What is Meta Family Center?
Meta Family Center is a new platform that allows parents/guardians to supervise and manage their teenager's online experiences within Meta technologies like Meta Quest and Instagram. Its key features include supervisory tools and features for parents to monitor their teen's online activities and communicate about internet use. Additionally, the platform offers resources from experts and an education hub.
The Problem
Currently, the Meta Family Center website is “over-tailored” to the function of parental control on teenage online experiences. Although this perspective reflects the motivation of many users, it ignores other use cases such as sibling supervision and younger generation media literacy. Thus, our team was asked to develop UI/UX modules and content changes to make MFC more welcoming to demographics outside of traditional family dynamics, as well as more appealing to a Gen Z audience.
My Role
As a project manager, I led weekly project meetings with our team of 6 consultants, developed project timelines and assignments, and created mini-workshops for each phase of our project. I also presented team progress and collected client feedback through weekly check-ins with our points of contact. During this project, we presented a midpoint deliverable with detailed research findings & synthesis, and a final deliverable with website module prototypes and content recommendations.
HMW
After understanding the current challenges and goals of the Meta Family Website, we started our project by asking:
Preliminary Research
Why Audit?
In order to better understand the product offerings and current user experience of Meta Family Center, our team started by conducting an in-depth UX audit of the 4 main MFC webpages and the hyperlinks they connect to. Through this process, we aimed to first internally identify some usability issues, design flaws, and areas for improvement in the user interface and overall user experience. Auditing was a method suggested by our points of contact, who were curious to learn about the initial impressions that Meta Family Center leaves on a team of college-age students.
What were we looking for?
For each page (MFC Home page, Family Center tools, Education Hub, and Our Advisors), we conducted a deep dive into both webpage content and design. Here are the 8 categories we focused on:
Preliminary Research
UI/UX
Overall Impressions
So, what did we find?
After a combined 28 (!) pages of audit material, we organized our key insights into a SWOT chart:
Strengths
Visual
Content
Weaknesses
Visual
Visual
Opportunities
Visual
Content
Threats
Visual
Content
User Research
Why Survey?
To collect quantitative data on the thoughts and digital behaviors of younger demographics, our team conducted a user survey with three main goals (shown below). We targeted college-age students, as gathering insight from these users would account for both the Gen Z perspective as well as the thoughts of those who may be interested in using MFC for a younger sibling (non-traditional family dynamic). In total, we collected 312 responses!
Preliminary Research
Gathering insights on people’s design sensibilities to understand what kind of websites or features people might find more appealing or user-friendly.
Content Preferences
Gathering insights on people’s content consumption habits, trust considerations, and preferences to inform website content strategies.
Company Values
Gathering insights on what individuals value in organizations and their views on the actions and behaviors of major players in the technology industry.
Our Visual & Content Findings
The first 6 questions of our survey revolved around a user’s visual preferences and content preferences. Through these questions, we hoped to uncover patterns around digital habits, better understand how target audience engages with website design & content, and to guide our later ideation stages.
What factors influence your decision to trust and engage with the content on a website?
*UGC = user generated content
How important is it for websites to offer a diverse range of content, including text, images, videos, and podcasts?
Not Important
Very Important
67% of the respondents preferred a simple website design, in order to find information quickly.
56% ranked content relevance as the most appealing aspect of a website.
What does this mean for us?
Some preliminary ideas that came to mind were credibility enhancement, improved content integration, and diversity in content. For example, the Education Hub should feature clear authorship and provide well-documented information with sources to enhance user trust. With MFC as a whole, we could expand the array of topics they currently provide guidance on, and cater to diverse multimedia content & simpler, less text-heavy interfaces.
Findings on Company Values & MFC
Next, we asked users to rank the importance of various company values based on their personal beliefs, and to identify which value they believed big tech to be most lacking. Finally, we included 2 questions about the development of Meta Family Center for sentiment analysis, and also to better understand how MFC influences users' perceptions of Meta as a company.
57% prioritized reliability as the most important company value, emphasizing a strong preference for trustworthy and consistent business practices.
34% identified 'Privacy and Transparency' as the most lacking value in big tech companies.
30%: Social Responsibility
18%: Authenticity
18%: Connection to audience
How does the development of MFC make you feel about Meta as a company?
Meta's efforts with the Family Center are genuine and authentic in their approach to supporting families and teenagers in the online environment: Agree or Disagree?
Strongly disagree
Strongly agree
What does this mean for us?
Within their website, MFC could incorporate more personality and relatability to show users that they are truly authentic and understand their target demographics. Receiving more uncertainty and skepticism than positive sentiments, Meta should also potentially engage in more outreach, transparency, and communication to clarify the intentions of MFC to users, and especially to Gen Z. Although some of these insights extended past our project scope, we shared these findings with our point of contact and during discussions around user sentiment.
Why Usability Testing?
To uncover initial impressions, navigation challenges, and perceptions of platform features, we conducted usability testing of the current platform. For each interview, we asked users to share their screen on Zoom, then gave them 4 tasks to perform on the MFC website. Users could choose whether to vocalize their thinking process during the task or afterwards, and we took notes on their natural user flow as well as any points of interest or confusion they ran into. After each task, we also prepared a few questions to dive deeper into their thoughts.
Task 1
Take 2 minutes to scroll through the website. Feel free to click onto any buttons or sub-pages that interest you.
Goal
Understand how users first interact with the page and if they are able to understand the purpose and goals of MFC.
Task 2
Take another 2 minutes to scroll around. This time, try to figure out MFC’s main features and what apps they operate on.
Goal
Determine whether the current website modules successfully convey information for those interested in setting up MFC.
Task 3
Let’s say you want to learn more about misinformation through MFC. Show us how you would get to that page.
Goal
Visualize how users navigate the website and determine whether the info architecture, user flows, and layouts are intuitive.
Task 4
Scroll around their Education Hub. Skim their variety of content, or read into anything that piques your interest.
Goal
Understand what users think about current MFC content, and any content they want to or expect to see from Meta.
Usability Testing Affinity Mapping
Design & Layout
A desire for a more seamless transition and flow between different sections of the website.
Users preferred getting overviews of features and information.
Users raised concerns about instances where the images did not seem to align with the information presented, leading to potential confusion on the information.
Content
Mixed opinions on the generic nature of content, especially in the education hub. Users desired more specific details on how Meta's features make platforms like Instagram and Messenger safer.
Some users emphasized the need for region-specific content and consideration for diverse cultural perspectives.
Users wanted clearer author attribution for articles to enhance credibility.
Users expected more specificity in content, with suggestions for short videos and easy-to-digest formats.
Expectations & Understanding
Users generally felt they understood Meta Family Center's goals, but desired more clarity on specific details and features. For example, having auto playing videos/ demos showcase how Meta Family Center tools really works in action within the Meta Products.
Several users did not immediately associate Meta with the Family Center, indicating potential gaps in brand recognition.
More Synthesis
Key Insights
After completing our research phase, we synthesized our findings into 3 key insights:
Key Insight 1
Key Insight 2
Key Insight 3
Meet Jacob, Karina, and Amy
To synthesize the information gained through surveys and interviews, we turned our key insights into 5 user personas. Our first 3 personas reflect the Individual with Siblings, the Typical University Student, and the Gen Z Advocate (those vocal about protecting youth against digital harm).
Meet Sarah and Logan.
Our last 2 user personas reflect the experiences of teens supervised through MFC. Our point of contact hoped to leverage our team’s own position as college students to uncover insights about how current Gen Z teenagers may feel about MFC and Meta as a whole as they grow up. These personas thus reflect our Teenager Recollection, with one being supportive of MFC and the other as skeptical.
Ideation
Brainstorming
Next, our team held a brainstorming session, focusing on rapid ideation and jotting down all the ideas we could come up with. Then, we sorted each post-it on a 2x2 matrix, considering the amount of effort and impact each idea held.
Final Strategies
Through our brainstorming exercise, we found that our most viable ideas were able to cater to one of 2 perspectives:
Addressing Skepticism
Strategy:
Emphasis is on providing clear information, establishing trust, and addressing potential privacy worries.
Ideas:
Interactive Demos:
User Testimonials:
Visual Simplicity:
Appealing to Indifference
Strategy:
Focus on inclusivity and how MTC holds broader relevance beyond traditional family dynamics.
Ideas:
Diverse User Stories:
Inclusive Language:
Varied Visuals:
Community Building:
Prototyping
Low-fidelity Designs
Transitioning into the prototype stage, our team started by designing some low-fidelity wireframes of each idea.
All Things Content.
To develop fully fleshed-out content recommendations, our team had discussions on all things content. From looking into our research and recent media trends (ex. privacy issues such as cookies, which have become overlooked and under-talked-about with the rise of larger concerns like artificial intelligence) to discussing case studies (ex. how Apple’s data auction advertisement presents them as a more transparent, genuine company), our team focused on creating recommendations that target authenticity, user need, and broader, more diverse audiences.
Digital Well-Being & Balance
Inclusive Online Spaces
Digital Literacy & Online Safety
Final Thoughts
This project taught me so much about not only designing intuitive and appealing interfaces for the users, but also considering how design reflects and can impact the brand image of a company. Especially as a project manager, I spent a lot of time with my co-PM considering all the different pathways our team could take to tackle such a broad scope. Through this, I learned so much about the importance of making sure our ideas were grounded in user and brand research, and I gained so much technical and leadership experience that I’ll definitely bring with me to future projects. Additionally, Meta’s design system is one of the most elaborate ones I’ve worked with yet, so I found it really interesting to find that balance between staying true to the company while also creating something new. If given more time, I’d also conduct usability testing on our final modules, and consider leveraging SEO to help inform our content recommendations.
Beyond the technical details of the project, I also loved working with this team and getting to become so close with all my teammates. I’m so grateful for everyone who made this project so memorable, whether through weekly team meetings or our shared core memories like the gingerbread house making social or our team trip to SF for our deliverable. <3
Our UMA-mazing team at banquet!
