Background
Mozilla Social was an experimental project from Mozilla that explored how to establish a social platform that supports psychological safety and reduces misinformation online. Developed on top of Mastodon's microblog functionality and the ActivityPub protocol which decentralizes social media away from the hands of large tech companies and allows people to keep up with their friends across the social web without requiring multiple accounts.
My role
During this project, I was the interim product design lead for growth and account features. I was the sole design resource on the project and worked alongside the product owner to discuss, advocate, and negotiate functionality based on technical feasibility considerations and fundamental usability principles.
The problem
As a platform, Mozilla Social focused on building a small community while developing additional moderation infrastructure. At the time, the focus was on growing small while working on refining trust and safety infrastructure. People who use social media platforms are far more likely to join and stay active if they interact and gain a mutual follower on the first day of use. A natural avenue for growth was to introduce invite codes, so I was tasked with designing the process for the foundations of the invite-a-friend feature in the closed beta.
Challenges
As an experimental product, our efforts needed to lay a solid groundwork while respecting the limited size of the development team in comparison to the number of features to be implemented.
Some of the systems that this feature would interact with would be external to our product and would require support from the Mozilla Accounts Authentication team to be successful.
Based on insights from my prior unmoderated user interviews, we confirmed that social media users are averse to joining new platforms due to market saturation. If someone is invited to join, we need to respect their time, avoid unnecessary data entry, and keep data collection to a minimum.
Outcome
Full development of this feature by our front-end and back-end teams wrapped in early 2024. This adjustment allowed the authentication system to pass information—like invite tokens—through authentication even when users would start and end the registration process in an experimental product that was not yet integrated into Mozilla Accounts.
Reflection
As someone who's worked on account creation and settings as a junior product designer, this provided me with a great opportunity to review the latest best practices while also bringing informed ideas to the table when leading discussions around prioritization with front and back-end developers.