Facebook Stories and Direct

Share your day with friends and send private visual messages

PROBLEM
News Feed ranks posts using an algorithm to help you see important updates from friends and family.

Because you don’t usually have enough time to scroll through everything posted by your friends, you can wind up missing some of the more casual and informal moments of your friends’ lives.

We also heard from people that they felt their content had to be high quality enough to share with all their friends in News Feed, which had the potential to discourage them from sharing smaller moments.

SOLUTION
With the rise of camera-based sharing shown by Instagram and Snapchat, we built two new spaces for people to view and share visual content from their friends on Facebook.

In Stories, only friends who check your Story will see your content, making it a space where you can feel more comfortable sharing smaller moments throughout your day. The format is full-screen and visual.

With Direct, you can send ephemeral photos and videos to friends and have conversations.

ROLE
After working on several experimental sharing products in Facebook's London office, I moved back to California in August 2016 to help lead the effort to build Stories and Direct. We launched worldwide in March 2017.

Working on the team designing the system for sharing visual content on Facebook, I collaborated with engineering, product marketing and research teams to build, test and launch.

We presented to Mark Zuckerberg and the product leadership team to gain consensus and set direction.