Designing for youth safety and integrity

Challenge

Open up Meta’s metaverse to 10-12 year olds with safety and integrity, rooted in parental comfort, confidence, and agency.

Goal

Help parents and guardians easily understand the Meta Horizon experience, approve pre-teen usage based on their comfort, and be confident in their child’s safety.

My role

I defined a prioritization rubric for allocating constrained content design resources based on user risk, legal and regulatory risk, and one-way doors, to invest appropriately in this sensitive and complex space. I worked with Policy and Legal to fold their requirements into our designs. I worked with Marketing to ensure accuracy and consistency of safety and integrity messaging across marketing content, parent guides, and in-product UX writing. As the Reality Labs Youth Lead, I worked with other Youth teams across Meta to ensure consistency in how we designed for youth safety across Meta apps.

Outcome

Meta announced the expansion of Meta Horizon to pre-teens, ahead of launch, with (desired) neutral reactions from press and regulators. The user experience has clear content in progressively disclosed panels and embedded video -- all CD-authored -- to educate parents. My team used plain language at a 6th grade reading level for maximum comprehension while meeting requirements from Legal and Policy.