Portal from Facebook

E-Commerce Website Redesign

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Bringing people together is at the heart of Portal from Facebook's family of video-calling devices. Portal’s natural, hands-free video calling experience provides the opportunity to connect and share in more meaningful ways, even if you’re thousands of miles away.

Our Facebook Reality Labs team was tasked with redesigning Portal’s e-commerce website to fix the inherent user experience and content issues of the original website, establish a digital design system for the newly updated brand and product UI and create a platform to promote the launch of three additional form factors and a multitude of new features. 

Softening Tech

In an already competitive space, we set out to differentiate Portal by creating an elegant, welcoming e-commerce site that didn’t look or feel like your other tech e-commerce sites. 

We elevated Portal’s digital presence with an editorial approach that strove for lightness in content, airiness between elements and layouts that reminded users of furniture magazines and lifestyle brands.

Furthermore, we wanted to show the video-calling devices seamlessly blending into people’s lives and homes like a beautiful piece of furniture. We focused on context: the video-calling devices in people’s real environments, with people’s real things, being used by real people.

Communicating the same, but different.

Our user testing revealed that users couldn’t quite grasp that all of the video-calling devices did exactly the same thing. We formulated a content strategy that was the same across all products while still creating differentiation with the use of secondary brand colors and contextualized use cases unique to each device. 

Alignment Across Teams

Our biggest hurdle of the redesign was figuring out how to keep a growing team of key stakeholders, team members, other internal Facebook teams and external vendors aligned with our vision and progress. 

In order to maintain forward momentum within an accelerated timeline we opted for prototypes and live links of our progress. In addition, an abundance of communication and collaboration with other internal Facebook teams, such as Payments and Support, ensured a single design system and motion language was being used across the entire user experience.