Designing with real data
How a Facebook group was used as a low-effort prototype for a directory website
In a medium article, I posted not long ago, I described how creating a Facebook community helped me and my partner understand our end-users needs and pain points in order to address them in a product we were developing, Pods. In this article, I’m going to talk about another unique contribution the group had, as the first iteration for it.
A short recap
From our research we learned that parents, on one hand, needed an easy way to form small local groups of kids with families with similar safety standards and education approaches, facilitated by an education expert.
On the other hand, educators, who rely on teaching as their source of income, need a quick and easy way to promote their classes and connect to potential clients, so they could monetize their skills and create a stable income channel.
Those problems led us to envision Pods as a tool for connecting like-minded families to one another and to relevant children’s education facilitators to help everyone adjust to the new normal.
To achieve this, we offered to rethink the classroom experience of children by encouraging and enabling local collaborations.
Facebook as the first iteration, or: The quest for simplification
As I described in the last article, we utilized Facebook’s group functionality to encourage the kind of community interactions we were hoping to achieve.
In that sense, managing the community was very much a work of designing an experience: we’ve taken “design decisions” that were aimed at enhancing the values we wanted to encourage, such as constructive and respectful conversation, empathy, community empowerment, and bonding.
Our local Pods community had somewhat achieved the product’s goal: it encouraged teaming-up at the local level and empowered members of the community to meet safely:
An overload of information
While the group created the sense of community we desired, with a growing number of engaged members and about a dozen posts a day, it also created an overload of information: Facebook group content is mostly arranged in a feed of posts that have random themes and subjects.
Eventually, we aimed to create connections between individuals in the community, and in order to do so, it had to be easy for them to discover the relevant individuals and information they need.
Here are two examples of how we iterated on the initial prototype (AKA the Facebook group) to create a functional tool for pods formation:
Pod details
Oftentimes, group members posted about a pod forming to try to find relevant families to join it.
When posting on FB, members were not obliged to refer to the specific criteria, which often led to long texts, that were hard to skim and understand at a glance.
From reviewing those posts and whether or not they got traction, we began to understand what information one needs to share in order to form a pod.
Those insights from the real data helped us cut through the noise and be precise about the information we would later ask in the forms we’ve created for Pods, in order to create the pod’s page:
Finding facilitators:
After noticing plenty of posts by facilitators (teachers, tutors, care-givers) offering their services, we’ve decided to use some logical grouping, and create a designated thread for that purpose, which would not only “clean” the group feed from being a bulletin board, but also make it easier to discover those services. The thread was categorized as an “announcement”, which meant it could be relatively easily found without having to scroll down the general feed, but for unsavvy users, it was still hard to discover and skim.
In our prototype, we organized facilitators information in a much more discoverable manner:
- Facilitators got their own tab in the main navigation
- Users would be shown relevant ones first (based on an onboarding questionnaire)
- Just the genuinely important content standing out before entering a facilitators page
- A search bar and filters were added to make the search process even easier.
When tested, while the prototype still had some usability issues that required further iterations, users were able to easily browse and find what they were looking for.
Lessons learned
Designing with real data helped us shape Pods and learn a few important lessons:
- Distinguishing essential and non-essential information for the functionality of the product
- Discoverability — by understanding Facebook’s feed defaults we learned how to increase the chances that users will encounter and use our content and features.