Settings Search
Built For:
Project Impact
The settings search improvements were broken into two parts: adding a dedicated search bar to mobile and building a dynamic settings search page.
- The dedicated search bar experiment resulted in 47.7% increase in settings search events and a 25.79% increase in settings search click events.
- This proved the hypothesis that the original entrypoint was too subtle, and resulted in significantly higher search usage.
- The dynamic settings search page resulted in a 57.7% increase in setting changes and a 63.79% increase in setting changes per impression.
- Not only did this validate our hypothesis and result in a substantially improved user experience, but the massive success led directly to an entirely new high priority workstream within our org to help alleviate the overwhelming controls experience across Facebook.
Overview
Facebook has been around for a long time. Over the years, more and more settings and controls were added and, today, the number of settings can often be overwhelming for users. One of the ways we alleviate that is through search functionality in settings.
However, despite its usefulness, settings search was often underutilized. In 2024, I developed projects to improve the search experience for Facebook settings to significantly improve the user experience.
My Role in the Project
I landed improvements to settings search through a self-identified opportunity as well as two hackathons over the course of 2024. After analyzing a user research study, I identified that there was a lack of user awareness about the setting search feature on mobile. I added a prominent search bar at the top of the mobile settings page to increase visibility and improve the experience.
During two separate hackathons in 2024, I led a small team of engineers to build a new settings search experience that would be better than any competitors, including Reddit, Apple, Microsoft, and TikTok.
Previously, Facebook (along with all of our competitors) delivered a settings search experience where users can search for settings and they then get redirected to the setting page where that setting lives to make the change. Instead, I developed a technical design and new UX where users would be given a dynamic page of settings that matched their search criteria. This would enable users to make one or more changes without having to leave the search result page. The hypothesis was that by removing friction, we would see an increase in setting changes.