MERIAH DOTY TREVIÑO

Hi! I’m Meriah. I've delivered exceptional content design and editorial to some of the world's largest digital brands and products. I bring joy and ease to user journeys.

Brands for which I have written, edited, content designed, and created style guides:

Content Design

Project 1

Retrofit guides with deep links to Facebook activity log from Privacy Center (2022)

This project allowed users to take direct action on behalf of their privacy-related matters, replacing an experience that relegated them to reading about the actions they could take. My contributions to this project introduced user education and tailored content for three separate user paths.

Before

THE PROBLEM: Meta's Privacy Center portal sent users to Facebook's Help Center from three separate sub-guides (above). They linked to Help Center articles about activity log, not activity log itself. This did not fall in line with Privacy Center's goals to be the known hub for people to make privacy decisions.

THE SOLUTION: Give users easy access to controls by rerouting them directly to activity log. Improve user experience through content design in these three user journeys.

After

For the three list cells here I focused on the user action and not the destination page name. So instead of “Activity log” as the header for all three (like it was before), each new list cell header speaks to the desired action for each of these three use cases. I landed on this north star to guide me, not only because it's more parallel with the other guide headings, but it’s quicker and easier for users to understand. A user can make a decision whether to click based on the heading alone, given the tendency for people to scan pages for important, actionable information. 

The subheadings for each further drive at this idea, suggesting and elaborating on specific actions users in each flow might want to take. I based suggested actions on data that shows where users navigate to the most on activity log e.g. "posts and photos." I used the same heading for the first two guides – “Review past activity” – because they both applied and followed existing patterns elsewhere in Privacy Center. But the subheadings are different, tailored to each use case. 

I also designed an educational banner (above) that appears on Facebook's activity log home page only when users navigate from the three aforementioned entry points. The banner explains that people can use controls here for their privacy matters. It offers instruction on how to use activity log, suggests actions, and links to a Help Center article to learn more. The banner offers a soft landing in these three user journeys, a quick guide for those seeking to keep moving in the flow, to help them decide quickly how to take action on behalf of their privacy. And the way education is progressively disclosed, they can get more information if they need it.

Members of my XFN team tested my design to see if visitations to activity log would increase enough to merit launching it. It did and subsequently launched globally on web and mobile.

Project 2

Deprecating Facebook automatic activity controls (2022)

I worked as the CD on an XFN team to deprecate automatic activity controls. 

THE PROBLEM(S): After two years live, UX research found people didn't even remember turning on automatic activity controls. Users were also surprised the feature didn't auto-hide some types of content from their profiles. Opt-in rate was low.

THE SOLUTION: Sunset the feature while maintaining, even strengthening, user trust and confidence. 

Why is a deprecation flow important, you ask? In this case, it involved removing a feature that allowed Facebook users to automatically hide activity from their profile page. Removing privacy controls is something I and my team took very seriously, taking care not to alarm users and continue to strengthen trust. (Imagine if the feature just stopped working, without any communication from Facebook, and, as a user, you didn't notice until after the fact.) It was important to 1) Alert users before the feature went away. 2) Give them options on how to handle it. 

I raised several considerations during the design process, and caught issues that significantly impacted design decisions. Most notably, the singular final design – and my strings in it – served two separate user groups who had been using two differing versions of the feature, including two different user-facing feature names.

Before my content strategy came together, I sought to deeply understand the existing feature in order to discover the project's demands and constraints. The project was more complicated than it first appeared because of the need to solve for two sets of users who would eventually experience one, unified deprecation flow. The existing product itself was also half-baked, meaning we were deprecating a feature that hadn't graduated to full functionality.

My eye for detail and quality control kept the naming, casing, phrasing and overall style of the content design consistent and easy for users to understand. Catching a naming inconsistency was key, as was solving for it.

In the end, my contributions to the design kept the user experience streamlined, simplified and clear. I iterated with the PD and my CD team several times before final internal reviews. My strings got the green light in final reviews (from product, legal and marketing). The design went live on desktop and mobile. 

Content Quality Example

Activity log style correction (2022)

I noticed and corrected the casing of the activity log homepage title on desktop. 

THE PROBLEM: Copy style was updated site-wide a year prior to my hire. Specifically, all headings and titles -- unless they were proper names -- had been updated from title casing to sentence casing. I noticed the updates in most areas of the UI, but, glaringly, not on the desktop version of the activity log homepage. This is where users see the title the most, aside from the main Facebook homepage nav. 

THE SOLUTION: I submitted the casing fix through our internal review tool and got the green light to update it.  My background as a copy editor and style guide writer makes me hypersensitive to copy style errors. I took it upon myself to fix it even though it was not part of my assigned projects or tasks. This is just one example of how my copy editing prowess ensures pro-level clarity and consistency throughout user-facing products. 

Case Study