Defining Meta Horizon voice and tone guidelines
Challenge
Meta Horizon is Meta’s nascent social platform in the metaverse, where people can meet virtually and explore immersive worlds as embodied avatars. The platform needed to convey a more playful and welcoming personality targeting a younger user base of pre-teens, teens, and young adults. But the new Meta Horizon voice also had to be consistent with the overall Meta brand voice, the “Big-hearted Nerd,” which applies across all Meta apps.
Goal
Define a distinct voice for Meta Horizon, unique to the metaverse and tailored for a youth-first -- but not youth-only -- audience, while preserving the overarching Meta brand voice for existing apps (e.g. Facebook, WhatsApp).
My role
I directed the content design team to define Meta Horizon's new voice, with cross-functional partner collaboration and alignment with Product Design, Marketing, and Brand. I led my team to establish a baseline understanding of our target audience (teens and young adults) using UX Research insights and competitive assessments, in order to define our voice principles and develop tone guidelines. I worked with leaders in Brand and Marketing to refine and scale the guidelines to apply across go-to-market and in-product content.
Outcome
My team delivered the first-ever voice and tone guidelines for Meta Horizon, with executive leadership review and approval. My team worked with partners in data science and engineering to run experiments leveraging the new voice. These experiments yielded statistically significant improvements: +16.5% increase in click-through rates, +4.7% increase in weekly retention.
Examples
Before adding voice
After adding voice, increasing click-throughs by 16.5%
Notifications leveraging voice were deemed a "critical lever for new user retention," showing a +4.7% absolute increase in weekly retention
Excerpts from internal-only guidelines
