Content-first creation on Facebook
Designing a creation experience that prioritizes the content over the method of posting.
Context & Problem
Over the years, pressure from the market — and our reactions to it — has bloated Facebook’s creative formats. What began as a single post surface grew into:
Feed posts (evergreen sharing)
Stories (ephemeral, lightweight expression)
Reels (short-form video, still struggling for clear differentiation)
Each surface brought its own composer, editor, privacy model, and organizational overhead. The result:
An overly complex creation landscape
Confusion for users around when to use what
Internal silos that slowed down iteration
We can’t afford to add yet another creation surface every time the market shifts. A more resilient model is needed — one that simplifies creation, reduces cognitive load, and future-proofs the app.
My Role & Approach
As part of a broader initiative to rethink Facebook’s creation experience, I explored how we might decouple creation from surfaces and design around user intent.
Approach:
Audit → Mapped the three dominant creation surfaces (Feed, Stories, Reels) and their overlapping value props.
Research → Partnered with UX research to understand how users think about posting. Insight: users want a simple way to start, but still value surface-specific consumption experiences.
Exploration → Sketched and prototyped flows that start with the medium (camera, gallery, text) instead of the surface.
Validation → Tested mental models and publishing workflows with users who often post to multiple surfaces.
Design Principles
Content before surface → Start with what users want to share (text, photo, video), not where.
Reduce cognitive load → One canonical creation flow that adapts to the user’s medium.
Flexible publishing → Users can easily share to one or multiple surfaces at once.
Strategic resilience → Creation model scales to new formats without reinventing composers.
Explorations & Visuals
(Insert annotated flows or mockups here.)
Before (surface-first model):
User selects a surface (Feed, Story, Reel).
Composer opens with unique UI, tools, and privacy model.
Content is created, edited, and posted.
After (medium-first model):
User begins with camera, gallery, or text.
Composer adapts based on medium.
At publish step, user selects one or multiple surfaces (Feed + Story, Story only, Reel, etc).
👉 Key shift: Users think “I want to share a video” → “I’ll publish it as a Story and Feed post,” not “I want to make a Reel.”
Outcomes & Impact
User benefits:
Simpler, predictable creation flow.
Ability to publish to multiple surfaces in one action.
Reduced friction → more frequent posting.
Product benefits:
Greater resiliency to future format shifts (new surfaces can be added without changing creation flow).
Organizational efficiency (fewer siloed composer/editor teams).
Increased content distribution across surfaces.
Tradeoffs:
Some users lose the sense of “starting with a surface.”
Requires strong system intelligence to infer defaults (privacy, format, editing tools).
