Communities: Expert Discovery

Helping experts find and join existing communities that need their expertise.

Facebook leads as one of the largest platforms that people use to connect to their interest based communities, but lacks the ability to help users connect and find expertise in these communities. This effort was solely focused on empowering experts to start, grow, discover, and engage in communities.

project Type
In-app experience built for end users.
Design
Visual design, interaction design, product strategy, content, and user research

Research

Understanding the problems

In order to build 0-1 experiences in a new space, we had to ensure that we understood the different set of problems we needed to prioritize and solve for.

What is the value?

For Experts, they didn't understand why they should join groups and what value that would bring them.

For Admins, they didn't know what value an Expert would bring to their groups.

Where and How?

For Experts, they didn't know what groups needed their help or where to even find them.

For Admins, they didn't know how to tell who was an expert, and how to determine what experts would be value-able to their group.

Understanding the users

After understanding some foundational problems in this space, we needed to do some understand work around the users. Answering the questions; who are we building this for, Who will use this, and what are the different user types and behaviors?

Strategy

Defining our goals

To begin on our vision of building and connecting Expert experiences, we needed to first prioritize building an experience where we could enable experts not yet connected to groups to identify their expertise, and signal their interest in joining these communities. While also enabling group admins to discover and invite experts not yet connected to their communities. For these goals, we wanted to first focus on two Expert groups, our tail and torso.

The tail experts

These experts are just starting out and have a higher desire to grow.

The Torso Experts

These experts are more intermediate and are more likely and willing to adopt new tools and strategies to up-level and grow further.

Execution

Ideas to solution

During this phase, there were numerous collaboration efforts with cross functional partners such as; Content, Research and Engineering. From UX flows and wireframes to aligning with other product teams, this process was a step into finding an ideal solution for MVP.

Flow Charts

Flow chart creation for different use cases to envision the overall picture.

Wireframes

Creation of wireframes that draft an initial visual for potential layout and direction for two core experiences; education and application.

Designing for a multi product universe

The experience we were trying to build would have to span and touch multiple products within the Facebook ecosystem, we had to ensure there were no gaps within the proposed experience, while aligning with cross product teams on changes, additions and patterns.

Application Entry points

When thinking through how and where users would access the experience, we needed to work across multiple teams, such as Profile, Newsfeed, Groups, and Privacy to determine the best strategy and system patterns.

Application iterations

The core part of the overall experience was the Expert application. The idea was to collect information from the user to help them find the right groups and opt-in to being discovered by group Admins.

Stepper Application

Exploring a step by step application experience, which asks for a series of 3 questions.

One Page Application

Exploring a one sheet application that also prompts a series of 3 questions. After conversations with research and our learnings, we needed to think through how we would make this even shorter.

The experience

To increase Expert engagement and impact in communities, the prioritization was to build an experience focused on helping Experts find and join groups where they can share their value-able knowledge, while also creating an experience where group Admins would be able to find the right Experts to invite to their groups.

Expert Education

Identified users will see a promotional card on their newsfeed where they can learn more about how and why they should become an Expert.

Expert Opt-in

Users interested in becoming a group Expert can opt-in and be discovered by group Admins by filing out a short application, where they pick the topics they have expertise in.

Admin Discovery + Invite

Once an Expert has opted in, group Admins will be able to find them and invite them to their groups.

Launched 2021

These experiences were launched and announced as part of our new Expert initiative. Read the launch article here.