Understand Facebook design in 5 easy steps

Introduction#

John wakes up with blurry eyes and fumbles for their phone on the smooth surface of the side table. As the deep blue light fills the bedroom, they notice notification bubbles on the screen. Taking a deep breath of the fresh morning air, scented with pine from their remote cottage, they open Facebook and excitedly see pictures of their newborn niece. They react to the pictures and send a quick voice message to their family group on WhatsApp.

With the morning sun sparkling through the window and a bird singing on the ledge, they leave their bed and share a picture on Instagram. John is one of approximately 2.09 billion daily active users on various Meta platforms.

Facebook and the entire Meta platform is arguably one of the most popular and successful social networking sites in the Internet’s history. Being a part of a generation that has grown up used to seeing social networking sites gives us a blind spot. Even though we are probably more or less aware of the capabilities of such sites, it can be challenging to quantify the ideas or imagine Facebook from a time when it didn’t exist.

Imagine you had never heard of Facebook before, and one fine morning, your boss asked you to design an app or a website where people interact with each other, share posts, and their profiles reflect the people in real life. So, how would you go about it?

Sounds overwhelming? No practical experience designing complex or even simple software? Don’t worry. In this blog, we’ll guide you to quickly grasp Facebook design from the ground up.

Understanding the design#

Whenever we need to build something big, whether a spaceship designed to take humans across galaxies or even a piece of software, it helps to have a plan. The plan is the blueprint developers can follow to create the required software. In software development, this plan is called the design.

Five simple steps#

The goal here is simple. We don’t want to get bogged down in exact technical details, but we should still end up with a clear path that helps us understand the software design similar to Facebook. The way we shall do it is to use our imagination so we can come up with a design quickly. To make things simple, we can take the following key steps:

• Step 1: Understand the problem

• Step 2: Define the scope

• Step 3: Software requirements clarification

• Step 4: A high-level design

• Step 5: A component-level design

So, are you excited to learn about Facebook design? What are we waiting for? Let’s start.

Step 1: Understand the problem#

It is important to note that before we can solve any problem, we must first understand it. If we don’t complete this crucial step, the end result will not be what the end users expected. So, the question arises—how exactly can we come up with the design of a service that doesn’t exist yet? While Facebook is prevalent across the globe now, we are imagining traveling back in time to where it wasn’t.

The way we can do that is by simply being creative and starting by defining the problem.

Problem definition#

We must design a software system where users can connect and create profiles. They can also invite and connect with other real people—including some they might have never met. Once they can connect, they can also share media and interact with other users’ posts.

Reimagining Facebook#

Let’s suppose we lived in the early days of the web. So, if we ever ask someone, “Hey, have you checked your newsfeed?” we might get strange looks.

Consider a digital space where users can create profiles, share personal information, connect with friends, and communicate through messages and posts.

This platform should allow users to easily find and add friends, share updates about their lives, and engage with each other’s content through likes and comments. We want to foster a sense of community and facilitate meaningful user interactions.

Additionally, let’s incorporate features like photo sharing, event invitations, and basic messaging functionality to enhance the user experience. And, of course, we’ll need a clean and intuitive interface that’s easy to navigate.

Security and privacy are also top priorities. We must ensure that users feel safe and that their personal information is always protected.

We aim for a user-friendly, socially engaging platform to revolutionize how people connect and communicate online.

Let’s get to work and make this vision a reality!

Phew! So, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Let’s quickly move to the next step.

Step 2: Defining the scope#

Any software idea is born with the secret superpower of becoming an impossible problem. The issue arises because of a phenomenon known as requirements creep or scope creep.

What that means is that with time, requirements tend to keep increasing. But that is not an unsolvable problem because this only happens if we don’t define the scope before starting.

So, we can ensure our project doesn’t get out of hand by formally defining it. To start, we need to understand that typically, when people talk about scope, it can mean one of two things:

• Product scope

• Project scope

Product scope refers to the scope of the entire product. In other words, we will talk about the product’s functionality or functional requirements.

On the other hand, project scope refers to all the work involved in achieving the product.

While that is also important, it is clear now that, in this particular case, our scope definition will be limited to the product scope only.

Product scope definition#

The first step in defining the scope is understanding the end user. In our case, the end user is any human being worldwide. But we must at least define what part of a person is considered in our software.

As we can see, we would need the user to have a profile first. Subsequently, the user can connect and interact with other users and share posts besides being able to message or communicate with others using some mechanism.

In the actual product design, we typically create a user persona. After that, we have to consider the value offered by our system. So, let’s see that next.

We can see here that the value of our application is based on a news feed, shared posts, comments, and other types of interaction that users can perform about other individual’s actions.

Finally, we can list product features using the 5Ws and 1H (who, what, where, when, why, and how) approach.

Notice how we have defined the product features, starting with defining the user and then assessing the value of the software, and finally moving to the actual product features. These features define the limits to what we shall be giving our end user.

Now that we are done with these basic steps, let’s move forward to clarifying our software requirements by analyzing different aspects of the system to come up with requirements.

Step 3: Software requirements clarification#

Before getting to the design, we must understand what the user wants us to make. So, we have to gather the requirements from the intended users. Normally, this can involve several iterations of studying existing documentation and similar systems and conducting interviews with the expected end users. To simplify, we will first list a set of sample functional requirements, i.e., requirements related primarily to the actual functionality to be implemented in the system.

Functional requirements#

1. Create an account (F.R. 1)

   1. Description: Allow new users to create an account.

   2. Functionality: Users should be able to sign up with their details, including email or phone number, and set a password.

   3. Validation: Ensure unique usernames or email addresses during registration.

   4. Output: Results in successful account creation with a unique user profile.

2. User authentication (F.R. 2)

   1. Description: Authenticate users during login.

   2. Functionality: Users should log in using their credentials (email/username and password).

   3. Validation: Verify user credentials against stored data.

   4. Output: Results in successful login with access to user-specific features.

3. Profile management (F.R. 3)

   1. Description: Allow authenticated users to manage their profiles.

   2. Functionality:

      1. Update profile picture, cover photo, and personal information.

      2. Add or edit bio, interests, and other details.

      3. Set privacy settings for profile visibility.

   3. Output: Updated user profiles visible to friends or the public per privacy settings.

4. Friend requests (F.R. 4)

   1. Description: Enable authenticated users to connect with others.

   2. Functionality:

      1. Send friend requests.

      2. Accept or decline incoming requests.

      3. View pending requests.

   3. Output: Established connections between users.

5. Newsfeed (F.R. 5)

   1. Description: Display personalized content to authenticated users.

   2. Functionality:

      1. Show posts from friends and follow pages.

      2. Allow users to like, comment, and share posts.

      3. Filter content based on user preferences.

   3. Output: Dynamic news feed with relevant updates.

6. Messaging (F.R. 6)

   1. Description: Enable private communication between authenticated users.

   2. Functionality:

      1. Send direct messages to friends.

      2. Group chats.

      3. Notifications for new messages.

   3. Output: Conversations between users.

7. Notifications (F.R. 7)

   1. Description: Notify authenticated users of relevant events.

   2. Functionality:

      1. New friend requests.

      2. Likes, comments, and shares on their posts.

      3. Event invitations.

   3. Output: Timely notifications to keep users informed.

8. Privacy settings (F.R. 8)

   1. Description: Allow users to customize privacy settings for their profiles and posts.

   2. Functionality:

      1. An authenticated user can set privacy settings to limit the visibility of shared items, reactions, comments, and other activities besides profiles.

      2. Authenticated users can limit who can invite the end user.

      3. Authenticated users can limit who can send messages, friends, groups, or invite requests.

After developing these, we can now list possible nonfunctional requirements for our system.

Nonfunctional requirements#

1. Security and privacy:

   1. Authentication and authorization: Ensure secure user authentication and authorization mechanisms.

   2. Data encryption: Encrypt sensitive data (e.g., passwords, messages) during transmission and storage.

   3. Access control: Implement fine-grained access controls to protect user data.

2. Performance:

   1. Response time: Aim for fast page loading, searches, and interaction response times.

   2. Scalability: Design the system to handle increasing user loads without performance degradation.

   3. Caching: Use caching strategies to reduce database queries and improve responsiveness.

   4. Load testing: Regularly test the system’s performance under heavy loads.

3. Availability and reliability:

   1. High availability: Minimize downtime by deploying redundant servers and failover mechanisms.

   2. Backup and recovery: Regularly back up data and have robust recovery procedures.

   3. Monitoring and alerts: Monitor system health and set up alerts for critical issues.

4. Usability and user experience:

   1. Intuitive UI/UX: Design an intuitive and user-friendly interface.

   2. Responsive design: Ensure the platform works well on various devices (desktop, mobile, tablet).

   3. Accessibility: Make the application accessible to users with disabilities.

5. Scalability and load handling:

   1. Horizontal scaling: Design the system to scale horizontally by adding more servers.

   2. Database sharding: Distribute data across multiple database instances.

   3. Queue management: Use queues for handling background tasks (e.g., notifications, messaging).

6. Compatibility:

   1. Browser compatibility: Support major web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge).

   2. Mobile app compatibility: Develop native mobile apps for iOS and Android.

   3. API compatibility: Maintain backward compatibility for APIs.

7. Localization and internationalization:

   1. Localization: Support multiple languages and cultural norms.

   2. Time zones: Handle time zone differences correctly.

Step 4: A high-level design#

After completing the three main steps, we want to create a high-level design that provides details from the mile-high perspective.

Here, we can see a possible way our system can be architectured. On the left side are user hardware, including mobile and desktop applications.

Now, we want to later on, optimize our applications to help ease the operational costs. And to do that, we will have an app stream running on a user applications layer on the user side. These can be browser-based applications that ensure that whatever is possible to be created at the user level is done there, rather than requiring complex and sizeable data going back and forth over the network, which would not only increase the cost but also lower the quality of user experience due to network delays and slow response times.

Next, we see the network, which connects with a server farm, allowing scalability. The application consists of bits acquired from the cloud and directly connected apps. Finally, we will have a dedicated data center to keep the required data to ensure security and fault tolerance.

Step 5: A component-level design#

Finally, we will move on to the component-level design of our application. First, let’s analyze the components necessary to create a Facebook-like minimum viable product (MVP).

Based on the limitations of our scope, an MVP would need a user account manager component, a news feed component, and a messaging component.

Let us also look at a sampling of possible interactions for the end users. In the illustration, we can see how a user examines a news feed and then sees another user’s post, either commenting on it or sharing it.

Please note that this is not meant to be an exhaustive exercise. Here, we have presented a single-use case of the system. There will be many. The idea is to understand how to start from a vague idea and get down to a component-level design to a detailed one.

Summarizing things#

In this post, we have designed an app similar to Meta’s Facebook. The exercise aims to understand how system design can be employed by starting with an idea and gradually getting to specifics.

If you enjoyed this post and are interested in discovering more, the Educative platform has several resources and courses that greatly advance your system design skills.