Meta Business
Suite Core Ads
- My roles: UX design – content · Product design co-creation · Strategy · Stakeholder management
I led UX content design and participated in product design and strategy within the Core Ads team in Meta Business Suite. The role involved working with a cross-functional group to help advertisers globally reach their target audiences.
Meta Business Suite (MBS) gives small and medium businesses and creators the ability to manage all of their connected accounts across Facebook and Instagram in one place. With a variety of tools to manage their online presence for free, MBS helps businesses and creators reach more people and stay up-to-date by managing their online presence from one central place.
The team
UX Content Designer · Product Designers x 2 · UX Researcher · Localization Manager · Product Manager · Engineering
Voice & Tone
Friendly · Approachable · Competent · Informative · Helpful · Knowledgeable
Issue
Meta Business Suite, for all its usefulness, was extremely wordy and required users to wade through a lot of content to complete each part of the advertising process. Our users were not professional advertisers, did not have staff to dedicate to their online advertising, and had to manage their own advertising and online presences.
This was in addition to everything else they needed to do to keep their businesses running. In essence, instead of spending time on their business, or on themselves, they had to jump through verbose hoops to accomplish their ad goals.
Solution
Melius est ut simplex
Cut down on content ruthlessly; trim it down to the essence of what’s required. Get rid of as much jargon as possible. Simplify. Repeat. Simplify. Repeat. Simplify. Rinse.
You may be thinking, “What? A content designer advocating for less content? Inconceivable!” But, as any experienced content designer will remind you, quality > quantity. Always.
Put more pretentiously: Melius est ut simplex (“It's better to keep it simple” *sniff*… thanks, Google Translate).
Steps to a better ad experience
Identify key areas
The first step was to identify the most used areas and features. The idea behind this was to first get those reworked to ensure that MBS’ experience would improve quickly. Once those key areas were improved, other areas could be reworked for better usability.
I collaborated with a data scientist and 2 key areas were identified based on their popularity and usage:
- Ad creation
- Budgeting decisions
Analyze content with a razor
Once the areas had been identified, I analyzed the flow with a view to cutting down extraneous information and reducing jargon. While complexity may have a place in the world, it would not be within Meta Business Suite’s user experience.
Begone complexity, hello useful ad creation information
Since our users were not ad professionals, they required a certain level of hand-holding to get up and running. In order to streamline the ad creation process, explanations of terms and goals were required to help them decide what’s best for their business. Along with this, examples of how the ads would look were also added for a more helpful experience.
I created descriptions for the goals they could choose (the ad creation elements would change based on the goal chosen) and working with my product designers, we put together example ads that showed how the final ad would present.
Stretch that %currency_type% !
a.k.a. designing for budgets and audience reach
I took on product design duties for this feature. Our users needed to see for themselves how a little could go a long way in their ad spend. The ad creation page with the budget section in it was already text-heavy, so forcing users to plug in different amounts to see how many people they could reach would be a poor experience.
I decided that we’d show instead of tell by giving users a way to play with numbers to see what works for them. After some interesting design discussions, I landed on a solution that was interactive, as well as illustrative of how a tiny amount could drastically change the potential number of people reached.
P.S.: There’s a great story for this particular piece of work that I’ll tell you about when we chat.
Results
These features, among others that I worked on, are still within Meta Business Suite and are pulling their weight on a daily basis. They’ve made it easier for small business owners to waste less time on creating and managing ads, and more time on what matters – their families, their lives, and their future goals.