Facebook Video CUEs
Facebook Video CUEs
During my time on the Platform Team within Facebook Watch (Facebook’s video-streaming platform, not an actual watch!), I partnered with a senior designer to create a system-wide component, called CUEs.
This enabled different Facebook teams and Video Creators to add dynamically triggered, relevant actions to videos, creating more interactive video experiences on Facebook.
DESIGN PARTNER
Colin Hoell
TIMELINE
2019-2020
CUEs stand for Content Unit Enhancers.
CUEs are time-based prompts that dynamically appear on videos, allowing audiences to complete actions related to the video. They can be triggered by Video Creators, or by Facebook teams.
We collaborated with the Facebook Design Systems team to ensure CUEs followed Facebook’s standard design patterns.
Scalable metadata
We designed CUEs to flex for different types of metadata to scale for different use cases, and ensure people had enough context before tapping on an action button.
Clear action button
Visually, we made the action button the primary focus of the CUE cards. Its full width size scaled well with longer languages and accommodated for different action types.
Easy way to dismiss
Lastly, we allowed audiences to dismiss the CUE if they found it irrelevant to the video they were watching, and re-access it through a permanent entrypoint on the video player.
We ensured CUE colors scaled for both light and dark mode.
We designed CUEs to scale across all Facebook surfaces that support video, and for all video formats (Live and Video-on-Demand)
OUTCOMES
We successfully introduced Video CUEs as a new component within Facebook’s Design System, enabling several teams to build interactive video experiences that serve several use cases.
MONETIZATION TEAM
Fan Funding
These CUEs, triggered by the Facebook Monetization Team, make it easier for fans to support their favorite video creators by buying “stars”, a form of tips, to show their appreciation and support. This was an existing feature that migrated to the CUEs system with our player redesign, a separate effort.
GOODWILL TEAM
Donations and Fundraisers
During the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Goodwill Team enabled video creators to attach and dynamically trigger donation and fundraiser CUEs so audiences could donate to causes without leaving the video.
MARKETPLACE TEAM
Product Tagging
These CUEs, triggered by creators, help audiences discover featured products in videos. The Facebook Marketplace to spread awareness to Sellers about this CUE, and enabled this both on video-on-demand and Live videos.