I recently served on a panel of judges for a hackathon at Meta. For the hackathon, employees created prototypes related to accessibility. What they came up with is incredible — for example, solutions that support the blind and low-vision community or individuals with dementia, but that also have potential to add value to everyone’s lives. It’s humbling and inspiring to be surrounded by people driving this type of work.

My first career was working as a journalist, reporter and editor, mostly in community newspapers in my home state of North Carolina. I leveraged that experience to transition to tech content. I started at Meta — then Facebook — in 2013 working on operationalizing our scaled support content, like our help center. Operations is a great bootcamp for the entire company. You learn project management and how to work with data, which serves you well across Meta, no matter where you go. I wanted to get closer to proactively thinking about and anticipating the challenges that people experience, so I transitioned to content design.

I love people management and started managing a small team in 2016. The company was in a period of extreme growth, and my team expanded rapidly. In late 2023, I started leading the content design function. Design work is also critical to accessibility. I’m passionate about creating amazing experiences for everyone we serve, and was happy to take on leading our accessibility work at Meta earlier this year as well.

There’s never been a dull moment in my 11 years here. We've obviously grown a lot and gone through so much change, but we've held on to a real, true and core company culture that inspires creativity, moving quickly and connecting people.

Zooming out, content design is part of user experience. We think about how to communicate with people and guide them through our technologies. Specifically, content designers approach design through the lens of language, crafting user experiences and the words within them to guide people intuitively through our technologies.

My team and I are responsible for the words you see (or hear) — but also the words you don’t see, and when and where they show up.

Design is critical to building accessible technology, so we’re baking accessibility into our design process, and ensuring that every designer understands what it means to build for accessibility. If we can solve accessibility within design, that gets us almost all the way there. Meaning, if we can get every designer at Meta to design with accessibility in mind, we’ll get most of the way there in terms of ensuring our Meta technologies are truly serving everyone.

Here’s one of many examples: Content designers are core to making sure that content is structured appropriately and that there are labels within the user interface, so that screen readers can identify the elements and understand how to navigate them for blind or low-vision users.

There's a lot of content out there where you can experience what it's like to use a screen reader. I encourage everyone on my team to do this. Sub-optimal user experiences force blind users to persevere through everyday tasks that should and can be simpler. It’s critical that designers understand this.

One example is how we experiment to determine the language that resonates with people. Which specific words help someone navigate through a Facebook sign-up flow? A person in Silicon Valley on a high-tech device on a high-speed network signing up for Facebook will have different needs than someone who is perhaps using the Internet for the first time, shares their device with a family member and has limited connectivity. Maybe they’re using Facebook in English, but English isn’t their first language.

There’s so much nuance in how to best communicate with billions of people around the world. Content design helps our incredibly diverse audience interact with and understand our technologies. This helps the business achieve its goals as well. Content design is key for driving sentiment, too. The words that we use matter, and they're core to how people feel about Meta and experience who we are as a company.

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