Research in a Transformative Time

How Facebook and Instagram researchers are adapting to the unprecedented challenges of 2020.

This was already a year of unprecedented change when the COVID-19 pandemic was joined by widespread demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism. The two developments have combined to bring about major — and ongoing — shifts in just about every aspect of our lives.

While people’s lives may have changed, the need for research hasn’t. At Facebook Inc., research always plays a critical role in creating and improving the tools that empower people to build community and bring the world closer together. Right now, our mission is more important than ever. Research at Facebook and Instagram has contributed to product pivots to help people stay safe, informed, and connected, and to help support businesses of all sizes. All while relying on our creativity and flexibility as we collaborate and conduct research remotely.

Changing the maps

When people’s needs suddenly change, so too must our research roadmaps. For some teams, this has meant pausing a project in favor of a more urgent need. Other teams have fast-tracked suddenly hyper-relevant features by focusing only on the essential parts of carefully thought-out research plans.

Take Facebook’s new Care reaction. With many people going through challenging times, expressing care to others is critical. Reactions give Facebook users more ways to respond to a post beyond Like, including Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. At the start of 2020, the team’s research roadmap planned to dig deep into expressions of social support. But it soon became clear that we couldn’t wait to give people the chance to show care. We accelerated our timeline from 2–3 months to 2–3 weeks.

To do that, we had to prioritize the most important research possible in the allotted time. First, we pulled together use cases to understand when and how people would want to show support. Next, we worked with design to do lightweight qualitative concept testing. Finally, we worked with a vendor to conduct a survey that we could field quickly to understand users’ perceptions. The new Care reaction officially started rolling out to users in late April. Following the launch, we ran an additional survey to better understand how the reaction translated cross-culturally and whether it showed promise to keep as a permanent reaction versus temporary.

Developing, researching, and launching a reaction in a matter of weeks — with an entirely remote team — was challenging. We overcame our inability to get together in one room to hash out details and designs with meetings, chats, and generally erring on the side of overcommunication.

Getting more resourceful

Researchers around the world haven’t been able to run in-person studies for some time. And because people have so much on their minds right now, participating in a remote user research session might not be high on their list of priorities. In response, researchers have relied on creative methods to help the people who use our products. One invaluable source of insights has been past research.

When COVID-19 began to emerge, teams started to think about the implication of the pandemic on mental health as well as physical health, and teams sprinted to identify areas where people needed the most support in the short term. The Instagram Well-being team reviewed what we knew from past crises about mental health, as well as our current understanding of the kinds of mental health issues likely to be exacerbated right now. This informed product ideas, for example an easy-to-read Wellness Guide that included secondary research and resources.

Guides (sample here) are a recently launched way to discover recommendations, tips, and other content from creators, public figures, organizations, and publishers on Instagram. Other teams at Instagram recently leveraged the Guides product to express our stand against racism and provide people with resources to act for racial justice (sample here).

When a team needs more to go on than secondary research, getting creative with observational methods can help product teams move forward. On Instagram, we noticed people organically showing support for small, local businesses — for example, posting a picture from a pre-pandemic restaurant visit and saying they’d be back. The team started brainstorming ways to turn fans into marketers for small businesses that are doing their best to stay afloat in these tough times.

We decided to build a “Support Small Business” sticker where people could type in the name of a small business. The resulting sticker would feature thumbnails of the business’s top 3 posts. This product made it easier to accomplish a naturally occurring behavior identified through observational research — and made that behavior much more helpful for small businesses. For the first week post-launch, when people used the sticker on Instagram, their story was added to a shared “SupportSmall” Instagram story, helping to amplify the post.

Shifting to an evaluative mindset

Researchers sometimes need to conduct foundational work to identify the biggest problems people face. At other times, people problems are fairly clear — and urgent. For many researchers, working through this time of change has demanded that we shift to an evaluative mindset by reactively investigating whether the design concepts we’re exploring address people’s needs.

Over the last few months, Instagram has been developing and shipping a series of “solidarity” stickers for global use. These stickers reinforce the importance of staying safe and together (StayHome, #IStayAtHomeFor); capture the spirit of gratitude toward frontline workers (ThankYou, ThankYouHealthHeroes, ThankYouHour); and help facilitate monetary support (Donate).

The team is still analyzing and gathering data, but the stickers, particularly the StayHome set, spurred a strong response. The sticker has been used more than 300M times globally! But how did people perceive, understand, and use these stickers? The research team helped to add color to metrics through 1:1 interviews with young adults and teens in the US and India. We found that the stickers were mostly understood and that the initiative had succeeded in tapping into feelings of solidarity during the COVID crisis.

“I think it’s really just to spread the appreciation and the love … like ‘hey guys, we know that this is really hard. We want to let you know that we’re thinking about you.’ … I’m a hugger. I can’t hug the people that I appreciate right now. That’s difficult … but I can share something like this.”
— Participant describing intent of ThankYouHour sticker

Additional qualitative insights pointed the way toward other sticker elements that we’ll roll out more broadly in the future. This research also yielded answers that the metric data couldn’t provide on matters such as the importance of message intentionality and story placement.

Navigating change together

Making sure our products serve the people who use them to stay connected — even as their needs quickly transform — has been a daunting and inspiring challenge. But rapid change has spurred us to become more creative and resourceful in the ways we ask and answer research questions, and has challenged us to make quick pivots. Although as researchers we’ve always had tools such as observation and relying heavily on secondary research, we hope to bring more of these methods, and lessons in how to pivot quickly, when we move forward from this turbulent time.

Authors: David Kille (author and editor), Product Researcher at Facebook; Shruti Bhutada, UX Researcher at Facebook; Diego Castaneda, UX Research Manager at Facebook; Anna Hartley, UX Researcher at Facebook; Mariah Levitt, UX Researcher at Facebook

Illustrator: Drew Bardana