How Meta’s Monetization Team Operationalized Human-Centered UX at Global Scale

“Moving to Discuss changed how we work. We went from juggling tools and losing sessions to having one stable place to run studies, tag moments, and see patterns across more than a hundred tasks.”
– Peter Lively, Former UX Researcher & Team Lead, Meta Monetization

From the TMRE Las Vegas presentation, Meta Monetization UX Playbook: Research at the Pace of Innovation

Watch the full session here.

About Meta Monetization

Meta Monetization builds and improves the advertising tools that millions of marketers rely on to grow their businesses on Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta surfaces.

One of its core products, Ads Manager, is the central hub for advertisers. It serves everyone from global brands with experienced media teams to small businesses and solo entrepreneurs who may be running ads for the first time.

Peter Lively, then a UX Researcher and team lead in Meta Monetization, focused on usability:

• How easy is it for different types of advertisers to create and manage campaigns?
• Where do they hesitate, backtrack, or abandon tasks?
• How can the team measure usability in a consistent, repeatable way over time?

The answer required going beyond log data and building a behavioral, human-centered research program that could keep pace with Meta’s product roadmap.

Challenge

Meta wanted to stay closely connected to the advertisers who rely on tools like Ads Manager. As research needs expanded across markets and teams, gathering fast, reliable behavioral insight at scale became increasingly difficult. Peter described scaling the research program as “nearly impossible.”

• Delivering deep usability insights quickly was difficult.
  Ads Manager is complex and used by advertisers with very different levels of experience. Log data showed what people clicked, but not why they struggled or what caused hesitation. The team needed a faster way to uncover real behavioral friction.
• Internal partners needed answers at the pace of product development.
  Engineering and product teams moved quickly and couldn’t wait for long research cycles. Traditional methods, manual notes, scattered recordings, spreadsheets, weren’t designed for the speed or scale required.
• Understanding intent behind actions was a persistent gap.
  Advertisers often completed tasks without verbalizing confusion. This made it hard to distinguish confident actions from silent struggle. The team needed a clearer view of the thought process behind each step.
• Fragmented tools slowed teams down and limited ownership of insights.
  Research required multiple systems for sessions, note taking, transcription, clipping, and synthesis. The lack of a single repository made it hard to share findings, run repeatable programs, or compare insights across studies.

Solution

To address these challenges, Meta’s Monetization UX team partnered with Discuss to create a continuous usability measurement program grounded in video-based research, real-time tagging, and a central repository.

One platform for the full research workflow
The team consolidated human-led interviews, self-paced activities, and uploaded research into Discuss. Researchers and observers could watch sessions live, tag moments as they happened, and review transcripts and clips in one place. This replaced a fragmented workflow with a single system for running sessions, capturing evidence, and sharing insights. Over time, the team saved more than 5,500 tagged moments, creating an on-demand library of real advertiser behavior for product, UX, and engineering teams.

Reliable sessions with live support
Each session included dedicated technical support, allowing moderators to focus on participants instead of setup or troubleshooting. Session loss dropped from 25% to nearly zero, eliminating re-recruiting and making timelines more predictable.

Automated transcription and translation
All sessions were automatically transcribed and searchable. AI translation allowed global teams to observe sessions in languages they did not speak, tag moments live, and engage with moderators without hiring simultaneous translators.

Scaling from tasks to a measurement system
The program began with five usability tasks and expanded to more than 100. Centralizing video, tags, and metrics in Discuss made it possible to scale without losing consistency. Researchers could also analyze patterns across tasks and product areas for the first time, rather than reviewing studies in isolation.

Longitudinal research at speed
For Opportunity Score in Ads Manager, the team ran a four-month longitudinal study across two countries. Discuss made it possible to track perception changes over time, compare markets, and identify where recommendations needed to differ by advertiser type. What would have required months of manual work was completed far more efficiently, allowing teams to act on insights sooner.

Results

In partnering with Discuss and reshaping its research playbook, Meta’s Monetization UX team:

• Eliminated session loss and increased reliability
  Prior platforms lost roughly one in four sessions due to instability, creating rework and delays. With Discuss and live technical support, session reliability improved to the point that re-running sessions was no longer a concern, making timelines more predictable.
  
• Reduced manual overhead and accelerated analysis
  High-quality transcription and real-time tagging eliminated the need for a dedicated note taker. Researchers now spend more time analyzing behavior and advising teams, rather than typing notes or reconciling fragmented files.
  
• Built a scalable library of behavioral evidence
  More than 5,500 moments were tagged and clipped across studies, creating a shared evidence base for UX, product, and engineering. Clips are easier to find, manage, and share, increasing how often real advertiser behavior informs decisions.
  
• Enabled cross-project and longitudinal insight
  With all research stored in a single repository, the team can identify patterns across more than 100 tasks, products, and releases. Longitudinal studies, such as the Opportunity Score program, are now feasible within realistic timelines.
  
• Strengthened empathy and cross-functional alignment
  Video clips and reels help leadership and engineering teams stay close to real advertisers. Research is no longer a background input. It is visible, concrete evidence that directly shapes product decisions.

Meta’s Monetization team needed a faster, more reliable way to understand how advertisers use Ads Manager. By centralizing research in Discuss, they replaced fragmented tools with a single system for capturing and sharing behavioral insight at scale.

With more than 5,500 tagged moments across 100+ tasks, teams now have on-demand access to real advertiser behavior, supporting stronger decisions and a repeatable UX measurement model.