Strategy and Design
Facebook Portal Redesign
Role: Punchcut Design Director
Punchcut Team: 7 Designers; Project Manager
Meta Team: 3 Designers + Stakeholders
Timeline: 18 Weeks - 2022
The Opportunity
Reimagine Portal as the OS for all of your relationships.
Goals
Facebook partnered with Punchcut to reinvent the OS for the Portal device to bring together all of the products in the Facebook family. The initiative leveraged Portal’s hardware as a starting point, but aimed to build an operating system akin to iOS or Android that was portable across devices with your relationships at its core.
Bring the Meta family of apps together in one seamless ecosystem
Create a UX and identity that is uniquely Portal
Reinvent Portal as the Relationship Platform
Keeping a Team on Mission
The team consisted of over 10 designers in different disciplines and multiple project managers and stakeholders. To lead a large team on a single project staying organized was key to success. We used a sprint plan methodology to time box feature design and clearly divide work between pairs of designers.
Defining the new experience
The Relationship Platform
Defining User Needs
We followed a Jobs to be Done methodology to understand the key roles Portal can play in a person’s life. Moving away from traditional personas was key to understanding how the device can play a role for all the different hats a person wears throughout the day.
A family of Colors
Visual Language
To define a color system, we explored the current family of products and how they fit across a spectrum. To unite all of the communication platforms into one space.
Shape, line and texture
To defin the shape language we explored what the Portal hardware and branding were leveraging to create a cohesive experience.
The Big Moves
Creating a New Language
Bringing together the gradients as a backbone and expanding on the shape language helped us to establish the core visual elements to the design.
Guiding Principles
UX for Distance - Near and Far
Motion, Prototyping and Development
How it Comes Together
Video Messages
Watch Together
All your apps in One place
Outcomes
What Happened Next…
After a great reception from leadership on the new design, the Portal Device was discontinued in November of 2022 before the new OS could be fully released. However, what we designed was presented to internal groups working on the Meta branding. Our main stakeholders said it was used as inspiration, so work always lives on in new ways.
