Stories Crossposting

For a long time, people could post something on Instagram and have that same content also show up on Facebook - this is called “crossposting.”

We finally decided to enable crossposting the other direction, from Facebook to Instagram, and I led design for the end-to-end user experience.

The Outcome

Crossposting Stories from Facebook to Instagram was launched with overwhelmingly positive adoption. In the first week, over 65 million users opted into the feature. As of 2021, nearly 3 and a half million users crossposted stories every day.

65
users opted in within first week
3
stories crossposted every day
10
weeks, start-to-finish

The devil's in the details

At first it might sound pretty simple to apply some cute icons to a share button, but there were so many more details to think through!

We had to consider how someone would connect their Instagram account in the first place—we especially focused on how to make that experience quick and intuitive. I collaborated heavily with the Instagram Accounts team to utilize their login page for increased familiarity.

Then we needed to think about what we called “eligibility”—how we tell someone that certain content is Facebook-specific and might act differently on Instagram. One example of this is an interactive sticker—on FB someone can tap it and hearts shoot out but on Instagram that interactivity isn’t supported.

So we needed to come up with an elegant way to inform people who had plans to crosspost special content alongside their Stories.

How someone connects their Instagram account after opting in to crossposting

Indicating reduced interactivity on IG with a yellow pulse and concise messaging at the top of the sticker sheet 

Aiming for "four nines"

“Four nines” means 99.99% reliability. What is reliability, you ask? It means 99.99 percent of the time, you can trust that your content will be published…instead of failing.

We wanted to ensure people had a good experience posting their Stories, and we realized we needed people to keep the Facebook app foregrounded (aka don’t swipe away to your home screen) in order to finish sending the data to our servers.

So I designed a nuanced, but very important interaction to help people stick around for those extra 2-10 seconds we needed to send the data.

Early concept that we used to validate that this type of design approach helped solve the problem. It tested well but left people wondering how long they needed to wait…

Final concept that gave people more of a sense that they were in an in-progress state. This tested very well in rolling research sessions.

Key Learnings

Sometimes the “small” projects can have the largest impact. Both of these design changes didn’t take a very long time to solidify, but they both made a massive positive impact on the company’s top-line metrics for success.

I learned the importance of the intricacies behind each user experience. Most of these features occupy mere glances from most users, but they required weeks of coordination, testing, and troubleshooting.

I also learned not to take minor interactions for granted. Someone most likely spent a large part of their time crafting every finite detail of that experience for you. Product development is hard, but when it’s done right it results in “easy” experiences that seem super smooth and simple.