Project
Encrypted messaging content
Content design
Challenge
To produce a bottom sheet that encouraged users to update without blocking the continued consumption of stories and maintaining an encouraging tone that did not imply something there was any security concern or safety concern about updating.
Why?
Stories without public commenting turned on have “comments” on the stories delivered as private messages. With the rollout of end-to-end encryption, some users might still be using a version of the Facebook app that does not support end-to-end encrypted messaging and we needed to notify users they must update the app to continue commenting on stories.
At a glance
Company
Partners
Product designer
Product manager
My role
Content designer
Timeline
2 months
Tools
Figma
Research
Existing research from the Messenger team
Although I was not able to take part in any research processes, the product designer and I relied on existing research from the Messenger team, which indicated that adoption of encrypted messaging features leaned heavily into avoiding creating a sense of insecurity among users. By this, it means adoption of features might not happen when users were made to fear that their existing messaging experience was not secure. Encryption was to be a benefit, but not something to fix previous problems.
Process
End-to-end encryption was added to messaging on Facebook/Messenger after the Stories commenting system was developed. Because of this, the existing system was written using an older delivery system that could not be retrofitted to deliver encrypted messages. Users had to be nudged to update, but we did not want to block the user from continuing to consume stories, since they might be in a low-data environment or not wish to update immediately. Because of this, we wanted to keep an informative but non-threatening tone to inform the user that the app might not function as previously expected (before the rollout of encryption) when commenting.
While the user might still be able to interact with the commenting function, the message they send would not be delivered. This was because of limitations built into older story viewer functions that could not be circumvented without the user switching to a newer version of the app.
Solution
The feature was launched to users on older versions of Facebook, and encrypted messaging launched successfully on Facebook.
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