how would you improve Meta (Facebook)’s safety check feature?
Meta- Natasha Martin
Clarification
First off, let’s establish a common understanding of the feature so we are on the same page. Whenever a catastrophe or a disaster happens, such as a shooting, hurricane, flood, building collapse, etc, users who are near the danger zone or who may have been impacted by the event may choose to mark themselves as safe. Once a user has marked themselves as safe, their friends will receive notifications that this happened or see it in their timeline that so-and-so has marked themselves as safe during X disaster.
What happens if a user is not safe? Does Facebook allow the user to denote as such? I am unsure and this may be an area worth exploring in terms of improvements.
Goal
Before we dive into this problem let’s take a step back and think about why are we doing this and what are we hoping to achieve. A good way of getting ahold of this is by examining Facebook’s missin statement which is to bring people closer together and give people the power to build community.
The Safety Check feature makes perfect sense in relation to the mission statement. By asking if users are safe it implies that others care about them and after they’ve marked themselves as safe other users can like or comment on that reconfirming the notion that people care about the user.
As a goal, let’s try to improve the Safety Check feature in a way that further brings users closer together.
Users
It’s often hard to come up with a single magic bullet that solves everything for everyone, so one of the ways I like to narrow scope is by looking at the different user groups of a product and choosing one to focus on. For the Safety Check feature there are the following:
- Users near the disaster
- Okay
- Not Okay
- Friends of the people near the disaster
- Close Friends / Family
- Distant Friends
- Varying levels of capacity to help
Out of the above user segments, we should focus on the users near the disaster who are not okay. While I estimate this to be the smallest user segment by a large margin, this is the user segment that is dealing with a difficult time and has the most capacity for being brought closer to others.
Pain Points
Now that we’ve chosen our user segment, let’s think through what are some of their areas of dissatisfaction or pain points when it comes to the Safety Check feature:
- How do I tell people that I am not okay? Is this functionality even supported?
- I’m not okay but it is personal and I don’t want all 900 of my FB friends to know
- How do I get help or support when dealing with the aftermath
- How do I get help without coming across as a beggar / There is a desire to save face
Solutions
Now that we have a better sense of some of the pain points Not Okay users experience with the Safety Check feature let’s go ahead and brainstorm some solutions while keeping the goal of increasing connectedness amongst users in mind:
- Follow User + Catastrophe: After a user has marked themselves as not safe during a catastrophe users would be able to click follow on that post or notification. Going forward they would receive a direct notification or the post would be given precedence in their timeline whenever the followed user makes a new post about the catastrophe topic. Dealing with the resulting fallout of a catastrophe takes time and this would help the Not Okay users keep concerned users abreast of how they are progressing with their handling of the situation.
- “How can I help?” page: Not Okay users would set this page up and it would be linked to from their Safety Check in were they designated they were not okay. In this page users could give a more detailed summary of events and how other users could help them out. For example, they might be in need of a space heater or temporary housing.
- Friend Segment Based Alerting: A lot of the time disaster and distress can be personal and you may not want to broadcast what you’re dealing with to all 900 of your FB friends. Similar to how Instagram has the Close Friends feature for stories, FB could implement something similar here so that only people close to you would receive the alert.
Prioritization
In all likelihood we won’t have the bandwidth or the resources to build out all three solutions in parallel so we should pick one to prioritize. To help guide that conversation I’m going to build out a comparison matrix:
Ease of implementation, Usefulness to User, Relevance to Goal
1. A, C+, B: I’m not sure how much additional value this feature would create, if a user is close to and cares about or has commented on the users previous Safey Check in then won’t their posts already be given precedence in the concerned users timelines due to the FB algorithm?
2. B+, A+, A-: This would have a huge positive impact on the Not Okay user by getting them the assistance they need and the concerned users would feel good about being able to help.
3. A-, B, B: I could see this being moderately useful, but a lot of the truly personal details would probably be shared off of the FB platform and more directly to the close friends and family of the Not Okay user.
Summary
In order to increase closeness amongst FB users, we are going to offer users who mark themselves as Not Okay during a Safety Check in the ability to create a “How can I help?” page. This page will give concerned users info on how they can be of assistance to the Not Okay user. The Not Okay user will appreciate the support and help from their community of FB friends, hopefully paying it forward down the line, and the concerned friends of this user will feel good about being able to help someone else out in a time of need.