Content design at Instagram is faceted and diverse.

When I reflect on everything I worked on in just under two years with Instagram, it feels impossible to summarize my time there. Instagram content designers wear many, many hats, often supporting several product teams at a given time.

I formally supported 5 product teams within Instagram for Business — including the Growth, Ads, Search and Browse, and Discovery teams — and worked on projects that improved existing features for professional users and several net-new experiences. I also frequently supported urgent ad hoc projects for the Meta family of apps, including WhatsApp and Facebook.

HIGHLIGHTS

  • I was the lead content designer for all in-app Instagram messaging targeting professional users after the largest outage in company history (10/4/2022) — and several critical mitigation workstreams in response to changes to regulatory requirements and different app store guidelines.

  • I was part of Instagram’s Brand Voice Ambassadors, a small group of voice experts established following the reinvention of Instagram’s brand voice and creation of the “courageous creator” persona. The ambassador group reviewed product experiences with collaborators to encourage more human language, provided feedback for iterations that explored different tones (while maintaining the new voice standards), and explored ways to thoughtfully humanize UX while also ensuring localizability and inclusivity.

  • When new product teams were created, I worked with leadership to craft new vision and success statements for the new teams.

  • I championed inclusivity by independently taking accessibility courses and applying my learnings to daily content design work, writing string descriptions for translators and accessibility strings for screen readers to ensure experiences were shipped with accessibility in mind.

  • I collaborated cross-functionally on a daily basis. This included: leading meetings with engineering about build restraints, unexpected error states, or edge cases; finessing copy with legal counsel to ensure compliance with regulatory bodies like the GDPR while maintaining brand voice and human UX (which was often challenging!); or after-hours conversations with our lead researcher based on user sentiments we took note of in the wild (something I always paid attention to).

  • I was often recognized by product teams, including product designers, user researchers, engineers, and product managers for generating product ideas, being vocal and innovative in ideation sessions, and contributing executable ideas to our team roadmaps. I was also frequently recognized for my design thinking and always advocating for human, empathetic, simple user experiences.

  • I cofounded and co-led a growth-focused “UXR pod” in which research, data science, product, and content design met weekly to align on upcoming research, identify research opportunities, flash early-stage design work, surface historic research for upcoming initiatives, and prioritize workstreams across teams with shared research, data science, and content design resources.

    We also used this time to examine product roadmaps from a design and research perspective, creating more thoughtfully constructed roadmaps and stack-ranked priorities, and helping our product teams make even greater impact.

    I also co-led a retroactive with the goal of encouraging the inclusion of UX research earlier on and advocating for more thoughtful UX, rather than shipping experiences solely on hypothesis absent of concept testing.

  • I was an onboarding guide to two content designers joining Instagram for Business from other parts of Meta, meeting weekly to help them get situated in their new product spaces, establishing dedicated time to flash work as they learned their new areas, and providing general guidance and companionship. Both relationships extended long beyond the formal guide timeline as we found our dedicated meetings productive. I was also an official mentor to a new content designer, creating a 10-week curriculum to welcome them to the company, introducing them to resources and education opportunities to thrive in the content design community, helping them prioritize their schedules and projects, and creating dedicated space for sharing work and finding the guidance they needed as they got settled.

  • One of the most frequent pieces of feedback I received from my cross-functional peers was that I always contributed feature and product ideas to our team roadmaps. I was always vocal in vision sprints and contributed very detailed ideas to our FigJam ideation sessions, many of which made it into our roadmaps for product explorations and concept testing.

  • Because content design was a very under-resourced discipline and most CDs supported multiple product teams, there were many projects that went unsupported by content design. I created guidelines and templates for the Instagram Business Growth team that provided cross-functional partners with resources to ship quality work without the formal support of content design, and to better understand the discipline. And I spent 1x1 time with folks interested in taking on a formal role of content support, including an engineer, and spent time sharing best practices, ways to repurpose existing copy from similar workstreams, and how to write string descriptions and accessibility labels. This helped unblock several workstreams that didn’t have official content support and gave cross-functional partners insight and confidence in shipping quality work.

  • I regularly supported time-critical mitigation workstreams, which often included highly sensitive privacy- and compliance-related issues. These mitigation projects came from across the family of apps, including both Facebook and WhatsApp, was often called upon for GDPR-related product updates to ensure compliance to regulatory changes, and was the lead Instagram content designer following the October 4, 2022 outage — the largest in company history. I regularly received accolades from our legal partners and general counsel for meeting legal requirements while humanizing complex and lengthy messaging and disclaimer copy.

  • I created a chat group for several members of the Instagram Business Growth team, in which we shared live user insights found in our own organic use of the app. This included both user frustrations and positive sentiments, which we used as inspiration for product and feature ideation in vision sprints and workshops.

  • I was one of Instagram’s Brand Voice Ambassadors, where we led office hours for folks to bring product work for voice and messaging guidance. In an effort to create more human, conversational product experiences, this committee was dedicated to exploring tone, simplifying and humanizing messaging, and ensuring that messaging remained translatable and inclusive.

  • Upon the creation of new teams the within Instagram for Business organization, I worked alongside pillar design leadership as the lead content designer to craft concise, action-oriented vision, purpose, and success statements.

  • As we prioritized workstreams in our roadmaps, I always partnered with product designers and our product manager in a discipline-specific costing session. This helped ensure we allocated enough time to ship thoughtful work, keeping in mind Metrics, Integrity, and Privacy reviews — in addition to content-specific needs like localization/translation, accessibility needs, and reviews with CD leadership, which was often necessary when shipping net-new features.

  • I was on the planning committee for Instagram’s first internal Design Summit, specifically tasked with coordinating the keynote speaker and providing outlines for the conversations with our guest speakers. The theme was centered around inspiration — and users who are using Instagram to bring their dreams to fruition and visibility to their missions or callings.

  • When Facebook became Meta, we were tasked with making innumerable updates throughout the family of apps to ensure we were properly referencing the parent company and the individual brands that are now part of Meta. To complete this arduous update, a volunteer team was established, and I contributed to the effort by making more than 200 direct product updates to ensure consistency and accuracy in product.

  • On the Instagram Business Growth team, I designed content for a megaphone that was one of the highest-performing experiences in the team's history. Since this was extracted from raw data, I don’t have screenshots of the megaphone itself, but the copy and metrics were as follows:

    Headline: Grow your followers

    Body: Start to build your community by inviting people to follow you.

    CTA: Invite followers

    Impressions: 328K

    CTR: 12%

    *Average click-through rates for megaphones on professional accounts was 4-5% at the time this data was pulled.

  • After my first year at Instagram, I went through formal training to become a candidate interviewer. Upon completing the training, I became an interviewer and regularly graded exercises for content design candidates, which included providing detailed feedback and perspective on test assignments.

PROJECT CASE STUDIES

Note: I’m redesigning this section of the site, and will be publishing project-specific case studies as I finish them.