Recognizing the Significance of Localized Content for Driving Engagement
Role: Lead UX Researcher — responsible for research design, recruitment strategy, interview moderation, and synthesis of findings.
Business Problem: Facebook's newsfeed ranking team wanted to increase engagement among infrequent visitors by optimizing the content served to them.
Research: Designed and conducted 30 in-depth generative interviews across the US, Canada, UK, Germany, and France. Recruited participants via dscout and verified visitation frequency through Facebook IDs. Collaborated with data scientists to validate qualitative findings against behavioral data in user repositories.
Findings: Infrequent visitors intentionally limited their Facebook usage and visited primarily to connect with specific contacts. Localized content resonated significantly more with this group than non-localized content — a pattern confirmed through quantitative analysis.
Impact: Presented findings to the newsfeed ranking team, leading to algorithm adjustments that prioritized localized content. This resulted in a 3% increase in monthly active users — at Facebook's scale, representing tens of millions of users.
Methods: In-depth interviews, thematic analysis, quantitative validation Tools: dscout, Facebook internal data repositories
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Evaluating User Resonance of a New Photo Sharing Concept
Role: Lead UX Researcher — responsible for study design, two-round interview execution, synthesis, and stakeholder communication.
Business Problem: Facebook's Creation Growth team wanted to increase user-generated content by tapping into users' desire to reminisce. They proposed a new photo feature concept and needed to evaluate its potential before committing further resources.
Research: Designed and conducted two rounds of in-depth interviews with 30 participants to evaluate appeal, anticipated usage frequency, and emotional engagement with the proposed concept.
Findings: Users showed low enthusiasm for the concept and felt it overlapped too closely with existing features, offering little incremental value. They expressed stronger interest in more innovative, differentiated experiences.
Impact: Communicated findings to the Creation Growth team, resulting in the concept being discontinued before further investment. Resources were successfully redirected toward AI-powered photo editing and sharing features — a more promising direction surfaced through the research process.
Methods: In-depth interviews, two-round iterative testing, thematic analysis Tools: dscout
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Discovering the Jobs-to-Be-Done for the Notifications Page
Role: Lead UX Researcher — responsible for research design, interview moderation, JTBD framework application, and delivery of findings to the product team.
Business Problem: Facebook's Notifications team wanted to overhaul the Notifications Page to drive engagement, but had no prior JTBD analysis to guide them. User engagement with notifications was declining and the team lacked a clear understanding of how the page fit into users' broader Facebook experience.
Research: Designed and conducted 30 in-depth interviews (~60 minutes each) with a diverse mix of users by age, tenure, and usage patterns. Intentionally oversampled users who had recently turned off notifications to capture the full spectrum of perspectives.
Findings: Identified two major jobs users hired the Notifications Page for: efficiently catching up on updates and reviewing interactions. Uncovered key pain points that were actively driving users away from engaging with notifications.
Impact: The JTBD analysis became a foundational resource for the Notifications team — frequently cited in product development discussions, used to guide the feature roadmap, and directly informed multiple follow-up research studies and prioritization decisions.
Methods: In-depth interviews, Jobs-to-Be-Done framework, thematic analysis Tools: dscout
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Reducing Missed Posts: Operation Ketchup
Role: Lead UX Researcher — embedded on a cross-functional team of 4 product designers, 1 product manager, and 2 engineers. Responsible for iterative research cycles from concept through prototype launch.
Business Problem: JTBD analysis and tracking surveys identified "missing important updates" as the top user pain point on the Notifications Page. The Notifications team proposed a "Catch Up" page to surface posts users may have missed and needed research support to design and validate it.
Research: Established a cadence of iterative research cycles to evaluate user comprehension, discoverability, and engagement with the feature across multiple design iterations. Used a mixed-methods approach combining in-depth interviews and surveys to refine the concept over time.
Findings: Identified terminology and discoverability issues early in the process. Recommendations were integrated into successive design iterations, with each cycle improving clarity and engagement metrics.
Impact: An enhanced prototype was released to a large US and Canada user group. Tracking data confirmed that users with access to the Ketchup feature reported fewer missed posts. The feature was ultimately finalized and launched after resolving engineering and localization challenges.
Methods: Iterative usability research, in-depth interviews, survey research, mixed methods
Tools: M365 Forms, dscout
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