“This little message was reassuring”: Mitigating risk + managing “brand tax” launching Meta accounts

Launching a new account type in the wake of Cambridge Analytica.

What are Meta accounts?

Meta accounts were a new type of account, initially launched in 2022, that would bring together Meta’s family of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Horizon) under one umbrella as part of a three-year roll-out plan to support the company expanding their social media platform capabilities into the metaverse. In this new paradigm, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp would become “profiles”, so this launch also presented a new mental model our users would be adjusted to over time.

Problems

Business In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, Meta struggled with public perceptions about how the company manages its user data. With this new incumbent “mega” account, there were concerns that this might be perceived as a way for Meta to “move beyond the scandal” or a new way to collate and share user data between apps, thereby creating a monopoly. In reality, this was not the case. In fact, we’d arranged to expressly prevent data sharing between Facebook and Horizon; it was an integral selling point for our productivity use case, as we’ll discuss later.

Workflow

The Workrooms team was relatively new. I was the first and only CD on the team and this was my first project at Meta. We didn’t have established content design or terminology principles for Workrooms at the time, meaning rather than hitting the ground running, we were defining and scaling patterns as part of the Meta accounts workstream that would go on to become canonical.

The launch was one of the largest public relations and legal projects Meta has ever worked on. In total, I worked with over 55 different lawyers from 5 legal teams across Meta to review every comma and full stop, and mitigate any comms risks that might compromise the integrity of the new account. My content brief was over 350 pages long.

Because we had a lot on the line, the project had many stakeholders from across Reality Labs and up to Boz and Zuck level. There was a lot of visibility and opinions. This was the first time the company had ever embarked on something of this scale. So, a lot was design by committee which added complexity and required a lot of relationship management.

User

Needless to say, Meta accounts were a huge change in the back end. So much so, it facilitated the need for a total overhaul of the Workrooms app to support the new container. This meant deprecating any existing Workrooms accounts and migrating users to the new Meta account. In practice, this meant forcibly logging users out their Workrooms app and making them manually sign up again with the new Meta account. We anticipated that a majority of our users would drop off at this stage and not come back. This was not ideal for a small 0-1 app with only 40,000 MAU, so part of the job of the comms strategy was to (1) prepare people by setting expectations early; (2) pre-empt and mitigate concerns and (3) empower and excite users about the coming changes.

Lastly, a classic conundrum for content design - all of this had to be communicated in notices and dialogs; a stunningly small piece of real estate.

What I did

• Developed a communications and content strategy for the Meta account launch
• Crafted promotional emails, QPs, modals and dialogs in VR and web

To support the same ship goal, I also created:

• A new onboarding experience on web and in VR, including helping users set up their virtual desk and virtual screen
• A new suite of activational and promotional product emails
• User permissions and Terms of Service disclaimers
• A FTU NUX on web
• New user settings
• Our team’s first VR user personas

Who I worked with

3 Product Designers 1 UXR 1 Product Manager 1 Product Marketing Manager 5 Marketing Managers 1 Data Engineer 2 QA testers 10 Engineers 55 Lawyers 5 Privacy Managers 1 Localisation Manager 3 Translators 1 Design Agency

Constraints

• Timelines. I had 2.5 weeks to draft all content for the product changes and the external announcement comms. From kick-off to design complete, we had 2 months.
• PXFN review. Legal and privacy had a lot of oversight into what I wrote, which meant that sometimes language was more watered down, or less specific. Superlatives were also out, as we even though technically possible, we didn’t wan to hold ourselves accountable for “faster” or “better” service through the Meta account migration.
• XFN alignment. There were a lot of eyes and opinions to manage.
• Real estate. We had a lot to say and not a lot of space to say it.
• Dependencies. Partner teams missed their deadlines, which meant we missed our deadlines. We were also working across time-zones; with the majority of the core Meta account team based in the west coast, meaning long hours and often missed comms at critical moments.

How I did it

⚽ Step 1. Kick off

Creating constraint in a lot of unknowns

Because the scope was so large and there was a lot of emphasis on the messaging being absolutely right, I tried to create a set of guiding principles that we could come back to and use as a rational benchmark for all our decision making when I communicated with leads and XFN.

These were:

👉 1/ Give explicit instructions and guide people to their goal and an action they can take

Avoid long listicles or lengthy explainers, as this leads to analysis paralysis. Early user-testing suggested that users are accepting of change, but as in any change state, they preferred clear instructions about how the changes would impact them and what they needed to do, rather than what the change was or why it was happening.

👉 2/ Don’t make it emotional

What we care about, we force our users to care about.

There was a lot of sensitivity around this launch that risked seeping into our comms. Reflecting top-down pressures, our PM pushed me for extensive in-product disclaimers, to reassure users that Meta accounts wouldn’t “misuse data” and weren’t “like Facebook”. In trying to make Meta accounts a success by drawing negative comparisons against our sister apps, I felt we were projecting our own internal anxieties onto the user in a way that could inadvertently reinforce subliminal user concerns and might actually undermine trust in the company at the very moment we needed users onboard.

👉 3/ Be clear, concise and conversational

Reduce cognitive load by meeting users where they are. A simple, conversational approach helps users process information quickly.

👉 4/ Progressive disclosure

Offer broad definitions on primary pages so users can easily understand the basics. For more detailed explanations, provide them deeper in the experience, ensuring they're accessible but not mandatory for understanding.

👉 5/ Speak to the segment

Legacy users would need greater persuasion to sign up for the new Meta account; it was high friction and a lot of change at once. For this purpose, we should offer personalised onboarding experiences for new and legacy users.

🖊️Step 2: Defining a comms strategy

Understanding constraints and dependencies

Once, I’d established product principles, I started to pull in PMM and MarComms to understand timelines and broader company positioning of Meta accounts that we might need to pull into our own product comms. As it transpired, we were not the only product team who were launching Meta accounts for the first time. Our sister team in Horizon OS, who were driving the Meta account log in flows, were launching the same day as us. We’ll discuss more about how we converged and diverged with their comms strategy later.

⭕ Mapping dependencies

• Horizon OS team for the Meta account ‘sign up’ flows we were integrating into our onboarding
• Legal to review new sign up flows, and well, all and any UX related to Meta accounts
• Privacy to review technical architecture of new Meta account flows and ensure user data was being upheld
• As we were anticipating an uptick in overall users into Horizon Worlds, Integrity needed to review our policy around user reporting and bullying and harassment in immersive spaces, and Workrooms needed to onboard to those policies for the first time. This also meant we had to build out user reporting flows in our workrooms spaces.
• Content strategy team for our Help Center articles on new Meta account setup and troubleshooting
• Workrooms engineering to rebuild the new account container and asset migration flows for existing Workrooms users- no mean feat.
• To hit a public launch date of August 20th, we had precisely 1 month to be design complete

1. Cadence/ “when”

Here I worked with PMM to devise a GTM strategy. Because we were migrating (and in some instances deleting) user data as part of the Meta account launch, we were legally obliged to inform users 90 days before. This was our first firm constraint.

We prepared a staggered comms plan with notification going live:

• 90 days before launch
• 1 month before launch
• 2 weeks before launch
• Day 0 (launch day)

In all, 4 sets of notices.

2. Audience/ “who”

We anticipated that once Meta’s PR team sent out initial comms, there’d be a lot of public scrutiny and we’d see additional traffic to the product. This could be new users, the press, or someone with ill-will towards the company who were looking to misrepresent us. We didn’t know who might come across our messaging, so we needed to strike a neutral balance between factual, but also excited. For legacy users, especially, the new Meta accounts came with some pretty neat benefits that we actually wanted to preach to about to balance out the negative implications of the forced account migration.

We decided to segment our users into groups and offer up a slightly different onboarding experience. These were:

• Legacy users
  • Admins (These guys had stuff to do to support the account migration, so we really didn’t want them ignoring comms).
  • Non-admins
• New users

3. Component/ the “what”

I wanted to find out more about engagement model to inform the methods we used to communicate outwards. Email is a notoriously poor way to contact users; statistically, only 10% of users actually received our emails (because of bounce-back or it landing in Junk) and only 3% actually opened them once received. This meant we couldn’t necessarily rely on email as our only means of communication.

Data told us of our 40,000 MAU, 75% were logging in once a month and only 30% were logging in daily. This meant that a large chunk of our user base might miss in-product comms.

In the end we hedged out bets. To ensure full coverage, we targeted all surfaces: web, email and VR, including an email campaign; dismissible dialogs and sticky live countdown in VR; and dismissible QPs on web.

Announcement email to admins and non-admin legacy users

We couldn’t anticipate where users would log in, so we covered both web and virtual reality.

How we announced Meta accounts in VR

Adding a persistent countdown to the top of the personal user interface (PUI) in your virtual personal office, so you never missed a beat.

4. Strategy/ the “how”

Now, it came to writing. I started off imagining how a user might be feeling in that moment when they received those initial notices about the account model change. Annoyed? Frustrated? Apprehensive? It felt wiser to err on the side of caution and assume worst case scenario. I avoided excited or celebratory tones, as we just couldn’t predict how a user might feel. And, exclamation marks (!) - forget it.

Instead, we focused on actionable guidance, answering these 3 questions:

• What is happening?
• When is it happening?
• What do I need to do and how do I do it?

Notification email sent prior to launch that pre-empted any user concerns and prepared them for launch day.

Email sent on Day 0

Once, we had core flows down, me and my PD pulled in UXR to test the E2E flows; value props and methods of communications we were employing.

We learnt that people were accepting of the new account, as long as we showed a clear rationale for why we were doing it and offered them a helping hand during the change state.

The sign up screen

What legacy users saw on Day 0

Impact

Business

• Mitigated risk: no mainstream backlash or negative user or press feedback
• Perceived as highly successful launch by company > received personal thank you from Zuck

Workflow

• PD and CD working relationship used an example in company for how product and content can work together
• Established product principles used for duration of product shelf-life

Product

• 75% increase in sign-ups for Workrooms
• 100% of all returning users migrated their assets into the new account to continue using Workrooms

User feedback

• Generated excitement for legacy users in community feedback groups
• Helped legacy users look forward to- rather than than dwell on- the onerous changes
• “This little message was reassuring”: No greater compliment to content design and demonstrates that a little goes a long way.