok, and streaming services and platforms such as YouTube. All such applications have been vying for user’s attention and time which is limited. So, I would consider the major business objective of Meta currently is to increase and maintain its market share by bringing in new users and providing the new/existing users with better engagement so as not to lose them to competitors.

Now, lets talk about the A/B test. Since the most active users on these social media apps fall in the age group of 15years to 40years, let’s target this demographic segment for the A/B test. The A/B test will have a control group who will be shown the current user sign up flow and a test group who will be shown the modified user sign up flow with profile pic being optional. The A/B test can be run for a month or 30 days. The hypothesis of A/B test is whether making uploading of profile pic optional in user signup flow leads to more user sign ups with engagement levels remaining same or increasing (no drop).

User actions:

1. User provides basic details for sign up
2. User uploads profile pic for signing up
3. User logs into Facebook
4. User sends/accepts friend requests
5. User scrolls through feed
6. User reacts/comments to others’ content
7. User uploads/edits profile pic
8. User uploads content

Metrics of importance:

1. No. of users signing up daily, weekly, monthly with and without the profile pic
2. No. of instances users come to Facebook but do not complete the signup process and drop
3. Percentage of new signed up users logging into Facebook daily, weekly, monthly
4. Percentage of new signed up users sending/accepting friend requests
5. Number of friend request sent/accepted per newly signed up user D/W/M
6. Percenatge of new signed up users engaging (react and comment) with other’s content
7. Total engaged content per newly signed up user D/W/M
8. Percentage of new signed up users uploading content
9. Total content uploaded per newly signed up user D/W/M
10. Average time spent by new signed up users on Facebook
11. Percentage of newly signed up users uploading profile pic after logging in

Metric Tradeoffs (assuming Facebook already has benchmark values for all the above metrics):

1. If the number of users signing up without uploading of profile pic increases substantially, it is a direct indication that uploading of profile pic is a hindrance and better to keep picture requirement optional. If maximum users sign up with a profile pic even when its optional, it can be an indication that the proposed change is not necessary but analysis of subsequent engagement by the users need to be done.
2. If the number of instances users come to Facebook but do not complete the signup process drops tremendously, it can again be a direct indication that uploading of profile pic is a hindrance in the registration process and better to keep it optional.
3. For all the metrics “3”, “4”, “5”, “6”, “7”, “8”, “9” and “10”, if the measured metric value for test group is greater than or same as (not less than) the respective benchmark values, the modification of making profile picture optional during signup can be implemented.
4. In the test group, if a huge percentage of the folks who signup without uploading the profile picture but log into Facebook and upload a profile picture will indicate that the A/B test modification is good to implement.

Keeping in mind the broader goal of creating communities by bringing in new users and higher engagement levels among users, if the news users signing up increases tremendously with 0 impact on engagement levels, the change of making profile picture optional during the sign up process should be implemented.