Meta, 2022
Increasing ad creation from business inboxes
Role
Lead designer
Surfaces
Messenger, Instagram, Meta Business Suite
Problem & Opportunity
Businesses use Instagram, Messenger, and Meta Business Suite to talk directly with their customers, but had no easy access to the best tool for getting more messages (messaging ads) from the place they actually spend their time.
Businesses want to start more conversations with customers. The best tool for doing that is messaging ads, but there was no way to access them from the inbox, where businesses spend most of their time. Ad creation existed in a completely separate location, resulting in low discoverability.
In ad creation, advertisers struggle to find messaging ads among a broad set of products designed to serve every advertising objective.
At the time, upsells within inboxes were the only way to encourage ad creation. They were disruptive and ephemeral, with narrow targeting. If a business didn’t click at exactly the right moment, the upsell disappeared.
Impact
Ad creation for 100 million global businesses, unified across three apps and three design systems.
What I Did
Over 100 million businesses actively message customers every month across Messenger, Instagram, and Meta Business Suite. I devised a strategy to add permanent ad creation entry points into each inbox, linking the place businesses chat with customers to the best tool for reaching more of them.
I was design lead and main touchpoint for five projects across seven teams. Each app had its own design system, approvals process, and roadmap. I worked directly with each team’s designers and PMs, going through their review cycles and making concessions where possible to fit each app’s established visual design. We shipped Messenger first, then used that data to make the case on Instagram and MBS.
On desktop, the Automations team had invested heavily in their button placement within Unified Inbox, and the inbox team was unwilling to shrink it. I designed two variations of the top nav and created a rule that swapped between them based on daily message volume: low‑volume businesses see ads promoted, high‑volume businesses see automations.
I also worked with the Messenger Design System team to redesign the megaphone icon suite from scratch. The original icon had not been updated since the birth of Messenger and didn’t appear anywhere in the app. I selected the final icon, QP, and illustrations that now ship in MDS.
Before
The Gap
No path from inbox to ad creation. Businesses had to leave the place they spend most of their time to create messaging ads.
After
The Solution
Permanent entry points in primary navigation across all three inboxes, linking businesses directly to messaging ad creation with introductory NUX experiences.
Design Principles
Top‑level placement
Place the entry point in primary navigation, not buried in a menu. Our experiments showed a top‑level icon gets 18x the click‑through rate of a menu placement.
Permanent over ephemeral
A permanent icon is always accessible when a business is ready to act. Unlike upsells which rely on catching someone at the right moment and in the right mindset, a permanent entry point never disappears.
Reduce ad product competition
In traditional ad creation, messaging ads compete against every other ad type. Starting from inbox lets us assume messaging intent and default to the right goal, so businesses no longer have to find the right product themselves.