Admin Notifications Center

Situation

Facebook's public figure pages, used by celebrities like Beyoncé and Lionel Messi, receive tens of thousands of notifications daily. This overwhelming volume made it difficult for page admins—often social media managers—to efficiently manage and respond to fan engagement. This issue became evident between 2019 and 2021, as engagement between public figures and fans on Facebook Stories significantly increased. Recognizing this opportunity, we aimed to create a centralized command center that would allow admins to better prioritize and organize notifications.

"It’s impossible to sift through thousands of notifications to find the most important ones." - from discovery call with a social media manager.

Task

After talking with our PM, we learned our goal was to boost engagement (likes, comments, responses) on notifications by 15%. This also meant we needed to cut down the time admins spend sorting through notifications—because the longer they scroll through unread messages, the fewer notifications they actually end up reacting to.

Action

Discovery Interviews

In tag-team effort with the UX research team, we conducted several discovery interviews with social media managers of public figure pages to identify pain points. Through our interviews, we discovered several key pain points:

1. Difficulty prioritizing which notifications to respond to first.

2. Lack of filtering, leading to unnecessary scrolling.

3. Missed opportunities to engage top fans or high-value mentions.

Once we had some qualitative results around this project, our UX researcher analyzed quantitative behavioral data on how admins interacted with notifications.

Design & Prototyping

Based on the feedback received during the user interviews, I designed a few different variants for what a notification "command center" could look like for these users. Each variant tackled the problem from a slightly different angle, each exploring different layouts and filtering mechanisms.

To understand the complexity of each variant, I met with an engineer to assess early technical feasibility and timeline estimates. Based on their feedback, I iterated on the designs and presented those versions to my design team curing a design critique session.

My PM and I landed on two final designs that would serve as the A/B test for this project. To move forward with the test, I collaborated once more with the UX researcher to understand what clicks/interactions we were looking for with these designs.

Testing & Iteration

Over the course of two weeks, I worked closely with our engineering team to implement the A/B test designs and slowly roll them out to a subset of active PF admins. We measured every action taken within the notification panel that would get us closer to seeing a percentage increase in interactions between PF pages and their fans.

Gathered qualitative feedback through moderated usability tests to refine microcopy and visual hierarchy.

Result

The redesigned admin notifications center saw a 7% increase in overall fan interactions originating from the notifications panel. Although the qualitative user feedback was overwhelmingly positive, the redesign did not prove as effective when measured at scale. Based on further user interviews, it seemed more of a "nice-to-have" feature for them.

"I think the highlights section is really cool. I like how it knows who else is famous and it gives me those notifications first" - one social media manager said.

As it turns out, a lot of these social media managers interact with a fixed number of notifications per day, no matter what the design looks like. Despite the improvements, the team decided not to proceed with a full rollout of the notification center.

Instead, we went back to the drawing board to understand anything we might've missed during our discovery interviews and user flow mapping. Maybe we interviewed the wrong persona? Perhaps the notifications panel was not the right surface to tackle? An admin notifications center will enter the Facebook ecosystem soon enough; it's about landing on an effective design that works for both the company and it's users.