From Need to Impact: Designing Products for Social Good
By: Garron Engstrom
Tags: Product Design, Social Impact, Technology, Social Good, Design

If you’re one of the over 2.5 billion people who uses Facebook each month, you likely know it as a place to find news, keep up with friends, or even buy or sell some of your belongings. But did you know that you can also mark yourself as safe during a crisis, raise money for nonprofits you care about, sign-up to donate blood to local blood banks, and help safely return children when they go missing nearby? In fact, there is a team at Facebook dedicated to using the platform to create real-world, social impact.

But at a company as large as Facebook, how do we translate needs into ideas, and get those made into features that will positively impact billions of people?

The secret to making a valuable product is to identify latent demand in people’s behavior and to make that behavior easier and more impactful. This is the same way we approach Facebook’s social impact products. Below, I’ll take a look at two examples: Facebook’s AMBER Alerts and Crisis Response and show how they went from concept to launch to become the helpful products they are today.

What is Social Impact?

You’ve probably heard the term “social impact” a lot, especially recently. Organizations use this term to refer to the effects their actions have on the well-being of society. For example, Habitat for Humanity makes a positive social impact on communities by providing housing for low-income communities. On a platform like Facebook, the community is diverse and global. Therefore, as designers on the Social Impact team, we need to design products that positively affect the well-being of people around the world.

I’ve heard this type of design referred to as “Design Activism” by Francesca Desmarais in her talk about climate adaptation at Design Matters 2019. She said that for her, design activism is a marriage of her passions and her work. At Facebook, our Social Impact team of product managers, engineers, data scientists, researchers, content designers and product designers gets to marry their passions with their work every day.

Identifying Latent Demand

We sometimes see people who use our app trying to accomplish things that we don’t yet support. We can identify this type of demand in many ways, but often this identification process follows the same pattern: First, we see a behavior anecdotally such as users posting about missing children — like what inspired AMBER Alerts. Or, a Facebook company employee experiences or becomes aware of a crisis and wonders how the company might use one of its apps to help. Next, we either substantiate that behavior through data or build a small test to measure latent demand for a product that might meet it.

An example of how our observation of latent demand led to a product innovation is the recommendations feature. The team found that a significant number of people posted to ask their networks for recommendations. Upon further investigation, the team found that these posts often followed the same pattern: Someone would post about an upcoming trip, asking their network for recommendations on what to do, where to go out to dinner, etc. Friends and family would reply, filling the comment thread with suggestions about places to visit or restaurants to try. So, in order to make this behavior easier, the team built a new type of post to solicit recommendations, which organized all the suggestions into map points for easier discovery and planning.