Empowering Facebook Users on Election Night

Overview
I was honored to lead design for Facebook’s 2020 election-week coverage experience — including a full News tab takeover and the modular system that powered real-time updates across the app.

Our goal was to provide users with timely, credible, and contextual information as the presidential election unfolded — all within an environment of record-breaking civic engagement and heightened scrutiny.

My Role
I led the end-to-end design of the election coverage surface, from early conceptual prototypes to launch and live operations. This included creating an editorially driven news experience in close partnership with Facebook’s internal curation team. I developed a flexible system of content modules designed to evolve in real time as results, narratives, and public sentiment shifted.

Bringing this experience to life required collaboration across the company — from policy and integrity to accessibility, legal, global security, and executive leadership — ensuring that every element met the highest bar for accuracy, credibility, and user safety.

Designing a Real-Time Election Toolkit
At the core of the experience was a robust modular toolkit that allowed Facebook’s curation team to guide the narrative with flexibility and speed. It supported the seamless integration of AP live results with timely, journalistically framed content, while offering a variety of exploratory units and context-setting modules to help users make sense of key developments, state-by-state outcomes, and shifting momentum.

The system was built with resilience in mind. In advance of Election Day, we mapped and visualized dozens of potential scenarios, using historical placeholder data to account for every conceivable edge case. That preparation ensured the product could flex dynamically — highlighting new developments, elevating trusted sources, or communicating ambiguity when needed.

Cross-Functional Partnership at Scale
Execution of this project required intense coordination across nearly every part of Facebook. Policy and integrity teams helped ensure the experience earned and maintained public trust. Accessibility and compliance teams supported design standards and regulatory requirements. Security and legal teams helped mitigate risk across volatile edge cases. And executive leadership was engaged throughout to align on everything from tone to rollout strategy.

Impact
The experience performed well above expectations. From November 1 to 7, the surface drove 13.8 million 60-second visits — far exceeding the typical 10 to 11 million weekly baseline. On November 4 alone, the News product reached 6.62 million daily active people, an all-time high. For the first time ever, Facebook News showed a statistically significant lift to total app sessions on both November 3 and 4.

Engagement also surged beyond the tab itself. Voting prompts, shareable templates, and Stories-based civic tools reached millions. Android app installs and usage of internal civic tools saw a notable increase. And the Voting Information Center directly supported Facebook’s goal of registering four million voters.

Algorithmic shifts implemented during this period also contributed to stronger visibility of credible reporting — helping combat misinformation at a time when trust in media was fragile.

Most importantly, the product succeeded in delivering clear, credible, real-time election information to the public — while introducing the Facebook News value proposition to a wide and engaged national audience.

Why It Matters
This wasn’t just a design project — it was a public service. We created a system that could respond to history as it was happening, balancing accuracy, adaptability, and editorial clarity. It stands as a model for what responsible platform design can look like at scale, especially in moments that matter most.