Innovating with genAI
Challenge
A genAI feature for the Meta Avatars product was an unfunded, low-priority initiative, initially seen as a nice-to-have. This zero-to-one feature, requiring creation from scratch, would enable users to customize clothing for their avatars with genAI. Potential impact from the feature included increased engagement (particularly for younger users) and possible monetization, but it had limited buy-in from key stakeholders. An added challenge was that content design was not recognized as a strategic contributor to AI projects. My senior content designer on Avatars faced significant resistance, including lack of support from her previous manager and skepticism from Product Management leadership.
Goal
Support this feature's development to achieve longer-term goals, while iterating on it rapidly to test viability with frequent short-term wins and checkpoints. Transform the perception of content design as a strategic discipline by empowering a content designer to take ownership.
My role
I allocated content design resources for this important work, carved a path for our involvement, and supported the quality of the work as it progressed. I shielded the content designer leading this initiative from partner resistance and protected bandwidth for her to own the project. I ensured that she received support and recognition throughout the project, even when immediate impact wasn’t evident, keeping her motivated and performing strongly. I positioned content design as a critical function by demonstrating its value to longer-term product goals and to AI projects, beyond what partners perceived to be content design’s domain.
Outcome
The content designer successfully led the project, designing and delivering a fun and engaging feature to create instant, custom avatar clothing based on user prompts. Every aspect of this feature -- naming, integrity, quality and performance metrics, UX research insights, and of course the UI design and copy –- benefited from content design’s direct leadership. As a result, this robust feature was ready to plug into the product seamlessly to support the major launch of the newly redesigned Meta Avatars.
To maximize the impact of this product launch, product leadership gave the genAI feature a prominent place in the user experience for new and existing avatar users. It earned high praise from the Meta Board of Directors during a live demo, which content design helped prepare, increasing content design's visibility with company leadership.
This successful project validated the investment in the long-term vision despite short-term challenges. Content design demonstrated the strategic value we can bring to AI projects; as experts in natural human language, content design was uniquely positioned to lead in prompt engineering and help train LLMs to generate high-quality outputs that users expected based on the prompts they gave. The feature surpassed 10 out of 11 quality KPIs, which content design had defined and enforced with multiple disciplines to ensure high quality output.
User flow
