How Facebook educates users about their new “upvote” feature with popups

Facebook is trialling a new feature to counteract Fake News**, where you can “up” or “down vote” users comments, the idea being to support better conversations within Facebook community.

I had noticed the new feature a few days ago but hadn’t really thought much of it. It wasn’t until I was surfing Facebook last night that the pop up below came up on my screen.

Now to be honest, I had no idea what the up and down arrows were until Facebook kindly informed me through a simple yet informative pop up.


It got me thinking that if one of the biggest companies in the world uses pop up tips to introduce new features then tips must really be effective!

This is a perfect case of what the leaders are doing today, trickles down through the hip startups (like Pipedrive, Netflix, Canva) and later becomes commonplace a few years later.

This is where Contextual comes in, we make it easier for companies :

  • That don’t have the mega budgets of companies like Facebook
  • That are time and resource poor
  • To be able to create tips just like the facebook example in minutes..
  • While  also allowing you to track how much of an impact the “Pop up Tip” had

Let’s look at three points why this “InApp Popup” was successful at educating me:

  1. Timing: I had enough time to notice the feature and think about it (not that I really knew what the arrows did), before Facebook explained to me what it was and how to use it.
  2. Simplicity of the design: Facebook has used simple colours that match the colour scheme of the app, it only took me 30 seconds to read it and it was simple to understand.
  3. Placement: of the pop up was strategically placed so that it didn’t block the whole screen and the user can clearly see the new feature behind the pop up.

This is all possible within the Contextual Dashboard where you can create helpful tips for your mobile app users without any code.

In Contextual you can also set triggers or the target for “Pop up Tips”  just like this facebook example, you can see this in the video where we target users that “have not voted”.

Here is a quick demo of how you could create a similar pop up using Contextual.

** To read more about the up/down vote feature, check out this Slate article.

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    Contextual & StreetHawk Inc 2023.