Facebook Events
The problem
On the Facebook Events platform, event creators could create one event at a time. This offered a limiting experience for event creators, some of whom needed an easy way to schedule multiple, recurring events (think: a daily meditation session, weekly pilates class, or monthly book club). The ability to create multiple, recurring events exists on many scheduling platforms—why not on Facebook Events?
The solution
Design an experience that allows the user to create multiple events. We built a “parent / child” structure that gives the user the ability to schedule a “parent” event—a yoga class, for example— then choose to “repeat” the event at their desired interval (daily, weekly, or monthly). Each subsequent event exists as the “child” event”. With this new “repeat events” structure, event attendees can view and respond to the subsequent “child events”they’re interested in.
My role
I worked with my product designer to identify competitor calendar tools that use a repeat event structure. We homed in on the most valuable players like Google Calendar and Calendar (Apple’s aptly-named calendar app). Most of our work—comparative research, product analysis, and product / content design—was done collaboratively via extended workings session over video and collaboratively in Figma. To help you understand the content strategy, the key components for each screen are emphasized.
Added Repeat event button to the standard event creation screen. Tap to automatically open the next screen
Bottom sheet to choose event frequency and end date. Tap Frequency to automatically open the next screen
Bottom sheet with radio button to choose event frequency. Once a selection is made the user automatically moves to the next screen
Date picker to choose event date and time. OK button was “Continue” when shipped
Snack bar confirmation. Tap X in the top left to return to main event screen. The language here has changed since launch
Top highlight allows users to edit or delete event before posting. Bottom highlight posts the event
What worked
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My favorite! I worked alongside my product designer from the get-go, frequently jumping into extended working sessions to talk through ideas and iterate on different approaches to solve the user problem.
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I generally ask a lot of questions throughout the process. This means I chatted frequently with my product manager, to ensure our approach was aligned with their goal, and with engineers to ensure our user experience dreams were feasible.
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I place great value on learning from my content design counterparts to gain that invaluable fresh perspective on the work I’ve been incredibly close to. For this project, I focused on getting the team’s perspective on my feature-naming strategy. An example of this is the use of the word “Frequency” and “Repeat”, which we iterated on at length during crit sessions.
What challenged us
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Recurring? Repeated? There was no time to test, which would have given us a clearer picture of what language best resonates with the user.
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Who’s using this and what are they using it for? During this project, the Facebook events research team was focused on retaining “young adult” users and we faced challenges in delivering a unique benefit to them in regards to this experience. The repeat events experience seemed to skew toward older users, such as business owners, who may use it to streamline something like company event invitations, while younger users typically create one-off events.
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Because we were shipping the MVP, we missed some key product features, like offering event creators and attendees the opportunity to interact with “child” events as individual events. It’s my opinion, as a test user, that this likely led to significant and detrimental user friction.
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Project retrospective
Partners and stakeholders
Research
Product management
Product design
Engineering