Vision: Unified Business Experience

Designed at Meta in 2019 Q1
Role: Project lead, PD Manager for Business Graph team
Team: Design team and core XFN members across 3 product teams (~20 people)  


Overview

Business Graph team’s mission was to make it easy for businesses to operate across Meta family of apps and business tools. The team hypothesized that if we create a unified system that surfaces essential info for each person to make informed decisions and take efficient action, more businesses would engage with Meta’s business tools and ultimately receive better outcomes. To make our idea tangible and ready for validation, design team and core XFN representatives across 3 product teams conducted a vision sprint and came up with 2 year north star experience for our business users.

Problems to solve

It was challenging to work across our suite of business tools to take right actions to maximize return on investment because of:

  • Inefficiency in managing business across Meta’s apps and tools 

  • Hard to understand ROI due to scattered insights

  • Lack of confidence in using a right tool or a suite of tools 

  • Lack of understanding of Meta’s offerings 

Existing experience: Business Manager

 

Our users

We recognized that there is a range of businesses and what they do and need in business tools are different. There is someone like Susan, who works at a local apparel store, doing everything such as posting, responding to customer questions and advertising. On the other end of spectrum, we have someone like Evelyn, who is a digital marketer who deals with hundreds of ad accounts and permission issues.

 
 

Guiding principles

To best serve our wide range of users and their needs, the team set 4 guiding principles for the unified system we aim to create:

  • Platform: Provide a framework for partner teams to integrate their existing tools and date into our system.

  • Power of family: Surface unified info and foster experience across family of apps to provide greater value and efficiency.

  • Grow with people: Embed scalability into the system so that it can evolve with people as their businesses and sophistication grow.

  • Guidance: Provide tailored guidance that helps people achieve their business goals.

Below, let’s see how each principle shaped the experience we envisioned.

 

Platform

Tool integration: Business Home leverages a flexible card system where each card connect people to the tool to get their jobs done.

Global tools: Tools you access frequently, favorited, or additional ones for discovery can be accessed from anywhere.

 

Power of family

Unified insights: People can see insights across multiple platforms (Facebook and Instagram in this example).

 

Grow with people

Tailored Business Home: Business Home for Susan, a generalist marketer, surfaces a range of organic and paid marketing tools and info in one place. Business Home for Evelyn, a specialist marketer at global company, may display aggregated performance across multiple accounts and allow quick access to permission management.

 

Guidance

Recommendations: A dedicated place to show best practices, help articles, and ways to contact Facebook for help.

 

Results & next steps

The working group successfully delivered the shared point of view for our 2 year vision, which created excitement and unlocked the drive for the Business Graph team. With the leadership buy-in, the team set plans in motion to make the vision alive.

 
 
 

What happened to MVP?

MVP: Business Home

MVP: Navigation

At the end of 2019, we shipped our MVP to 100% of target audience. Here are key results:

  1. While keeping the counter metrics neutral, MVP drove increase in daily active users by X [Confidential]% who take meaningful actions that are co-related to business outcomes, validating our hypothesis.

  2. Success of MVP was one of the core drivers for the inception of Facebook Business Suite (business.facebook.com). Guiding principles and learnings from MVP accelerated the development.