A few months ago, I spoke to my friend Aydin Ghajar at Facebook. Aydin explained that the best product managers he had worked with always had a specific view on the world, and are able to articulate that view succinctly.

Given the work Elliott Gibb and I already undertook this year with thinking about context could come into the Slack messaging client, we decided to turn attentions to the Facebook newsfeed and give some thoughts on how it could be enhanced as a mobile interface.

The Problem

In my opinion, the biggest problem on the Facebook newsfeed is that users are not able to easily access further, contextual information based on posts, videos, events, adverts and other media. 

Scrolling through, many posts are written about similar events or thematic subjects through a given day. Yet, none of this categorisation is taken into account visually in your newsfeed. This means it can turn into a never ending queue of posts to look through and try and finish, without knowing where you are, where you’ll finish, or what you’re going to find.

The newsfeed is time based and the only filtering or prioritisation can be in terms of which users you want to “See First” or are “Following”. For example, users don’t have the flexibility to see posts of a certain subject or topic first, or only posts from a certain location (let’s say, from the location they are in the present moment, their contextual location).

The user currently has the onus to curate his/her newsfeed over time, by providing feedback on individual posts. However, because we give feedback only based on if we like the user or the page, based on one post we cannot fully make this judgement correctly. Facebook currently doesn’t help you decide who you should or should not un-follow and give you the reason, because it has not exposed what your friends are actually like and what they know about e.g. Technology, Sports etc. in a clear manner.

The Facebook newsfeed contains user generated media, but because this has to be intermingled with sponsored content from publishers, there is no seamless blend where the user is given a “publisher-like” voice when pushing content.The Solution

The future of the Facebook newsfeed is for the user to be able to take on the role of article writer, reporter, or blogger, categorising views and providing statements just like the article writer or magazine you also see in the newsfeed.Users of the newsfeed should be able to build their own curated feed from their friends, and Facebook should give you that knowledge of what your friends are like and posting about. The means of achieving this is to allow each user to be aware of and be exposed the creative subtleties of his/her friends.

Which of my friends tend to post most about a certain subject? Given this friend has posted about this subject, what other posts does the friend have about the subject. Is he/she a specialist?

Just like magazines like the Guardian categorise news into sport, politics, and websites like Overtime use hashtags like #goldenstatewarriors, #berniesanders and so on, the newsfeed could be a new magazine where user content and published content is categorised in the same manner. Facebook could do better to group posts by subject e.g. “Belgium Attacks”, “Technology”, “Marine Biology”. Or see feeds by #dunks and so on, like Reddit or Twitter.

Here was our thought process:

The newsfeed should offer horizontal scroll posts that a) should visually stand out b) give users the FOMO to want to scroll all the way right and c) offer different types of contextual posts. One avenue we explored was utilising a magazine spread approach to each contextual card. It becomes less a card, more a spread of elements, similar to what you see on Google Keep. However ultimately we felt the card is much cleaner and fits the rest of the narrative on the app.

With the data and machine intelligence Facebook has at its fingertips, if newsfeed was smarter at being able to group posts, I believe it would become less of an add-on to the Facebook experience, more an ultimate source of content for the web. The value of reading stories shared or recommended by friends has already been evidenced by the rise of Nuzzel.

Another powerful mechanism would be to bring the graph search that Facebook already has within its search bar tools to the user, in helping to describe what is going on in a user’s feed. For example, you could automatically see a section in your feed called “Events this Weekend your friends are going to” or “Holidays your friends recently went on” or “Posts about Bernie Sanders” with the ability to horizontally scroll through that group.Facebook newsfeed has already started to highlight if a friend has posted or commented about a specific article or piece of content, perhaps giving you additional articles people have shared which are similar. It’s already getting smarter, as I’ll show below.

The context of an article now is sharing a link, instead of discussing a subject. The emphasis is highlighting the piece of content rather than the semantic subject of that content. Our take is to surface those semantics to the user.

The final elements of our UX concept for newsfeed are:

• Give users the ability to choose their news feed groupings e.g. by News Subject, by Friend Location or so on in their Facebook Settings. Funnily enough, not many people (certainly not me) realised that the foundations of this are already there. However, these are based on “Groups” that the user has to manually curate herself, rather than automatically generated (and we all know noone maintains groups any more).

Imagine if you could have a Feed specifically for content or posts from your friends about “World Politics”.

• Not having users lose context when they scroll down. When a user clicks the floating “New Stories” button on their apps, instead of going back up to the top of their feeds and losing context, Facebook could maintain a button to allow the user to go back down to their last position. Often when I go back to the top to view a new post, I give up on scrolling back to where I was before. This solution would keep people engaged for longer.

Here we mock up a "Go Back" button

• Removing the Star Post option, and in addition the Lightning Bolt icon in newsfeed. Both these buttons I believe have little use and would have even less as the newsfeed evolves.

Why?

Facebook’s revenue is driven by engagement, by serving users with more contextually relevant information in an easily accessible manner the user is likely to consume more content, therefore increasing engagement, retention and consequently, ad clickthrough.

The solution for Facebook is not to remove sponsored content. Nor is it to make the user feel like the feed is like a newspaper to complete every day. This is because Facebook relies on people exploring, diving deeper, clicking through links and sharing back. Any improvement to Newsfeed needs to allow the aspect of “going down the wormhole” whilst also providing a neater experience which isn’t lost — organised needling based on choice.

We know friends from many different contexts — some from work, some across countries, some we met at parties, some we met at coffee shops, some relatives and so on. Each person may have a different context and reason for posting about different things, and different viewpoints. So just like with media where we want a balanced perspective (we watch Al Jazeera with CNN if we want news on the Middle East, or we value a particular journalist from being left leaning vs. another for being right leaning), similarly we need to expose what different people are like.

And…changes are already under way…go Facebook!

Funnily enough, in the month I have been formulating my hypothesis, I have been watching my Facebook newsfeed change on a daily basis with exactly the same ideas Elliott and I brainstormed together. Instead of kick ourselves, let me highlight some of these changes and just reaffirm how good this product team is.

Diverse ranges of newsfeeds, not just “recent first”

Unfollowing people not based on their profiles, but based on the content they push

Use of horizontal scroll to reduce endless scrolling for the user with content directly linked to a single post

This is a variation on our grouped posts solution. If a user posts multiple times about something, let’s say many photos from his/her trip to Fiji, instead of seeing each post appear in scattered places on the timeline, you could horizontally scroll through the posts and the title would be “John posted Photos from Fiji”. But the next revelation is the most interesting...

“Trending” subjects

Here, posts are not grouped on the same newsfeed (clicking the Trending subject button takes you to a search and a new screen), so horizontal scroll is not yet there yet. But Facebook is on to something here. Not only has Newsfeed grouped the posts (here, by topic “Prince”) but actually done it for a reason — the posts are Trending.

A weakness to our proposed solution above is that perhaps users wouldn’t want to have groupings arbitrarily for every subject/topic/category, but only for posts that should be grouped because they are always important to the user. Perhaps the factor of importance that is common to everyone on Facebook is trend, and so Facebook has taken the approach that works best for everyone.

Preventing app switching by storing the last link you viewed on the clipboard or last photo so you don’t have to look for it again

Use of the areas above and below a post to give context — both “related” articles and “other posts related to this”

One issue of having the “related posts” section on newsfeed appearing top and bottom is that this increases, not decreases, screen space. Sometimes the algorithm can’t figure out location or other contextual information on the post. In the below example you don’t know what those Instagram photos are about— their subject or semantic grouping is not revealed to the user. Still, pretty neat.

Ice Bucket

As I normally do with these types of explorations, here are some more “out there” ideas for Facebook newsfeed that could radically alter the current UX paradigm of the app.

However, given what we’ve seen in the past month, I am confident Facebook’s PMs have debated these ideas endlessly anyways, and maintaining the quickest wins possible given obligations from their publishers and agencies.

• What if news feed was a separate app like messenger? Funnily enough, an attempt at this was made already with Paper, but I believe the idea still has legs.
• What if notifications become a curated feed in itself — you get newsfeed updates in the notifications box and can go to the full copy if you want by clicking. This would mean making notifications much more animated and lively.
• Giving the reader a feeling of completion: giving a percentage bar or something to show a user what percentage of a day he or she has gone through from scrolling through the newsfeed. There may be a conflict of interest where publishers don’t actually want users to “finish” exploring, and want them to go down the rabbithole of clicks and views, but still I believe an interesting concept bringing gamification to reading the newsfeed.
• Giving the user summary statistics on who is posting that day, where and when etc..
• Utilising the Feedly widget UX on Android to have users be able to paginate through groupings instead of horizontally scroll through them, so each grouping is a stack of cards. This could obscure the other chevron drop down which allows you to unfollow people on Newsfeed, and we felt was too left field for Facebook to be likely to adopt it, but still worth mentioning. Essentially each “post” is actually a card of many posts grouped into a section.

• Imagine if swiping left or right on Newsfeed could get the user to view feeds sorted in different ways, such as a feed where the “Most Loved” posts appear on top instead of “Recent First”. Showing the current active feed could just be a text bar showing the name of the feed, expanding the sliver just above or below the “Add Post” box. To switch feed would be a swipe just below this text bar.
• A pinch interaction which displays less or more cards/posts per screen on the app.
• Potential for a floating Material Design style Messenger button as it becomes more of the core of Facebook so you can always message when you want, instead of appearing right at the top.
• Ability to have better places to see requests from friends or “asks”e.g. “Anyone know anyone looking for a flat?”. This is an extension of the Facebook sales groups feature that already exists.
• A newsfeed that lets you understand what your friends actually know /post about e.g. Tech- e.g. this post about Terrorism from your friend, the same friend posted Tech a while ago — track and learn your friends interests organically, so you can build your own curated feed from your friends using your own knowledge.
• Displaying posts in different colours/highlights based on their “heat” — number of likes, shares, loves etc. , similar to Reddit upvotes.
• Never having a card appear on the mobile app half-hidden — every card is “snapped” to fill the entire screen as a user scrolls down. For example, in the image below, my friend’s post of a song is obscured — I need to scroll back up to see what it’s about. This is a small change but could radically change the UX of scrolling down a newsfeed so you are not twitching so much.

Inspirations

I’ve been lucky enough to be inspired by a few fantastic posts, which I highly encourage you to read:

• The Feed Is Dying
• 64 Ways To Think About a News Homepage
• An exploration in Material Design by feedly
• Facebook Camera

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