News mentions
Project Goals
The goals of the Mentioned in News project were to increase public figure activeness, awareness of public figures’ presence on the platform, and audience growth. We aimed to achieve this through:
Notifying public figures that they’re mentioned in popular news articles
Ask them to approve the addition of a “follow” CTA to the article
The Team
Content Designer (me)
Product Designer
Product Manager
Data Scientist
UX Researcher
Product Marketing Manager
Engineering Manager
2 Ranking Engineers
2 Product Engineers
Privacy and Legal
The notification
Before
The flow begins with the notification sent to users to approve the addition of a “follow” CTA on a news post.
It was key to include the publication name and explain the value of taking this action — increasing follows for their Page. “Letting people follow” is better than “adding a follow button” as it focuses on user benefit rather than button functionality.
After
Review mentions screen
Before
After tapping the notification, the user lands on this screen to approve the “follow” CTA.
I shortened and capitalized the page title. Then I moved the value proposition and instructions from the top closer to the CTA — I wanted to make sure users would notice it.
I made the primary benefit to the user, audience growth, clearly stand out. This new content, located above the button component, clearly explains what, why, and where.
But, what if the article is unflattering and not something a public figure wants to be associated with? For privacy and trust, we added the lock icon and the content string assuring users that this preview was only visible to them.
After many iterations on the button text, I chose “Dismiss” for consistency, and updated the text to comply with Facebook’s capitalization standards.
After
Toast notifications
I worked through many iterations for the confirmation toasts. Because of the sensitivity of connecting a public figure with an unflattering or damaging news article, it was important to confirm that their desired action had been taken.
Here were some of the considerations:
“Remove” is the correct action — but makes the user think the button is already on the post, which is incorrect
Language needs to be consistent and concise
Contractions should be avoided as they’re less accessible
“Following” is unclear, because though it’s the UI component that the public figures adds, it isn’t the action they’re actually taking
In the end, I landed on “Button added to post” and “Button not added to post” for the toast copy.
Image: on the left side, toast options for adding the button; on the right side, toast options for not adding the button
Remove button
Before
Here is the public figure’s self-view before and after the “Remove” button was added.
Initially, the team decided that it would take too much time and budget to enable the user to remove the follow CTA once it had been added. Our MVP did not allow for it.
I felt very strongly that this was an unacceptable user experience, and I advocated for the capability to be added to the MVP. I argued a user should be allowed to change their mind and that Facebook would cause distrust and frustration as a result of not allowing an undo option. I thought the benefits far outweighed the extra time or cost.
I easily got product design on my side, and we convinced the rest of the team that it was unconscionable to ship this experience without a “Remove” button.
I also updated the metadata to confirm to the user in self-view that the follow button had been added.
After
Results
Mentioned in News was an immediate success. Public figures such as Miley Cyrus and Floyd Mayweather attached “follow” CTAs right after launching. This quick adoption proved we’d created a simple and intuitive experience that public figures wanted to use.
Next steps are to allow for other types of posts to add “follow” CTAs such as video and photo posts.
