Help Center Content Strategy at Instagram

I collaborated cross-functionally with product, policy, legal, marketing, and engineering teams to develop support content for product launches focused on Instagram policy, security, access, and safety. The jargon-free help center content I wrote guides 500 million+ global Instagram users through complicated products and policies, empowering them to self-serve when troubleshooting.

Over 3.5 years, I supported nearly 200 product launches by writing new and/or updating nearly 400 help center articles. Here are a few examples of Instagram product and feature launches I’ve developed content for:

 
 

Your Activity

A product that allows users to bulk manage their content and interactions on Instagram in one place. I wrote and edited 30 help center articles for the initial launch of this product and then collaborated with the content designer on subsequent updates and expansions of the product over a year. My approach to this launch included auditing existing help center content to identify articles where UI changes needed to be updated in how-to steps, finding gaps where new content was needed, and reporting on help center user data to make recommended product changes. Additionally, I worked closely with another help center content strategist to develop the best approach for succinctly explaining the differences between bulk and individual content management to users.

 

Instagram.com/Hacked

A comprehensive destination users can rely on to self-diagnose, report, and resolve account access issues. Instagram.com/hacked was a project that had previously been prioritized due to understaffing, I volunteered to step in as content designer (though it was outside of scope for me). For this launch, I worked closely with security engineers, product designers, and UXR to develop a content design that allowed users to self-diagnose and resolve account access issues. This url links to an in-app or web form, where users can select their account access issue: Hacked, Forgot Password, Disabled (self-disabled or policy violation), or Impersonation. Each option in this form will route the user to a support channel, based on their self-selected account issue. Soon after launch, /Hacked received 120k impressions/day, allowing about 1.6k users/day to get back into their accounts using the support form

Sensitive Content Control

A control that allows Instagram users to see more or less of some types of sensitive content in Explore. For this launch, I spent 14 months strategizing with product and legal teams to write jargon-free and legally accurate help center content. Post-launch I monitored help center user feedback and discovered a bug where some users weren’t seeing the option to turn off the control, I reported the bug to the product team who then worked swiftly to fix the issue. Additionally, I monitored user feedback to identify trends in user’s understanding of the control and suggested improvements to content design while also making updates to help center content to improve our explanation of how the Sensitive Content Control works.

 

Oversight Board

This launch marked the first time that users can appeal content decisions made by Facebook and Instagram to an independent board. I worked closely with the FB help center content strategist and a team of 20 global cross-functional partners to strategize on how to present a highly-visible and highly-sensitive new independent review process for violating content. I wrote 4 help center articles for this launch and continue to monitor user feedback to improve content for helpfulness and clarity.