Case Study: Story Tiles

Context: When you open Facebook, the first thing you see is the story tray. Most of these tiles represent your friends’ stories, but some of them are entry points to sharing suggestions. I worked on the content for these tiles over the course of a few years.

Challenge: Tiny, Tricky
Story tiles offer extremely limited space for content. They also look nearly identical to your friends’ stories.

Solution 1: “For you”

• Research showed users liked the idea of suggestions that were “made for them,” so we leaned into this concept.

• While this provided a scalable baseline and made my Product and Design partners happy, I was not thrilled with the approach. I pushed for revisions.

Solution 2: “Share a…”

• I decided to drop the “for you” approach and header + body format. Instead, each suggestion tile would have a header in a “Share a…” format. It was aggressive, but it was also honest.

• This change improved the product’s top line metric by 6.38% across the entire system, with some improving as much as 15%.

Solution 3: Context + Emoji

• As the system scaled, tile copy began to feel too aggressive. Meanwhile, we gained the ability to show basic metadata like time and location, which until then had been cost prohibitive.

• Emojis rarely improve metrics for long, but in this case, I recognized they could make real impact. Beyond mere decoration, they subtly helped recommendation tiles stand out while signalling what kind of recommendation they had to offer.

• This change improved the product’s top line metric by 3.3%.