I was a senior content designer at Instagram for nearly two years, supporting several teams, cross-functional partners, and cross-family experiences.

I worked hand-in-hand with product designers, researchers, data scientists, and engineers every single day at Instagram — and regularly worked with general counsel on costly and complex mitigation projects (once receiving a high five from a Meta legal partner for quickly simplifying and humanizing a particularly complex response to a GDPR requirement, resulting in an incredibly rare GDPR approval on the first pass of a product update).

Some of the features I led content design for include Instagram’s launch of content scheduling, which was one of our most-requested features in user research; the introduction of ads that run continuously (which resulted in leading a terminology update adopted across both Instagram and Facebook); secondary CTAs in the form of profile banners for advertisers; an inspiration surface for professional users; and several regulatory response and mitigation projects (including leading all in-product communications for Instagram’s mitigation efforts following the largest outage in company history).

I also co-led a biweekly setting where data science, UXR, product, and content design came together to identify research opportunities, stack rank priorities, share work for research-centered feedback, and identify opportunities to optimize our team roadmap in a way that allowed us to ship more thoughtful features and product updates. Outside of the product teams I supported, I was also a mentor, onboarding guide, Brand Voice Ambassador following the establishment of a new brand voice, and part of the committee who planned Instagram’s first internal Design Summit.

As part of the Seller Experience, Ecosystem Engagement, and Risk teams, I helped create features that unified Square experiences and crafted guidelines and standards for design components and converging product spaces.

Key projects I supported include the information architecture for a simplified seller dashboard navigation based on user jobs to be done; an audit of the dispute challenge UX, which guides sellers through customer disputes — as well as developing the long-term vision and strategy for a redesigned experience that incorporated more humanness and education; a product audit whose findings yielded guidelines for the company’s first pattern library; the content and product design for a several-screen premium trial flow, including elements of education and upsell while also incorporating user consent for future communications; and the strategy for a push notification consent flow.

I also supported several forward-looking vision sprints centered on a more unified Square experience, including contributions to the decks for our presentations with leadership.

In my almost two years at DigitalOcean, I contributed to both brand and UX initiatives. Examples of UX work include co-writing the last Currents survey of 2020, which had complex flow logic; wireframing a new Community section of the website that merged product and community initiatives; and leading an initiative to further integrate DigitalOcean products and community initiatives by redefining how user stories were told — and establishing a richer, more cohesive footprint throughout the website.

The storytelling initiative and redesign included auditing all existing case studies; creating low-fidelity wireframes for both the new section of the site and the existing sections that would also house new content; developing the strategy for the connective tissue between more thoughtful customer stories, product, and community; and writing the first customer narratives in the new storytelling format, which I also wireframed from scratch. These wireframes included architecture diagrams, functional and interactive components, and mixed media.

In addition to thoughtfully crafting the Pilgrim brand, visual identity, and ethos, there were also countless design and UX efforts ahead of launching in June of 2018. I aggregated a group of people for usability testing on the staging site to ensure everything functioned properly across devices and operating systems. I constructed the initial sitemap, publishing workflows, and led the usability testing, which focused on navigation, URL structures, scrolling functionality, image expansion, linking behaviors, and responsiveness on mobile.

Meanwhile, we had to come up with clever and clear ways to showcase multiple voices in our Felicity Buckwinder series — which remains our most read story to date.

I’ll be graduating from UX Design Institute’s Professional Diploma in UX Design program in early ‘25. The curriculum includes qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, journey mapping, interaction design, prototyping, and functional annotations. Upon completion of the program, I’ll be adding all design files to the UX Design Institute section of my portfolio, including a fully clickable, medium-fidelity prototype.