How We Work: UX Design for Facebook Business Tools
By: Megan Mahan Fletcher
Tags: Design Thinking, Internet Business Tools, UX Design, Enterprise Technology, Design Process

Megan Fletcher is a Director of Content Design in Ads and Business Platform at Facebook.

Designing products is difficult work with untold complexities. Designing business products — like those used by the businesses and advertisers on Facebook — can be even more complicated. That’s due in large part to the breadth of businesses we serve — more than 180 million businesses globally use our products each day to do everything from creating posts that promote their business to posting jobs to advertising their latest products or services.



At Facebook, the Ads and Business Platform design team — which includes product designers, content designers and user experience researchers — continues to learn and improve the way we design at scale, leaning on three main principles:

Keep people at the center of designs Prioritize multidisciplinary collaboration Invest in scalable frameworks

All three principles are interconnected and essential, and they demonstrate our unique way of working at Facebook.

Principle 1: Keep people at the center of designs

When working in the enterprise space, it’s easy to slip into “designing for business.” But we really design for people — people who run businesses…and use a host of other apps throughout their day. And while we do have revenue goals as a company, our ethos in Ads and Business Platform is to focus on the customer and what they need. The value for people—and for the business—often follows.



As UX practitioners in the business space, our first step is identifying our customers’ needs and challenges. This means understanding how they think of themselves and their business so we can design tools that fit their mental models and drive the most value for their business goals. For example, we need to understand both the way a large agency develops ad creative for its clients, as well as the way a small business approaches managing its product inventory — and all the key jobs within those workflows.



We also spend a lot of time understanding who our customers are so we can ground our designs on user goals, behaviors and key tasks. Some of the types of customers we consider include:

New businesses that operate solely online

More established companies that are bringing more of their business activity online

Businesses with a particular focus, such as travel or retail

Agencies that are responsible for managing the world’s largest ad budgets

Small businesses that have grown massively by leveraging Facebook ads and business tools

As you might expect, we also invest heavily in testing concepts and prototypes with people who use our products, and we incorporate tests as part of our product rollouts. We do this to make sure that what we’re building addresses the customer problem we set out to solve and that it adds value for a business.

Principle 2: Prioritize multidisciplinary collaboration

I’ve been in the field of UX content strategy since the early 2000s, but the practice is still relatively new compared to other technical roles. And because I’ve been working in this field for a while, I’ve experienced several different types of team structures and dynamics. From my perspective, the structures that yield the best product outcomes (and are the most rewarding!) are multidisciplinary setups. The worst (for the work and for morale) are those that silo UX and creative disciplines from each other, and from other critical roles in product development.



That’s part of why Ads and Business Platform has been such a great fit for me. Here, product design, content design and user experience research work alongside product management, engineering, data science, product marketing and more as a core set of disciplines on a given team. With UX as part of the product team, we’re able to keep people at the heart of our design solutions and leverage each other’s strengths to design tools that make it easy for people to run their business on Facebook.



We also bake this collaboration into our design process, which allows us to move quickly on solutions that are often at the forefront of strategic work being done in our industry. For example, we run robust design crits to turn ideas on their sides, work closely with localization to understand how our designs will work for people in other locales, and collaborate with legal, privacy and policy to make sure we’re protecting data and the people who use our products.

Principle 3: Invest in scalable frameworks

The Ads and Business Platform team invests in frameworks that enable scale and consistency. This is not just because those 180 million businesses have varying needs, but also because they’re part of the more than 2 billion people who use other Facebook apps and products.



For example, a business owner might check the performance of their holiday campaign in Ads Manager, then open Instagram to see what their friends are sharing. They might buy a pair of pants from an ad they saw in Stories (hey, they were on sale) before responding to a family group thread in WhatsApp, prompting a quick Portal call with Mom and Dad to discuss holiday plans. Before they wind down for the night, they might double-check their campaign performance on Ads Manager App and decide to pause an ad until morning.



Facebook business tools designers are responsible for helping all of these experiences feel coherent, and for ensuring that business tools are just as beautiful and easy to use as the apps people use in their non-work time.



We aim to accomplish this by creating frameworks — patterns, standards and best practices that extend across products. A few examples include:

A business design system that drives craft, clarity and consistency in patterns and components

A homegrown design tool that helps UX functions and engineering teams prototype, test and ship polished solutions

Robust voice, tone and terminology standards for UI content to help us speak consistently across products no matter what locale a customer is in

UX metrics for top customer workflows, leveraging qualitative and quantitative data to better reflect someone’s experience in our tools

Better together

During my time at Facebook, I’ve had the good fortune to work as an individual contributor and as a manager. I believe the way we work — with a focus on people, collaboration and scalable frameworks — helps product designers, content designers and UX researchers stay at the forefront of new technologies, industry standards and trends. We couldn’t do this work in isolation from other functions or with just one tool. As is often the case, we’re better together.