Facebook Business Home

Facebook Business Manager is a suite of tools that Meta had mashed together over the years to help advertisers run campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. However, it’s very complicated and very overwhelming - there’s a lot of different tools created at different times by different teams and it’s difficult to understand what they’re for or how to use them. My role was to lead a design overhaul of the homepage to make it easier for small businesses to use while also not detracting value from large businesses.

The first step was to do research. We flew down to Texas and spent time with multiple small businesses to get a sense of their day-to-day processes and how they use Facebook and Instagram to grow their businesses. This confirmed that our business tools are hard to use and our home page doesn’t do anything to support our users. It doesn’t streamline workflows for large businesses and it doesn’t steer smaller businesses towards any meaningful actions.

After running a design sprint with key stakeholders within Meta, we realized that there are too many tools and user types to create a one-size-fits-all approach. We decided to create a platform for the teams who own those tools to design into since they know their individual users better than we could.

The system also needed to be future-proof and scale as new tools were created to satisfy user needs going forward. We approached designing this platform as if it were a Business OS where the homepage were the widgets on the launch screen and the tools were the apps. The home screen is intended to give a sense of what’s working and what needs to be done to improve results.

We created a column system to help build a consistent silhouette while supporting different scenarios and use cases:

The left column is larger to provide more room for context, role-based cards that would change depending on a user’s tools, jobs and preferences. These are more flexible for moving data around. This is the column partner teams could build into.
The right column is smaller for scannable item lists and other universal cards that all users need. These are consistent but fill with different types of data, like alerts or guidance depending no the user’s context and needs. They are static to keep important items in the same place for all users.

The idea for each card is to convey necessary information for a user to understand what they need to act on then quickly take them to the place to do the work. We created a card component framework that was flexible enough for teams to build into, but consistent enough to feel cohesive.

To act quickly, for our MVP, we decided to start small and leverage our current users: large advertisers who mostly know what they are doing. We also ran workshops with relevant partner teams to understand their user’s specific needs to create a scoped MVP to test the design and the concept.

Our MVP solution includes:

Data visualizations to compare and contrast account performance and quickly identify areas to work on
A quick way to access your Facebook Pages for quick posts and edits
Critical alerts from the system bubbled up front and center to ensure they’re seen
Guidance cards to begin building a comms channel to help users grow

We shipped this solution to 25% of our MVP audience (large businesses) and 10% of our total users to get signal on the design and concept. Our test achieved net neutral revenue and visitation metrics, which helped establish a baseline for the framework to be built upon with minimal impact to our existing users (negative revenue and metrics is common with redesigns).

Created at Meta
Role: Project Lead, UX Design, Visual Design