Product content design

Highlights: 0-1 product content design, UX defense, pair design, simplifying complex concepts, plain language, content patterns, developing content standards

TL;dr: I designed content for a new feature that allowed users to place a hold on a product through Facebook’s local C2C product, Marketplace.

As part of my work, I also:

• Influenced cross-organizational partners to prevent a deceptive pattern from getting launched and provided the eventual UX solution we implemented instead

• Piloted a pair design model, which became a popular workshop at the Comma-Con content design conference and scaled to an ongoing program

• Supported users in onboarding to the new feature with simple, straightforward language

• Created scalable content patterns to support the user at every stage of the experience

• Launched a new content standard after noticing a user experience contradiction in the way product designers were using a standard component

People problem

Buyers on Facebook Marketplace had no way to indicate to a seller that they were committed to purchasing an item, and often missed out because someone else could pick it up quicker. Some buyers would send the seller a money transfer (eg., Venmo or e-transfer) to reserve an item, but this put them at risk as the seller could keep the cash and sell to someone else. We needed a way to help buyers secure items they were serious about buying.

The strategy

Collaborating with the Facebook Pay team, we built a user experience where buyers could “request a hold” on an item, using Facebook Pay to create a temporary authorization on their credit card as collateral so the seller would reserve the item for them.

What I did

Influenced cross-organizational teams by advocating for the user experience

When my team wanted to hide the cancellation feature behind friction and warnings to prevent platform abuse, I pushed for a more transparent, user-friendly experience to increase user trust. I had to convince two teams, one of which I’d just met, to do the right thing.

I articulated the potential negative implications of the current solution—flagging a misleading experience and pointing out stress cases, especially those around economic insecurity, risks to trust in our payments product, and PR risks, especially during a pandemic with record unemployment. I proposed alternatives, including a standard cancellation flow, a transparent approach that informed the user along the way, or a product model change where we charged people for cancellation upfront.

I got buy-in from team leads to make my proposed flow part of the MVP, using cross-organizational influence to prevent a potentially damaging experience from launching to millions of real people. We eventually launched with my proposal—a simple, straightforward flow that empowered the user with information about the cancellation process and mirrored patterns from our Marketplace shipped product.

Piloted a pair design model

Since this was a cross-org project spanning multiple teams, I had the rare and great luxury of collaborating with another content designer. We initially took the divide and conquer approach to move fast, but through giving each other feedback in our regular crits, we realized this was a strength we could leverage. My content design partner shared some resources he’d read around Pair Design from Cooper agency. We switched to this model, where one partner was responsible for generating as many ideas as possible (the “gen”), and the other for distilling those ideas, providing feedback, and bringing them back to the project’s goals (the “synth”).

Our collaboration worked so well that we decided to run a workshop at Comma-Con, Meta’s annual Content Design Conference on pair design, so that other content designers could learn about, practice, and use this working model.

Our workshop was popular enough to be turned into a Pair design program, matching content designer “gen” and “synth” pairs for future work. (You can find out which camp you fall into using the quiz I made!)

Designed content for the new user experience

Due to trade-offs with our MVP model, our user experience wasn’t the ideal I was pushing for—we were able to place a temporary hold on a user’s credit card through Facebook Pay as collateral, but buyers would need to pay the seller for the item price separately. That made it especially important that the content introducing this new experience was as simple and straightforward as possible, using an informative tone.

I explored many iterations of the feature name and educational content, ultimately landing on “Request a hold” as it was the preferred option in research, was most aligned with the true impact of the user action, translated and localized well, and was alright with legal. “Hold” carried the implication of “holding onto an item” and matched colloquial language, where the primary alternative of “reserve” gave associations with the intangible, like a hotel booking. I used “request” as the verb to manage user expectations, since the hold wouldn’t be official until the seller accepted it, and it was important that the user understood their hold wouldn’t happen right away. I used a new term, “hold amount” to help users understand that this temporary authorization was separate from the payment and price of the item.

Created content patterns

I explored the happy and unhappy paths for this flow, considering all of the scenarios: a hold that was waiting the seller’s acceptance, a hold that was accepted or declined by the seller, a hold that the buyer or seller cancelled, a hold that had passed the window for acceptance and expired.

To make sure the flow was consistent and easy to build mental models around, I created content patterns for each component to apply throughout the experience.

Scaled to develop content standards

In my work on this product, I noticed that product designers and content designers were using design components in inconsistent ways that might create confusing user experiences. I created a model for how we could use them more consistently, in a way that matched with existing patterns and common mental models, and scaled this to an app-wide content standard. Read more about my work on developing content standards.

The results

We didn’t get the right metrics on our experiments to make a full launch, but the offshoots were a success:

• I prevented a risky experience from getting launched to millions of users in an experiment

• The content standards I co-created were hailed as “the best launch of the year” and live on today

• The pair design workshop I co-led with my content design collaborator at Comma-Con, Facebook’s annual content design conference, was well-attended and received—so much so that other content designers created a program to match content design “pairs” to each other!