The Facebook Ads Experience

We're just hours from Facebook's IPO hitting the stock market, and whatever happens, it's likely to make waves in Silicon Valley and across the United States. But Facebook's 900 million users might not be aware of a key part of the business or marketplace side of Facebook: how the company profits from advertisers. I thought of Facebook only as a social networking site until a few months ago, when I started trying to build a Facebook page for my blog. All of a sudden, as opposed to being a typical end user, I became a user who might be a business owner or an advertising or PR representative for a company or organization. To those users, Facebook can be a "marketplace" to attract and engage with more customers. With help from a friend who works on Facebook's ads team, I was able to get some ads credit to try out the process of creating, modifying, and eventually evaluating my ad strategies. And, of course, wherever there's a user, there's a user experience! After spending one hour going through the process of building my first Facebook ads, here are some interesting thoughts from a UX perspective:

• Have a unified portal

Instead of going through one unified portal for building an ad, users can start from multiple places: Facebook Ads, Facebook for Business, Facebook Pages, or of course your own page that you would like to use ads to promote. Each of these portals seems to have an independent information architecture. If the user is patient enough to navigate around, he or she should be able to find all of the information needed to get started, especially the button labeled "create an ad." However, the whole experience is still very fragmented. It almost seems to me that multiple teams within Facebook are managing this process at the same time — and they probably don't talk to each other too much. Have a unified feel and flow if you are trying to get the same users to do the same thing — which, in this case, is to create an ad on Facebook.

• Always assume your users are starting from ground zero

The concept of Facebook Pages kept popping up when I was trying to read tutorials on Facebook ads. It took me a while to understand that having a Facebook page is the precondition to having an ad on Facebook. All ads have to be associated with a page. However, this idea got buried in articles describing how you should "target your user," "group your business," or "track your ads." With a UX background, I'm always looking first for the user flow in any system — even a system as simple as an informational website. As a novice user, in this case, I had no idea how to start a Facebook ad from scratch. I read things like "build your presence with a page" or "talk to your consumers using your page," but nowhere did I see something like: "In order to create an ad, you need a Facebook page for your business as a first step." Trying to educate your users about too much at one time usually overwhelms them. In this case, "how to create an ad" and "how to create an effective ad" are for users at different stages. Mixing basic flows with all the other information and strategies you would like your users to learn will likely confuse them. So assume your users know nothing about the platform. Hold their hands, step-by-step, for the basics before teaching them tricks. A PR person from Starbucks probably doesn't need to review this basic knowledge, but the owner of the cafe around the corner who wants to advertise his little shop on Facebook would need the concrete steps.

• Have support ready for users along the way

This point is actually a positive one! Creating an ad is by nature more complicated than creating an event on Facebook, as there are more details and customizations involved. Instead of setting a goal for a service like, "Create a system so that users won't make mistakes," why not have a more realistic goal, such as "Design a system that has high 'recoverability' so users know what to do when they have questions or make mistakes"? Facebook's neat "question mark" feature was a great help when I was working through the flow. For systems with fewer details or shorter learning curves, using a click or hover-over effect to hide extra information when it's not being actively requested is an unobtrusive way to have help ready whenever users need it. You would expect Silicon Valley companies like Facebook to come up with products that are unified, user-friendly, and well-supported, but when it comes to business users, that might not be the case. Similar to some notorious enterprise software, Facebook still requires users who would like to post ads to download and sift through pages of start guide PDFs, and trying to figure out the step-by-step flow for building an ad for the first time can be a struggle. If Facebook ultimately wants to let every small shop owner quickly get the concept of Facebook ads and build ads for their business (without shelling out for an online ads consultant), there's still room for Facebook to improve.