Facebook Search Typeahead

Large-scale system redesign • Senior Product Designer • 2021

Team

Design Manager (1)
Product Manager (1)
Explore Design Lead (1)
Intent & Navigation Design Lead (Me)
Search Result Page Designers (5)
Content Design (2)
User Research (2)
Data Science (1)
Engineering (6)

Timeline

8 months

My role

Lead Designer
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Prototyping
Search Design System
User Research
Cross-functional leadership

Facebook Search Redesign was an org-wide effort to reflect our app-wide strategy:

Help 2.7B people using search daily explore their interests, connect with like-minded people, and discover culturally relevant experiences.

Core Primitives

Background

Search Typeahead was a plain text system of keywords without any context about the results.

It led users to broad and suboptimal SERPs that needed to disambiguate and fulfill multiple intents at the same time.

Background

SERPs were optimized to help users find friends, pages, and other Facebook entities.

The system was unable to fulfill intents that required exploration and content discovery.

Data analysis showed that 30% of users already use Facebook Search to satisfy "explore" intents.

FB Search had strong potential in connecting people to interests like News, Entertainment, Travel, and Business.

Opportunity

How might we deliver a reliable and high-quality search experience and seamlessly enable both finding and interest exploration?

Roadmap: 8 months

We’ve learnt that despite making Typeahead identify most of people’s intents, there were still lots of cases when people were naturally bypassing Typeahead suggestions and expected the search result page to disambiguate their intent after they landed there.

And it helped us identify the right disambiguation framework between Typeahead and Search Results.

I defined the following system of typeahead components that allowed us to deliver a cohesive and clean set of recommendations on the surface across use cases and maintain scannability, simplicity, and efficiency on the surface.

Final Designs

Launch Outcomes

Direct Navigation Typeahead Suggestions

Explore Typeahead Suggestions

  • +6% more downstream engagement for Friend’s profile

  • +3% Search Activation

  • +0.18% Search Active Days

  • +0.05% App Sessions (People started using Facebook more)

Out of 2.7B daily active users:

Launch Outcomes

This change became a fundamental shift in how people use search across Facebook products.
Later, the system was adopted by Instagram and is still used today.