Thoughts Sticker
A new creative sticker for Facebook Stories to inspire authentic sharing.
The Goal
'Thoughts' was part of an initiative to explore concept projects that could help increase sharing by young adults (YA) on Facebook. Org leads directed our team to spearhead new creative sharing formats that could resonate with a younger audience.
Research & User Insights
The user research team (UXR) conducted in-depth research with YA users to better understand their opinions, problems and sharing habits. Key takeaways:
- YA users are leaning more and more into unfiltered, 'authentic' content.
- Facebook users have too many friends — sharing across a wide network of coworkers, family and acquaintances feels daunting.
- There is a growing trend to share more long-form, 'unfiltered' written and video content.
The Thoughts sticker in the Story viewer.
Ideation
Thoughts started as a concept from our YA design ideation sessions — a new type of interactive sticker that could allow users to share long-form text over their stories images and videos without obscuring the content underneath.
Reviewing the concept with research and product partners, we felt we could push further. We were trying to encourage authentic, unfiltered sharing, but users felt real pressure sharing to all their Facebook friends. After sketching and jamming on ideas, we aligned on a concept: what if the Thoughts sticker had its own privacy setting? Your story could be public to everyone, but the sticker text would only be visible to your close friends.
Design Process
In my initial explorations, I designed a flow where users create a story, then add a 'Thoughts' sticker through the existing sticker tray. When adding the sticker, users were automatically prompted to add their thoughts and select who could see the text. On the viewer side, selected friends could tap the sticker to pause the story and reveal the text overlay. I designed and prototyped the round-one flows for lead review.
Leads liked the concept but were unsure about a 'dual privacy' system — public story, private sticker. This was a new sharing paradigm users might find confusing or hard to trust. The engineering lift was also considerable for a conceptual project, so the team asked us to find lighter-weight solutions.
'New' badge calls out the new sticker in the sticker tray.
Stories sticker tray with the 'Thoughts' sticker.
I moved to a more streamlined flow and removed the audience/privacy aspect. Since Thoughts was unique to Facebook with no Instagram or TikTok equivalent, a key challenge was explaining how it worked without heavy interruptions. I focused on inline hint and placeholder text throughout the creation flow.
If users added the sticker before adding text, the text tool would automatically open and prompt them to 'share your thoughts for your friends to reveal'. I worked closely with my content design partner to craft placeholder strings that made the functionality immediately clear. I also added hint text below the sticker reiterating how it worked, and collaborated with another team to include a 'New' badge on the sticker tray for awareness.
Once added, the text tool opens. Placeholder text hints at functionality.
User positions the sticker. Help text below reiterates the functionality.
Design: Consumption & Mimicry
On the consumption side, I initially designed a more in-depth viewing experience focused on long-form text — a higher character limit with vertical scrolling. Design leads liked it but engineering said it exceeded bandwidth for this test. I kept it lightweight using our existing text tool.
I realized it wouldn't always be apparent that the Thoughts sticker was interactive. Rather than adding hint text that would overlay users' content, I designed a 'shimmer' animation to play on the sticker — a subtle effect inviting interaction. I prototyped it for the engineering team to use as reference.
Mimicry is critical for new creation tools. I utilized existing Stories attribution patterns to show when Thoughts was used. When a user tapped the attribution, they'd be taken to their Stories gallery with a Thoughts banner explaining the feature. Once they selected media, the sticker auto-applied to their editing canvas — providing education even if they didn't share immediately.
Viewers can tap to reveal Thoughts.
Users can 'tap to try' Thoughts and start using it themselves.
Test & Launch
Thoughts tested in late Q4 and early Q1. It started neutral for sharing metrics but then became statistically significant positive for original Stories sharing. The sticker was positive across all age cohorts — YA the least, which is a common trend. Partially successful in the original goal, but a clear win from a wider perspective.
The positive metrics met the bar for launch as a new creative sticker on Android and iOS. I'm proud to have taken this concept from ideation to a launched product. I see it as an MVP — with more engineering headroom during design, we could have pushed the concept further and likely improved YA performance. With stat-sig positive metrics, developing a V2 with more improvements is the next goal.
