Fan Appreciation and Celebration
In any Facebook community, the relationship between Creators and Fan is key to foster strong communities. Creators deeply value fan connection, where direct recognition fosters a true sense of belonging.
Role: Lead Designer
Team: PM | Content designer | Researcher | Engineering team
Strategy & Roadmap | Cross-functional alignment | Product Design | Visual Design
Weekly Recognition
There's about 1.8 billion participants in Facebook communities, made up by dynamic Creators and their fans.
Through UXR, we found what perpetuates engagement is positive sentiment. People want to feel a sense of belonging and recognition with each other, especially with their favorite Community Creators.
That insight became the design lens for everything that followed.
Fan Appreciation was built around recognition and gratitude. Creator gets a weekly notification, goes through a simple creation flow, and posts or shares a story that publicly names their most engaged followers of the week.
The gesture is simple: I see you. I appreciate you.
UI update
My initial assumption was straightforward — this was a design problem. It was built on an old design system and there were a few structural issues.
So updated the components. Tightened the hierarchy but the same drop-off persisted.
Creator Challenges
This revealed a larger issue across platforms.
Metrics
Completion
Return Creators
Time Spent
Content production volume
Feature adoption
I designed a weekly board that identifies a creator's most loyal advocates and lets them quickly select fans to appreciate and share a post.
Since GenAI is a new feature, I wanted to provide it in a familiar and open environment for Creators explore.
Prompting can be a place where Creators don’t know what to do.
Create not Overwhelm
Creators should not feel overwhelmed by the amount of choices. To prevent choice overload, the interface presents a curated set of four distinct options. This strikes the optimal balance between variety and focus. By integrating direct feedback loops and rapid regeneration, creators should feel in control of the iterative process rather than overwhelmed by its scale.
I didn't want Creators to spend time trying to compare every option against every other option which can slow their decision-making. On the technical side, showing 4 at once would either decrease image quality or add latency.
So I added a feedback bar below each image to capture early signals from Creators to get a sense of what was working and what wasn't.
Generated images should still be ‘remembered’ for comparing and switching back.
Latency
When images are generating, 20 seconds is an eternity for Creators waiting. So instead of a blank wait that could cause drop-off, I experimented with loading states that feels atmospheric, adding just enough motion and delight.
Prompt error
I caught this myself stress-testing the different prompts — I typed 'violence' to see what would happen. The model returned a strange grey image with no explanation. To a creator, that could reads as GenAI is broken. No recovery path, just confusion and likely drop-off.
Instead of showing a failed render, I proposed we show the same dark background with a simple guided message for next steps: 'I can't do that one. Let's try something else.'
A familiar landing
We land the Creators back in the familiar composer. They have all the previous tools to edit more.
Creators have the final say. GenAI is just a part of the process, not the ultimate creative controller.
Learnings and next steps
By transforming fan engagement into personalized moments, we gave Creators the expressive tools they'd been asking for, closing the gap that static, limited imagery couldn't fill.
In the MVP, we saw a 5.5% completion rate lift and 5% biweekly return from Creators.
The vision extends beyond Fan Appreciation. AI-powered creation could become an ambient layer across the Creator toolkit.
UXR: The need for more guidance
Next step
Creators often dropped off at prompting. They either didn’t know where to start or felt that they weren’t getting what they wanted. To help guide them, I designed a richer layer of input guidance including prompt suggestions, style direction, and contextual cues for the next phase.
Vision
Beyond Fan Appreciation, this was always a platform issue. The vision is expanding into other creator suite surfaces.
Short-term: products like Community Events that already have inventory limitations can benefit immediately from GenAI visuals.
Longer-term: GenAI plugs into creation templates. Instead of static templates that feel generic, AI personalizes them to each creator's style and content.
