During my time at Meta, I’ve touched so many different products, apps, and teams, that it will be hard to showcase everything. Some areas I’ve worked on: Autofill, In-app web viewer, Ads Responsibility & Privacy, Facebook Gaming, Gaming in Messenger, Gaming Notes, Gaming x Metaverse, Events, and Locals. As I’ve gotten more and more senior on the team, I’ve gotten further and further away from the actual implementation, where much of my time is spent working on concepts or aligning the team on the vision. Due to confidentiality reasons, not everything will be shown, and some of the work may be altered.
For Facebook Gaming, my initiative was to enable gameplay on Messenger between friends. Given that Gaming used to be part of Messenger, and then was later “kicked out” due to a decluttering effort (before my time), there was a relationship that needed to be mended. Most of our conversations were not “How can we help you figure this out,” but rather, “Why should we invest time to do this?”
Since this was a cross-app proposal, Facebook and Messenger prioritized different goal metrics, requiring extensive collaboration to define the project scope and secure leadership approval through frequent reviews. Throughout the year, Messenger underwent multiple leadership changes and re-orgs, meaning we had to constantly manage our relationship and strategically align to demonstrate how games drive conversations in a way that resonated with Messengers’ goals.
Product Designer
Tech
Gaming
Social Media
2020-Present
Figma
Product thinking
Product design
Strategy
I should mention that Messenger is one of the orgs within Meta that is notoriously known for being “difficult to work with.” Some of those reasons are that they have changing leadership and directions, they have a different working cadence, they have longer and more stringent approval processes that involve leadership to sign off on every change, and product ownership gets so specific that you may need to talk to multiple designers when working on just a single page. Getting through these hurdles to a product launch is a massive undertaking. Being on gaming has always been an upwards battle when it comes to collaboration, where we frequently hear people say, “I mean I don’t really play games or know anyone who does, but I just don’t see how playing games drives ______.” Part of the job has been saving that relationship time and time again through alignment conversations.
We hypothesized that by adding games to Messenger, we would strengthen users’ relationships by increasing social play sessions and driving Messenger sessions. This new gaming entry point contributed to 116.8k new sessions a day and also new users, which was a huge win for the gaming team. The turn taking UI was also incremental to sharing/invites (statistically significant), and increased overall Messenger and Facebook app engagement, especially among young adults, which is a targeted audience for the company.
I iterated on 20ish card designs, balancing Messengers known component standards with playful gaming aesthetics. I focused the designs on who’s turn it was, and scaling a system that would work for both 1:1 and group threads.
At the end we decided to split the 1:1 (pills) and groups thread (list view) experience to focus on the best experience for each group type.
Just to even use those new bronze, silver, and gold colors, I had to push for approval with Messenger leadership. Ironically, nailing the colors was easily in the top three toughest struggles of the whole thing.
A little confetti for some delight
Part of the struggle was that the existing entry point for Gaming on Messenger was really hidden, so I wanted to increase discoverability given constraints of playing within their rules. This was a concept idea for integrating games with slash commands as a new discovery entrypoint. Although slash commands themselves already exist, the integration of gaming was unfortunately deprioritized.
User taps on the keyboard
User hits slash to trigger commands and then selects play
User can either type play or tap it in the menu, which then shows a list of games
After the user chooses their game, hitting enter will trigger the game and send an invitation to play
Full experience
User taps on the keyboard
User hits slash to trigger commands and then selects play
User can horizontally scroll to find games visually, sorted by recently played
After the user chooses their game, hitting enter will trigger the game and send an invitation to play
Full experience
The Gaming Tab is the entire surface when the user goes from Facebook > Menu > Gaming. The project was the result of a design sprint that I led, and aimed to organize the information architecture of our Tab to better support upcoming features, and to match the different user needs/values based on user research. Be sure to unmute to hear the voice over.
favorite question
almost always,
it just stacks
Emoji pong is an easter egg experience that is live for most Messenger users today. Users can tap on any emoji and trigger a pingpong experience, where they can then share their score in a Wordle-inspired emoji grid format. Users in the chat can then tap on that grid to compete against their friend’s score. We had considered options like sending a custom image, an admin text, or sending another “card” with a CTA, but ultimately we felt like an emoji grid was the most YA friendly.
In a two month rush, I defined the Locals MVP through rapid prototyping and iterative user testing. I balanced leadership expectations with user needs, delivering the launch prototype under pressure. Besides the MVP as shown, in the following four months, I contributed mostly to the Events subnav and the future post-clicks experiences (not yet public). My funny story here was that I had planned a team offsite for blacksmithing, and mid event the communications team pinged me for a quick change to the prototype. I busted out my laptop while on hotspot and made the necessary changes just in time to push the video for the public update. The MVP garnered attention at the Austin IRL event and got covered in a TechCrunch article, Facebook official newsletter, and a post from Head of Facebook Design Tom Allison’s page.
a private section.