Reimagine: FACEBOOK STORIES

Communications | Research | Motion Graphics | Collaboration

Given the rise of social media platforms, there is a natural "follow the leader" that occurs. We looked into three social media platforms that shared a common feature and re-imagined a different usage of that feature for that platform. 

We proposed a repurposing of Facebook Stories to better suit its user needs and give it a competitive edge. The new Stories would be a personalized curation of one's Facebook activity, showing content of mutual interest with its viewer.

Design Brief
With the rise in social media, improve one's experience with a specific social media platform.

Team
Susie Lee,  Joohee Kim

PROCESS

Research

My partner and I wanted to begin by defining "Social Media". We enjoyed the definition that social media is "the creation and sharing of info, ideas, and interests via virtual communities and networks". One relatively new feature on the rise was the concept of "Stories". Stories is creation of daily moments that allow for a form of feedback. From our personal experience, we knew that Facebook stories was not as popular as Snapchat or Instagram. But why? After performing brief secondary research, we approached the users.

We sent out an initial survey through Google form in order to get a better understanding of the stories feature usage. I sent out the form to various groups on Facebook including my High School alumni page, Sorority alumni page, current university page, and more. In order to receive data that was not biased towards Facebook, I posted the form on my personal Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook story. 

Key Insights:

• Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook have different personalities associated with the platforms.
• Snapchat is private, Instagram is personal, and Facebook is too public.
• Stories is used more by the younger generation.
• Snapchat came first, and people are less likely to switch platforms.

Afterwards, I sent out a second survey geared towards Facebook audiences only in order to better understand users' interaction with Facebook. What they use Facebook for, if they use it as a social media platform anymore, and also about their interaction with stories. From these users, I conducted three casual user interviews. 

Key Insights:

• Facebook is too public, with connections from former classmates to teachers to even strangers. 
• Facebook is slowly no longer being used for user generated content, but instead as a media platform. 
• People don't find a use for the feature.

Out of personal curiosity, I posted the same image on my personal Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook stories.
Out of 443 Snapchat friends, I got 154 unique views. (34.8%)
Out of  1,024 Instagram followers, I got 309 unique views. (30.2%)
Out of 2,465 Facebook friends, I got 170 unique views. (6.9%)

We then looked into the UI flow of each of these platforms. We looked at how the user can get to stories from the main landing page, how many different routes the user could take in order to get to stories and how easy it was to navigate the UI. We found that all three platforms shared similar ability in terms of posting and responding. The major difference belonged in the feedback portion. 

Facebook stories reply back as a Facebook message, while Snapchat has a life span of 24 hours and Instagram takes you to its direct messaging system. 

Ideation

In order to get as much ideation out as possible, we conducted a sprint exercise called, "Crazy 8's". For 8 minutes, we each pumped out 8 different ideas. With these ideas, we conducted an affinity diagram in order to group our kernels of an idea and move forward to a well thought out solution. Our ideas could be grouped into two major categories: UI changes and Re-purposing/ re-defining. 

Some of my ideas were to incorporate the media posts that users engage in into stories, to create a new form of feedback on Facebook stories, and to incorporate geolocation as an aspect to stories as portability is an advantage with the creation of the mobile phone. 

Our initial solution was to re-purpose Facebook stories as a way for users to see other user's most recent Facebook activity– the content that would pop up on one's newsfeed. This means that the stories will be entirely self-generated and act as an individualized mini feed for each user. However, this solution only increased the problem of content collapse– that Facebook users are no longer posting their on content, but only engaging with the public media posts such as memes and news outlets. 

Solution

We decided to make Stories into a personalized curation of mutual interests between the user and their friends based on their activities (likes, comments, shares, posts), becoming a new form of communication between friends and acquaintances. Through this new feature, users will be able to use Stories to get to know people better, hopefully encouraging more user to user engagement and promoting the act of posting ugc. 

Motion Graphics Presentation

After figuring out our solution, we were challenged to translate it into motion graphics into After Effects. How can we effectively visualize all of our findings into a time-based medium? We first decided what components of the research is not important to show and what visual style to strive for.

I wanted to present the content showing Facebook's reason for releasing stories and then do a comparative analysis of the three major platforms, leading to the presentation of our solution to Facebook stories.

I designed characters for our video and we decided on a different visual style through colour and line weights. 

After a soft deadline crit of our video, we had a lot to fix in terms of legibility of the text because our characters and graphics were so engaging. Viewers found it hard to read the content after absorbing all the graphics. 

Moving Forward, I would like to revisit this video in order to improve the pacing and the text readability. One solution is to use a voice over rather than text. In addition, perhaps a different video could be created that used a less cute visual style and something more neutral, reminding the viewer of Facebook.