Lead content designer for the Friends tab, the revival of “OG Facebook” and a direct priority from Mark Zuckerberg.
Designed a new feed made entirely of friends’ content, launched to the US and Canada in March 2025.
0→1 feed designPrompt design
The problem
“Facebook’s a ghost town” is something we heard a lot. Feed engagement was declining and people weren’t seeing their friends’ content, if there was any. The social network had stopped feeling social. Then Mark Zuckerberg named a “return to OG Facebook” as a key goal for 2025.
The brief
Make Facebook social again by building a home for friends’ content inside an app that was optimizing for everything else.
What I did
I was the lead content designer for the Friends tab. The work spanned across:
A new feed system
Designing a surface made entirely of friends’ stories, reels, notes, posts, and birthdays, with zero recommended content.
Profile integration
My biggest challenge on the product: bringing Facebook’s redesigned profile into the Friends feed, and making profile updates something worth talking about. I built a new component set from scratch to meet the unique content challenges that our existing design system couldn’t solve.
Connection funnels
Helping people find, add, and re-engage with friends, so the feed had something to show.
Revitalizing an old experience
The tab was native to Facebook but had to signal something new, while not straying too far from existing mental models.
Experimental AI features
Exploring how AI could solve friending problems directly, from summarizing your friends’ content to an assistant that helps you stay in touch and never miss a birthday.
Sample 1
Profile updates in friends feed
I built out a net-new feed component to make profile updates something worth sharing and responding to.
Sample 2
Features to make Facebook social again
User education and engagement features to help users stay connected with new and old friends.
And then what happened?
The Friends tab launched in the US and Canada in March 2025, announced by Mark Zuckerberg as the first of several “OG Facebook” experiences, and covered by The New York Times and TechCrunch.
This chapter taught me what craft looks like in a hyper-optimized system. My biggest learnings came from integrating Facebook’s new profile updates into the Friends feed, and making the profile redesign worth talking about, within a highly streamlined design system. I learned where to challenge norms, champion quality and continually put the user first.
