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While working at Meta, I joined a newly formed cross-functional team in September 2022 that was responsible for Ad Monetization on Facebook. Like many other ad platforms, Meta had been facing a range of headwinds that were putting downward pressure on ad revenue and ad performance. The team I joined was tasked with improving ad performance by implementing ad re-engagement solutions on the Facebook platform. My role as the lead UX researcher on the team was to articulate the user problem and plan and conduct research that would guide the team’s product roadmap and help them to achieve their goal of improving ad performance.

Research Process

Problem Articulation

Initial research from qualitative and quantitative sources revealed that users struggled to keep track of interesting ad content on the platform and were relying on a range of off-platform tools or “hacks” to help them keep interesting content top of mind. I conducted some follow-up surveys to quantify the prevalence of these user problems and workarounds and collaborated with the Data Science team to help size the revenue opportunity of addressing these issues. These problems and latent user behaviors were presented to the team during the Design Sprint phase, which guided the team towards opportunities and solutions that would allow users to set reminders for ads that they encounter while browsing Facebook.

Concept Testing

I planned and conducted a series of 12 moderated in-depth interviews with a diverse set of Facebook users across the US to explore a range of research questions related to the end-to-end experience of the initial concept solutions and how well they addressed the underlying user problems.

Key Insights and Research Impact

The concept testing phase generated a range of user feedback, which caused the team to question some of their key assumptions about the solution, particularly with respect to how the Call-To-Actions to set reminders should be positioned and triggered, what controls users desired over their reminders, and how reminders should subsequently be delivered to users.

As a result of the research, the team committed to an experimentation plan that would empirically test the performance of a range of both ad pre-click and ad post-click triggers for ad reminders that were suggested by the research. In addition, the team changed its plans on how reminders should be delivered based on user feedback to maximize the effectiveness of the reminders.

Further details available on request.