My favorite feature so far on facebook is a newsfeed because it puts me upfront what’s happening with my friends, the pages I liked and people I follow.

Clarification:

• What to do you mean by improvement and what is the goal in your mind?
  • The goal is picking a feature and improve that by increasing customer engagement on the Facebook platform.
• What all platform would you like to start with?
  • According to statista website, 96% of active users accessed Facebook through Mobile Devices(Smartphone+Tablet) this proves that mobile already has a huge customer engagement hence I will be trying to improve things for Laptop and Desktop users.

Approach:

I will start with the kinds of users who are a real contributor to the newsfeed. Then I will look into their paint points while exploring the use cases. After that, I will find the most pressing pain point and explore multiple solutions that would address the same and increase customer engagement. Lastly, I would recommend the best solutions by weighing down the business value and efforts involved that could also be measured with clearly defined metrics.

Users:

There are two kinds of users which I could think first is the Millenials fall into age group 18-35. They access facebook most frequently to check updates from friends, families, life events and current affairs across the world. Second is the old age people(above 65+) access it to connect with their children, friends, political news and so on so forth.

Given that I have selected desktop and laptop category of users It would make more sense to deep dive the old age group of users. Because they are the prominent desktop and laptop users.

Pain Points:

• As a user, while scrolling through the newsfeed it looks overwhelming and I miss some posts and pictures which I really like and want to see them again.
• If I am not an active user and take breaks quite frequently when I come back and see my newsfeed it will be inundated by outdated post and facebook has its own algorithm to decide it and don’t have any control to customize according to my needs.
• Sometimes it shows me the posts from friends which I haven’t talked in years and that would be redundant for me.

Having customer engagement is the goal in mind I would pick third pain point that is showing the irrelevant post from idle friends and pages.

Solutions:

• We could have a pop-up as soon as open an app it should give me an option to select which type of news I would like to see like from friends, entertainment news, followed celebrity and so on.
• It should only show the posts from friends which I spoke in the last few weeks or so and it could also take leads from my recent activity like the pages I have liked, posts I commented on and so on.
• There should be an option for voice search like I could say hey facebook show me my top 10 posts on my newsfeed and it would also be an option to comment or like by the automation voice assistant.

Recommendation:

If I look keeping in mind the goal of increasing customer engagement first one has a tradeoff if it will allow filtering out some less wanted posts it would defeat the purpose of engagement because facebook wants us to see and explore more and more even if you don’t like it. Same goes with the second solution. Hence, I would go with the last one having a virtual voice assistant that would make customized according to my facebook history and help in commenting or liking the post automatically. That makes the balance between customer engagement and value edition.