Stars x Gifts
Facebook Gifts is a monetization feature that allows fans to send virtual gifts to Creators on Reels, live videos, and other eligible content. These gifts are purchased using Stars, Facebook’s virtual currency. Each gift has a different Star value, and Creators earn a set amount per Star received. This feature enhances fan engagement by enabling direct appreciation while providing Creators with an additional revenue stream.
Role: Product Designer, Art Director for Gifts
Team: Product Manager, Engineers, Product Designer on the Stars team, Illustrator, Animator
Background
Research shows that although Facebook is the #1 platform for communities, we don’t have a way for members and admins to recognize high-quality content in their groups.
From Admins
In research, we asked Admins for their challenges. They offered great insights into how I can start helping them.
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“Rewarding valuable content could be game changing for us.”
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“Members don't have a great way to highlight someone's comment… I find it gives that extra, special touch. If someone sees for example an informative award, they may stop and read that comment.”
People Problems
Members have trouble…
Discover high quality content
Share appreciation to their community
Feel recognized by their peers for contributing high quality content
Admins want to…
Identify and highlight high quality content/contributors
Encourage members to continuously create high quality content
Community lacks…
The tools to up level high quality content
A way to encourage positive content production.
MVP
To address the challenges, Community Awards was introduced for members and admins to recognize standout contributions.
Goal
Build a simple, intuitive, unified gift sending experience to help fans to support creators and encourage them to continue creating the content they love.
Our success metric: full ecosystem session gain (engagement)
Awards
First time user guidance and bottomsheet visual updates.
Trophies
User feedback showed that people didn’t find the awards “fancy enough”.
With this valuable insight, I used a 3D approach to render the awards, creating an experience that feels like collecting valuable trophies.
Gaming
When I looked into past research, I saw that there was a similar work-stream on Facebook Gaming that utilizes similar principles of sending appreciation. Gaming utilizes “Stars,” a paid currency that sends gaming Streamers paid Stars and Virtual Gifts.
Research showed that Stars + Virtual Gifts performed really well on Gaming, making it a perfect union of two similar design systems.
Alignment
I facilitated a workshop to align Gaming and Awards, presenting research and user insights from Community Awards.
My goal was to propose a cohesive visual strategy, blending the delightful 2D illustrations from Gaming with the collectible-esque 3D style from Awards.
Unification
I gained support from the Stars team and began introducing Stars as a paid currency in Groups, similar to Gaming. Alongside this, Virtual Gifts were refreshed in a new style. The art direction was to create each Gifts with an “unexpected delight”.
Data showed a 29% increase in Full Ecosystem Engagement (success metric) in Groups, further validating the design direction.
Gifts x Stars on Reels
As Reels became a company priority, Virtual Gifts caught the attention of the Reels team as a great fit for users to express their appreciation for the content.
Facebook’s new foundational design system is introduced and altered the UI.
Gifts x Stars on Reels
I put extra attention in the Gifts design to ensure that it was something people wanted to pay for.
I refined the visual design on what we aligned with the Gaming team, adding delight yet maintaining clarity. Additionally, I worked on how the Gifts are incorporated with the new UI.
Stars purchase
I collaborated with a Stars designer to restructure the UI, breaking actions into clearer steps while ensuring consistency with Facebook’s design system components. The payment flow for Stars follows the device’s, int this instance iOS, original pattern.
Send a Gift
After stars are purchased, Gifts can be sent. Gifts is a flexible design system that focuses on making content creators feel appreciated, as well as making the giving experience from a viewer’s perspective more delightful.
Comments
The Gifts sent are shown in the comments section. Clicking on the Gift can be an additional entry point for someone else to send Stars and Gifts.
Qualitative data and user feedback proved that the Gifts were highly engaging. Success metric of Full Ecosystem Session (engagement) increased by 20% and 25% increase in stars sent per reel.
Documentation
Working on Gifts was a valuable experience, enabling me to scale a single project into a full system. I documented the process and key learnings through internal posts to inspire other teams seeking similar solutions.
Gifts have since expanded beyond the Creator space, prompting Instagram to express an interest in the Unified Appreication System. Hence, I share insights with their design team to extend Gifts to Instagram Reels.
