The Facebook Friending team’s mission is to help people find their friends, connect safely with new ones, and keep relationships with people who they find meaningful.
Friends are what make Facebook fun, relevant and meaningful — and almost 1 billion friendships are formed globally every day.
Most people find friends through “People You May Know” (PYMK), a feature that provides friend suggestions. PYMK is located on News Feed and a dedicated Friends “tab” buried within a sea of features in your Bookmarks. PYMK is crucial to finding and adding relevant friends on Facebook.
But as more people spend their time on News Feed and Facebook Stories, our team needed to find a way where people could still access People You May Know so that they could still find and make friends.
That’s when our team decided to look at Facebook Stories.
Facebook Stories was an ideal space to place PYMK: many people view and interact with their Stories on the daily. Your story tray is also the first thing you see when you open the app, even before you scroll down to see more of your News Feed updates.
Because of its visual capital and interactivity, our team designed 1-candidate story cards and 3-candidate story cards.
We also tested our design iterations at different intervals within the Facebook Stories experience, either at the end of someone’s story tray, and also midstream, where friend suggestions might pop up as you tapped through your Stories.
We found that the mid-stream experience was the most effective — and it makes sense, since American users have an average of 80 Facebook Stories to go through (so most people would never reach the end of their Stories to see PYMK, anyway).
We had to be very conscious of screen sizes and spacing — and factor in edge cases: like someone accidentally adding a friend when they actually wanted to tap into their next story.
We developed a set of Design principles for PYMK in Stories, which would be useful when working cross-functionally with the Facebook Stories team (since we were pitching to add our feature into their playground).
Our main priority was to make sure that PYMK in Stories could be distinguishable from an ad, and that users would understand that this was something that Facebook was surfacing them. Second, it needed to be playful and fun, like FB Stories.
Though due to too many moving data targets, we couldn’t quite land a perfect, shippable candidate that our team and the Facebook Stories team could agree on.
However, many other teams within Facebook caught onto what our team was doing; and were quickly spinning up their own versions — like Instagram’s Suggested for You.
Spot the similarities from our initial mocks? We worked closely with Instagram’s Growth team to share research, experiment data, designs, and design thinking.
We may not have been able to ship our product, but it spurred ideas in other teams — and in a way, PYMK in Stories lives on in Instagram!