Usability Study, Facebook Ads
How brand
impacts usability
Facebook's Conversion Pixel, a snippet of code, gives advertisers information about which sales came from which ad campaign. The Conversion Pixel installation process assumed that users knew technical language and how to code, or had a developer on call. Installation was challenging for small and medium business owners, who often failed to complete the process.
The research and iteration process and Facebook is private. However, we did have the opportunity to share our findings with some members of the team and believe the quality of our research was validated by seeing many of the user experience changes we identified appear in the later iterations of the tool.
Role /
Research Lead,
4 HCDE M.S. students
Documents /
Industry /
B2B - Advertising
Insight
In addition to 11 minor to moderate usability issues (view full report), our team of four UW Master's students uncovered a deeper concern: Users believed Facebook wanted - above all else - to be a world unto itself. This colored their expectations for the tool, making it harder for them to understand why and how the Conversion Pixel tool could help them track sales data from their ecommerce sites.
They didn't expect to be connected to business data beyond Facebook likes, because they had not in the past, so they struggled to make sense of individual steps of the pixel installation process - labels, directions, even help signals. Usability was impacted by assumptions about the 'intent' behind Facebook as a product.