What I’ve Been Working On…

Messenger

Messenger is the instant messaging service that powers conversations within Facebook, Instagram, Portal, and Oculus. I support our Shared Experiences pillar, focusing on new features for Groups and 1:1 Messaging.

I’m super lucky to have a fantastic, well-balanced team. Here are a few amazing features they’ve shipped:

Command System

In March 2022, we launched a robust system for chat commands to help supercharge messaging efficiency and add a little extra fun to Messenger.

Examples include the “@everyone” command, which notifies all participants in a chat about a new message, and the “/silent” functionality, which makes it so that members of the group will not receive a notification of your message at all, removing the anxiety of interrupting someone who may be in a different time zone and allows users to read messages at their leisure.

Covered by The Verge, and TechCrunch

Word Effects

We introduced suggested word effects to easily add a fun emoji cascade to everyday words and phrases you’re already using in your chats. Now, when you send standalone messages like “goodnight,” “congrats” and “jk,” you’ll see an option to create a word effect for that term, including a suggested emoji pairing like 😴, 🎉 or 😛. … A new way to help people discover this feature and bring their conversations to life!

Covered by TechCrunch

While I love the challenges of management, I also loved being a part of a product team as an IC. Here are a few features I worked on as an IC designer:

Soundmojis

In 2021, I pinch-hit for the Audio & Immersive team before they hired their first designer, and spun out Soundmojis — a next-level emoji that lets you send short sound bites, ranging from clapping 👏, crickets 🦗, drumroll 🥁, and evil laughter 👻, to audio clips from musical artists like Ariana Grande or TV shows and movies like Universal Pictures’ F9, NBC and Universal Television’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Netflix’s Bridgerton. This feature was lauded for it’s intentional and user-centric design.

Covered by The Verge, TechCrunch, and WSJ.

Messenger & Instagram Cross-App Launch

More than a billion people already use Messenger as a place to share, hang out, and express themselves with family and friends. In 2020, we connected the Messenger and Instagram experience and brought some of the best Messenger features to Instagram. Now, users have access to the best messaging experience, no matter which app they use. For this launch, I led design for Custom Reactions, Chat Themes, and Replies.

Custom Reactions

I championed this feature for about two years, ever since I first tested it as a Growth experience. I was ecstatic when it finally made the roadmap in 2020 and I got to lead design on it. As a heavy-duty messaging user, I desperately wanted to give Messenger users the ability to react with any emoji — expanding on the original set of seven. Custom Reactions is designed so users can trick out their personal reaction tray while having the flexibility to add cheeky or contextual one-offs. What’s in your reaction tray?

Replies and Forwarding

Replies is one of my favorite features on Messenger, designed in staggered collaboration with Will Yoshimura. I’m proud of the design details we sweated — the precise tension for the swipe gesture, the interaction to view the original message, the threading with different types of media.

Forwarding and I got comfortable when I worked on Messenger’s Growth team. Here, I increased the accuracy of our broadcast suggestions and designed an equitable experience for group chats.

Chat Themes

In 2020, we introduced a set of chat themes for people to personalize their conversations. Pride launched in early June to celebrate Pride month, while our Tie-Dye, Love, Halloween, and Monochrome themes arrived in the fall for our inaugural cross-app release for Messenger and Instagram DMs. Since then, we’ve also teamed up with K-Pop sensation BTS for a TinyTAN theme that was covered by Rolling Stone, worked with Warner Bros to launch a Dune theme to celebrate the movie’s release, created a Billie Ellish theme for her new album, and much, much more.

Covid-19 Care Reaction

In early 2020, we launched a temporary pulsing heart reaction in Messenger to help people show extra love and support to their friends and family during the pandemic, when digital connections mattered more than ever. This was a fun easter egg to design, and I got to collaborate with artist Ryan Putnam, one of my design heroes 💗

Project Lightspeed

In 2019, Messenger took on an org-wide project of rewriting Messenger from scratch, shrinking the app’s footprint on iPhones down from 120MB to 30MB. I led the design side of this project, which involved unifying and simplifying our design system to components that could be built once and recycled across the app to save on binary size. This was a very rewarding project because it allowed us to rethink how our components could scale across all of our features, making our design system far more robust than when we started.

I was interviewed by Fast Company.

Omnipicker (Chat Composer)

I owned Omnipicker from 2016 through 2019, and saw it through several major iterations, such as improving group creation, increasing the accuracy of suggested ranking, and adding a group-specific entry point. I also updated it for two app-wide redesigns and published historical documentation on this core feature.

Messenger’s Redesign (M4)

In 2018, Messenger launched a major redesign that TechCrunch described as "a subtle sense that the claustrophobia had lifted." Notable features of this redesign included consolidating the app’s nine tabs into just three and introducing a lighter, cleaner interface. I worked on new versions of Thread Details, Chat Creation, and Wave.