Facebook Sidebar
Prototyping new ways to find, organise and connect inside communities, a quick-access sidebar, a clearer group home, and channels for smaller, more casual conversations.
Announcement film via Meta Newsroom.
Overview
Groups are where communities actually live on Facebook, but getting to your favourites, and going deep once you're inside one, had grown noisy. This work made groups quick to reach and simpler to organise, and introduced channels: focused spaces for people to connect in smaller, more casual settings.
I prototyped the surfaces behind it, the quick-access sidebar, the reorganised group home, and the chat, audio and feed channels, so the team could feel the navigation and the real-time moments before build.
The surfaces we prototyped
Find your groups fast, see their latest activity, and pin favourites to the top, plus discover and create new ones.
A new in-group menu brings events, shops and channels together so you can jump straight into what's happening.
Real-time messaging and drop-in audio rooms, across Facebook Groups and Messenger, for deeper, in-the-moment conversation.
Topic-focused feeds inside a group, so members can gather around the specific interests they care about.
From one big group to many small rooms
Channels reshaped what a group could be, no longer a single stream, but a set of rooms with different tempos: a live chat for real-time feedback, an audio room to drop into, a feed for a narrower topic. Prototyping was how we tuned the transitions between them and the sense of moving through one community.
The working models let the team try the navigation and the real-time formats side by side, and decide what belonged where.
