Case Study · 03
Designing global transparency frameworks for a highly sensitive audience.
Youth advertising content must navigate an intricate web of regulatory, legal, ethical, and UX constraints. For this project, the content had to be clear to a teenager, trustworthy to a parent and advocacy groups, and hold up under regulatory and legal scrutiny.
I led content design from day one across two experiences: in-product messaging telling younger users what was changing for them, and advertiser messaging explaining how youth ad delivery was changing, across 20+ surfaces.
Beyond the writing, the biggest part of my job was driving alignment across more than 30 cross-functional stakeholders in legal, policy, product, and engineering.
The bar for the content that younger users would see was high because every line of copy was serving three distinct audiences simultaneously. It had to be easy for a 13-year-old to understand, satisfy the privacy needs of parents and advocacy groups, and be rigorous enough to meet global regulatory and legal requirements.
Early in the content exploration phase, 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 challenge was different. We had to deliver clear, actionable messaging across our advertiser products and help center resources to explain the changes for advertisers. I also had to reconcile how these age-based changes would fit in with existing and future age-related advertiser guidance.
I saw this challenge as an 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, age-focused 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 at 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’d created and previously shared with content designers across the organization. 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. A partner product manager also shared my template with PM colleagues facing similar alignment challenges in other projects.
Despite an aggressive timeline and complex stakeholder alignment, I handed off all content deliverables on time, including transparency notices for younger users, a teen-to-adult graduation experience, privacy resources, help center articles, and advertiser product messaging built on my new age-band framework. I partnered with localization to prepare every asset for a phased global launch.
This project paused before launch due to a strategic shift. However, the age-band messaging framework remains a blueprint for scaling to future age-based regulations without adding friction for advertisers.