Topics as Channels in Facebook Gaming Groups (Copy)
How do you make Facebook Gaming Fan Groups (GFG) feel more like…well, gaming groups? Or, put another way: how do we make content feel more organized, like Discord’s channels? Simple: we turn Facebook’s Topics into plink-like channels. Only, it
THE SOLUTION Create an onboarding NUX to encourage gaming group admins to learn the new possibilities that Topics as Channels can provide their group. We focused on “pinning topics” to avoid introduction of a new term and concept like “channels
We started off with a quick promotion to grab a group admin’s attention.
Then we laid out all the values. We worked closely with our illustration team to convey hashtags, but also keeping a gamer attitude and feel to the image.
We had to communicate in the settings plink what would happen to their group menu if they wanted to turn their topics into navigational plinks (ie. channels).
Due to Topics team logic, mental models and rules, we were limited in that new pinned topics had to have at least one post with it. (You can’t have empty topics/empty channels.)
To work around this, my designer and I had to be conscious of existing information architecture and button patterns to make sure users knew what they were getting into — that they had to create a post first.
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We added a tooltip to visually guide admins to see the difference they made after finishing the NUX.
We also created a tooltip for members, so they could see this new change that their group admin implemented.
What about Rooms and Chats? We had to be conscious that these pieces of content would also show up in these new “channels” if they were attached to a topic.
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Null state for Rooms and Chats with “Create” buttons.
We also had to account for group searches, and how content would be handled with the new channel logic. Per the Search Team’s feedback, we had to make it clear to users that the content they were seeing belonged to the group. And if they wanted t