Professional Dashboard is home for Facebook creators: the first place they come when they’re in creator mode. I led its mobile redesign when our metrics and our creators were telling us very different stories.
Both increased at launch.
For two years, the qualitative feedback kept pointing to a problem the dashboards weren’t explaining.
We consistently exceeded the internal quantitative targets leadership had set. By those measures, ProDash was doing well. Product and engineering leaders needed convincing that there was a problem to solve.
For two years, qualitative research and in-person interviews kept telling us creators disliked the experience. One creator team even made a roughly 20-minute video explaining their frustrations.
Creator needs, product goals, and delivery constraints all had to meet in an experience we could actually ship.
Before the redesign
The team had already improved navigation and design-system consistency. That was valuable work. But we were calling it “modernization,” and the experience barely looked different.
I pushed for a bigger change. Early speculative work had shown design leadership how much further we could go. My product director and I were preparing to present to the head of Facebook. We agreed that the current direction was too safe: it asked for approval of changes that would be hard to disagree with.
We needed to give the head of Facebook a real decision: an ambitious direction he might actually say no to.
A six-day vision sprint
I brought together five designers, including me. We rebuilt the direction and the story around a cleaner home, more useful analytics, stronger brand expression, and a future with Creator Assistant.
We explored an AI-first version, too. These were vision screens, intentionally ahead of what we knew how to build. We wanted a vision bold enough that people in the room would disagree with it. That debate would help us decide how far to push.
The executive review
The head of Facebook endorsed the direction. His steering was to build toward the AI-native future without going fully AI-first immediately.
He also gave us something essential: room for temporary metric regressions, with confidence that we could earn them back. That changed what was possible. We could pursue a stronger experience without every short-term dip ending the work.
Turning the vision into delivery
The teams behind our most-used analytics surfaces already had approved roadmaps. They couldn’t simply absorb another roadmap or replace the one they’d committed to. But refreshing home while leaving those experiences behind would break the promise we’d just made.
As acting PM and design lead, I aligned everyone around the new direction, including three critical teams whose roadmaps needed to change. I revised the goals and set the scope, staffing plan, experiment strategy, and working cadence.
Weekly leadership reviews kept the direction aligned. Twice-weekly design and engineering sessions exposed dependencies and helped adjacent teams prepare for the changes coming their way.
I wanted home to feel alive and useful in a small moment. Something you could check while waiting in line at Target and get a sense of your content’s pulse.
The large hero line chart could only foreground one metric. We moved to a two-by-two grid: views, earnings, engagement, and followers.
That gave creators a broader picture without asking them to work through a chart first. The important functionality stayed; organization and hierarchy did more of the work.
Showing the shipped redesign.
We tested Today as the default because we expected a real-time view to matter most. Usage tracking showed creators repeatedly switching to seven days. Interviews helped us understand why.
Most weren’t posting daily. New content’s activity often flattened after about two days. A week gave them a combined view of recent work while still reflecting activity on new posts. After two weeks of testing, we made it the default.
Explore the decision
Chosen as the home default after two weeks of usage tracking and in-person interviews.
A guide to the decision, not a live analytics demo.
Previously, clicking through could repeat the information creators had just seen. We made each metric tile lead directly to a dedicated deep dive.
That’s where the line chart belonged: a 28-day view by default, with a date picker covering Today through Lifetime. Better grouping, horizontal sections, and insight messages helped explain what was happening and why.
Animated tiles and transitions made those deeper surfaces feel more responsive. The structure gave teams room to evolve their work while keeping every surface useful in its own right.
| On home | Views deep dive |
|---|---|
| Views beside your other three metrics | A dedicated view of that one metric |
| 7 days by default | 28 days by default |
| A quick account pulse | A trend chart, related metrics, and insight messages |
| Today, 7 days, or 28 days | Date picker from Today through Lifetime |
Our vision deck was a sketch of a house. It didn’t tell us how the structure worked. The team had to define those details while moving quickly and working around significant gaps in availability.
I brought designers into the effort, connected them with the right partners, and kept the wider experience in view. We preserved the useful content and functionality while changing how it was grouped, presented, and connected.
The result was modular, with clear rules. Teams could keep iterating without rearranging the home around their own priorities. We also planned for Creator Assistant so its eventual arrival wouldn’t require another full redesign.
We didn’t reach every surface at launch. We continued into the more specialized experiences afterward.
Creators gave us positive feedback throughout design and testing. After launch, that feedback stayed positive and sentiment kept improving.
The work started by asking why two kinds of evidence disagreed. It ended with a clearer home for creators and a way for the teams behind it to keep making it better.