Case Study · 03
Designing global transparency frameworks for a highly sensitive audience.
Advertising to younger audiences means navigating an intricate web of regulatory, ethical, and UX constraints. The real challenge for this work wasn’t just explaining a set of changes to the user’s experience. It required creating messaging that was clear and understandable for a teenager, trustworthy to a parent, and able to hold muster under regulatory and legal scrutiny.
This project required designing both the consumer and advertiser experiences to communicate global changes to a younger users’ experience. One set of content and design served UX and resources for young users, parents, and regulators simultaneously, and a separate set delivered UX messaging for new and existing advertising campaigns and operational guidance to advertisers in the help center.
I led the content design from day one, owning the end-to-end transparency framework across the entire ecosystem. I designed everything from in-product privacy notices and educational resources to help center articles and advertiser guidance — spanning over 20 distinct surfaces. Beyond the writing, a huge part of my job was driving alignment across more than 30 cross-functional stakeholders in legal, policy, product, and engineering.
The bar for the consumer-facing content was incredibly high because every line of copy had to perform a triple-duty balancing act: easy for a 13-year-old to understand, thorough enough to satisfy privacy advocacy groups, and rigorous enough to meet global regulatory and legal requirements. As we mapped this out, I also evaluated how parental consent options might look and feel in the event we needed to include them as part of our solution.
On the advertiser side, the friction was different. We had to deliver clear, actionable messaging in the UX and help center resources to explain the changes for advertisers, reconcile how these age-based changes fit in with other age-related advertiser guidance, and communicate requirements that some advertisers might have to complete.
As part of this change, I took the opportunity to redesign how we handled age-based messaging in our advertising UX. Historically, when a new youth advertising policy was implemented in a specific geography, the team would launch a brand-new standalone notice. Over time, this turned the advertiser UX into a chaotic patchwork of regional alerts that didn’t scale and created increased confusion and friction.
I audited our entire library of age-related messaging and consolidated everything into a streamlined “age-band” framework: one standard message for each age band (<18, <16, etc.) where the geos mentioned were based on the advertiser’s selections and designed to cap after a maximum number of geos to manage content length. This new setup gave us a clean, extensible system that could easily absorb future global regulations without creating more design debt.
Many of the stakeholders I worked with on this project hadn’t worked with content design directly before. I quickly identified the need to onboard stakeholders to the content review template I had created and used across dozens of prior projects. This drove alignment on how stakeholders would provide feedback on content and set the rules for our collaboration model.
During that onboarding, one stakeholder offered valuable feedback that led me to revise the template to make it clearer where changes were being made. I shared the improvement with content designers across the company, and it was incorporated into content review templates used across the organization. The product manager also shared my template with colleagues facing similar alignment challenges in other parts of the company.
Before transitioning off the project for maternity leave, I delivered the full content package, including the localized transparency notices, UX experience for transitioning to an adult, educational resources, and help center articles for younger audiences, as well as the advertiser in-product messaging and guidance, including the consolidated age-band messaging framework and help center articles.
This package did not ultimately launch due to a broader strategic shift, but despite the pause, the age-band system remains a highly valuable blueprint for the company to help scale for future global regulations without adding new friction to the advertiser experience.