Life events are the defining, before and after moments that serve as the anchor points for our lives and our relationships. They are inescapably social. And bring people from all corners of our lives together, to celebrate or support us and help guide us into our next chapter.

As a brand built on connection, Facebook had the opportunity rebuild brand value and create a product that matched this emotional and social significance. To do this, we were tasked to re-imagine the Life Events product. And create an experience that empowered the 2.6 billion people on our platform to better share and come together around the events that shape them.

To do this, we re-imagined the Facebook Life Events product. Our vision was to give people a way to capture, share, and hold onto their most meaningful moments; to map the story of their lives.

We designed and built out a completely new end-to-end experience that features an intuitive create flow; an inclusive category system; and a brand new animated post format. We also added video capabilities, suggested illustrations, tagged photos, and animated icons. To empower reminiscence, we built a home on Profile for the posts to live.

Life events launched alongside Timeline in 2011 and has long gone unloved. In real life, major life events are anything but ordinary. So we optimized for our platform and sought to create a new way for people to tell the story they want to tell, how they want to tell it.

We conducted global research to understand how top moments vary by country so that we could design for what matters most. This global context informed every product decision we made: from creating illustrations that resonated around the world, to simplifying 70 categories to the 11 that best capture a diverse stories and emotion.

The re-imagined life events product launched globally on December 12, 2018. Leading up to the launch, the product was researched, designed and engineered with the entire Facebook community in mind: 2.6 Billion members across the world. To create a product that meets the emotional weight of our most important moments, we spoke with people around the world. We spent months crafting the most beautiful part of Facebook and the best possible experience across platforms on iOS, Android and WWW.

It includes a completely new “what you see is what you get” creation flow, the first ever media-first News Feed format, custom animated icons for each life event category and sub category, forty unique animations for category and emotion specific storytelling, a new way to highlight them on Profile and a dynamic, data driven reaction experience that highlights your shared friends when sending or receiving a reaction on your life event.

Since the December 2018 launch, millions of people around the world have shared and come together around their important moments using Life Events. Through our Coming Out category, we generated a strong positive press moment and saw more people than ever tell and share their stories of coming out and coming together to celebrate National Coming Out Day.

By investing in an experience that matches how people think and talk about their milestones in real life, we increased Life Event post creation, engagement, and profile time spent. Ultimately reaching our goal of building brand value by bringing people closer to the moments and people that matter.