Working at Instagram/meta
For some context on working as a Content Designer at Instagram/Meta, the product teams I was on consisted of the following:
• Product Manager
• Product Marketing Manager
• Product Designer
• UX Researcher
• Data Scientist
• Software Engineer
• Content Designer
• Product Marketing Manager
• Product Designer
• UX Researcher
• Data Scientist
• Software Engineer
• Content Designer
Projects required multiple reviews with leaders from product design, content design, privacy, and legal before launching. My product teams often collaborated with teams from Facebook as well, and rigorous data analysis and user research informed every stage of a project from ideation to launch.
Each string of content required working with Software Engineers to include accessibility information and create content briefs to help translators with localization. I also gave and received feedback in 4–6 product design and content design critique sessions each week.
Project: RATINGS & REVIEWS ⭐
Ratings & Reviews was a 0–1 project, and my first at Instagram. The company wanted to build a Ratings & Reviews system to help people know which businesses were trustworthy when shopping on Instagram. My team also wanted to help trustworthy businesses reach new customers by promoting existing customers' great experiences.
I worked on the core product-reviewing experience on Instagram, and about 30 total design variants across 6 experiments to prove product-market fit for business reviews. To standardize ratings-like experiences across other apps owned by Meta, I collaborated with Content Designers from multiple teams to establish principles and a working model.
My NDA with Meta prohibits me from sharing content work from experiments, but here are some highlights from the core product-reviewing experience on Instagram.
Project overview 🗺️
Product reviews are an important element of the Instagram shopping experience that help people know which businesses and products they can trust, and help businesses show their trustworthiness.
While the number of reviews on Instagram was growing, the growth was slower than we had hoped. We had projects aimed at encouraging review creation, but we wanted to dig deeper into the core reviewing process to discover any areas for improvement.
My role + project duration
Role: Content Designer
Duties 💼
• Content design
• UX research
• Information architecture
• Getting buy-in from content and product design leads
Team 👥:
• Product Manager
• Product Marketing Manager
• Product Designer
• UX Researcher
• 2 Data Scientists
• 3 Software Engineers
• 2 consulting Content Designers from Facebook and central company teams
• Product Marketing Manager
• Product Designer
• UX Researcher
• 2 Data Scientists
• 3 Software Engineers
• 2 consulting Content Designers from Facebook and central company teams
Duration 🗓️: August – December 2021
User research📈
We used data analytics to find where users abandoned the review flow on Instagram, and reviewed user research conducted on other review-like products in Meta's family of apps, such as Facebook.
I worked with my team to explore alternate content designs for problem areas, and created design variations for our own user research to get additional insight on where users would abandon the flow, why, what they find helpful in reviews, and their own review behavior.
Our UX Researcher used my designs in interviews with users from different demographics. Here are a few key learnings from the people we interviewed:
• They wanted as much detail as possible. Pictures and videos are especially very helpful.
• They don't want to spend much time creating reviews themselves. In some cases, they didn't want to create reviews at all, though they still really valued others' reviews.
This was a fascinating tension to discover. The people wanting the most detail in reviews were also the least likely to create reviews themselves. Some said they didn't have the time, some felt self-conscious about reviewing purchases, but all looked to reviews to inform their purchasing decisions on a daily basis.
Challenge🏅
Revamp the product review flow to meet two important, opposing goals:
• 👩🏭 Simplify review creation to decrease the cognitive load as much as possible.
• 💁♂️ 🖼️ Encourage providing detail and media in reviews without sacrificing simplicity.
Core review flow
When reviewing a product bought on Instagram, people can give an overall rating and choose to provide additional info.
Again, user research showed there was a conflict between how much info people wanted to see in reviews and how much they wanted to provide.
We kept this first screen in the review flow simple and gave the content a neutral-to-friendly tone to start the review process with as low a barrier as possible.
Our team went through hundreds of reviews to discover what type of info was most common and helpful. From that, we created 5 main product aspects.
Since we're asking for more info than in the previous screen, we included content that explains why. User research showed that helping others was a common reason people spent time writing reviews, so it became our value prop.
It was a common concern that a person's reviews would appear in their followers' feeds. Because of spacing limitations, mitigating that fear had to be done subtilely. The term "other shoppers" was used instead of "people" to convey that reviews would only be seen by other people shopping.
The fit of an item was identified as an especially important detail when shopping online.
We wanted to collect this information to help other shoppers while still keeping the experience of providing info lightweight. Every detail in the flow so far has been collected with a simple series of taps.
The content had to be as concise as possible to maintain a low cognitive load for the user while collecting a lot of key product info.
At this stage in the flow, we ask users for a lot. User research showed that people find written reviews and photos for purchases the most helpful. The more detail, and the more forms of detail, the better.
We wanted reviews to be as helpful as possible, but understood that it can be a lot of work to provide a helpful review. We continued making the design and content as simple as possible to avoid overwhelming users, and to respect the amount of work we're asking of them.
We include another "why" statement—"Other shoppers need your advice"—to reinforce the value prop of helping others. For the placeholder text, we wanted to give subtle instruction on what to say about a product without influencing the review to skew more positive or negative.
When the review is complete, we thank the user for their work and let them know that they'll be notified when the review is published. This is important because review content has to be checked for spam and violations of Instagram's Community Guidelines before posting.
We also had to include "published on Meta Company Products" because reviews appeared on both Instagram and Facebook.
We added the "Review more items" CTA to encourage reviewing other products to help more shoppers.
Results🏅
• 👆📝 Increase in reviews. After shipping the new review experience, we saw a significant lift in the amount of reviews created and details collected.
• 🧱 Foundation for future work. Since the new experience collected more details about purchases, it laid the foundation for future experiments using this info. For example, allowing businesses to highlight the product/purchase aspects they're consistently rated well on, or the ability to share reviews in Instagram stories or posts.
Team: ads consent & value 🤝
My work for the Ads Consent & Value team focused on educating people about controls for managing Instagram's use of their data for ads and the benefits of ads personalization.
Unfortunately, the sensitive nature of this team's work prohibits me from sharing project samples, but here are a few highlights from my time on the team:
• Designed content for the 2 most successful experiments in helping people understand data controls and data sharing for ads. Content was noted as a key to the success of both projects, which both had very tight timelines and high legal and business scrutiny.
• Worked with multiple teams to help run our successful Instagram experiments on Facebook.
• Created new opt-in controls that worked so well they became standard in other experiments.
Team: Transparency & Control 🪟🎚️
My work for the Transparency & Control team focused on improving Instagram's controls for ads and data, and making the company's data practices as transparent as possible.
A lot of my work addressed governmental regulations from different parts of the world, and content design had the highest scrutiny in meeting—and where possible, expanding on—legal requirements. My work on this team was also highly sensitive, and I'm unable to share specific project contributions, unfortunately. Here are a few highlights I can share:
• Created content for improved data controls and transparency that helped Instagram and Meta avoid millions in government fines.
• Added more info and controls to the "Why am I seeing this?" surface for ads.
• Consulted on transparency and mitigating legal risk for other product teams.
• Represented Instagram's design voice in company-wide transparency initiatives.