Context

First off, let’s just establish a common understanding of what Facebook profiles are and how users use them. When signing up for Facebook you create a profile, this profile describes you and contains a bunch of information about you. It is a form of self expression. When there is activity related to you on the platform, other users can  click on your profile or search for your profile to view it.

To further frame this, Facebook’s mission statement is to bring the the world closer together and give people the power to build community. Facebook profiles help bring users together by allowing users to both express themselves online and gain a better sense of the other individuals they are interacting with and connecting online. The goal of profile pictures is to let users do this in a visual manner.

Tradeoffs

Very few changes are often purely good or purely bad and requiring profile photos during onboarding is no different, let’s go ahead and list out some of the potential pros and cons of doing so:

Pros

1. More likely to begin engaging with other users
2. Easier for users to know if they are connecting with the right person and engage with that user
3. Decrease in the number of fake accounts

Cons

1. Takes longer to sign up
2. Not all users have a recent picture of themselves
3. Not all users are happy with the way they look / may be shy
4. Users may be skeptical of giving FB more information / rights to their photo

1. % of users who start the sign up process and but don’t finish -> This would help us assess whether or not the additional friction of having to upload a profile picture actually results in less users signing up. This addresses most of our cons.
2. # of those new sign ups reported for suspicious activity or flagged by our automated system
3. Average # of friends per account created -> This would assess our assumption that having a profile would make accounts more likely to have their friend requests accepted and have more requests sent to them.
4. % of new accounts last week that also returned this week and performed at least one interaction – We are assessing retention here and further confirming the belief that that increased engagement as measured by point #3 will lead to increased retention.

Hypothesis:

Before we need to decide about upload profile photo during onboarding, we need to figure out what impact this feature will create. The hypothesis here is, upload profile picture during onboarding will create an effect on the activation rate.

Reason for Hypothesis:

• The uploading profile photo is part of the initial signup process. Since signup occurs on the facebook homepage, It won’t create an impact on User Acquisition. 
• According to facebook, the users will stay in the platform once they added a minimum of 7 friends in 10 days.
• These are some possible scenarios the upload profile may create
  • Profile picture makes user identification easy, so the users can add more friends in a shorter time which will increase their engagement in the platform.
  • Users discontinue the signup process in between which will reduce the activation rate.

How to decide?

• Create an A/B test with the upload profile picture during the signup as a variable.
• Run the test with two equal and randomized set of users.
• Monitor the change in activation rate (No of users created account/No of users come to the home page) and engagement level in initial days (Time spent by users in the platform on first ten days).
• Make the final decision based on the below matrix.

Facebook mission is to connect people in a more meaninignful way.

So to me, this is a tradeoff situation. One 1 hand we want users to upload the photos in the signup process and make it a mandatory step before proceeding , on the other hand we are thinking of making this step as optional and let user proceed even without uploading the pic.

I would like to :

1.  Define Pros-Cons of Pic Uplaod during signup process(tieing back to company’s goal and strategy)

2. Define Hypothesis based on which option I see more Pros

3. Run A/B Test for 5% of Random  Traffic from users follwoing same steps from a geography of equal activity.

4. Tradeoff and Evaluate : Define 2-3 key Metrics which I would like to track to make a decision along with keeping ‘User’ as my focus  with ‘Impact on Users’ as a criteria

5. Give my recommendation

Hope this strcuture works for you IW:

Lets start:

Hypothesis: Keeping Fb’s mission in mind and upload picture’ as a feature, the goal seems to be driving engagement.
My hypothesis based on the pros and cons is that I feel that we should keep profile pic as ‘mandatory’ step ,because long term, it will drive more enagement for the users and they will feel more motivate to  continue returning on FB more often.

We can test this hypothesis by running a quick A/B testing for a 4-week period on a random traffic size of 5% from same geography with similar level of user activities. In my asumption 4 weeks should be give us good enough data to run validation to monitor:

1. Conversion Rate(How many customer are completing this step in sign-up process) per day/week/month

2. Churn Rate(Opposite of #1) per day/week/month

3. DAU/MAU( Users login in to FB and atleast do 1 activity- view,like, comment,share etc)

4. Average Session time per user per day/week/month

5.Average number of ‘friend request or join group request’ accepted per user by others (Risk : It could also include the users who are senidng random friend requests to unknown people and getting denied. One way to mitigate this is to funnel it out for users who sent friends request to 2nd or 3rd connections only) per day/week/month

5. Average number of interactions(comments or DMs)  per user with other FB members/group per day/week/month

I am assuming that we will see higher validation for users with uploaded profile pic and DAU/MAU will be higher for them. My recoemmendation is to continue keeping profile pic as ‘mandatory’ as FB would like to keep more engaged users than just the count of total users. If user without progfile pic arent able to engage with other on Fb community, then they are probably not the righ target segment for FB for now.