Saradwati Chatterjee

Content Designer

Hello, I am Saradwati (Sara) Chatterjee. As a Content Designer, I am deeply passionate about making technology accessible to all. Currently, I work on the News Feed and Stories team at Meta, where I get to simplify complex ideas for millions of people.

I started my career as a Learning Experience Designer in India, where I had the opportunity to learn how empathy shapes inclusive user experiences. I wanted to expand my understanding and passion for designing accessible experiences, so after a hiatus of few years, I restarted my career as a Content Designer.

Facebook Avatars

Feb 2020 - Current • Content Design, Accessibility Language System creation & implementation

This was a unique opportunity to create a holistic language system to make Facebook Avatars, accessible. It empowered people with special abilities across the world to create, express and engage in conversations using their own avatars.

This work lead to various company-wide initiatives to solve the unprecedented challenge of making expressive tools accessible to all.

Challenges

How might we

Building a globally relevant experience had many nuanced challenges. The core areas of focus were defined by a set of how might we’s under the following broad categories:

Inclusivity

• Create scalable naming system for categories like skin tones, hairstyles and body types.

• Define colors objectively and differentiate between shades of the same color.

Cultural Relevance

• Capture religious and cultural nuances of expressive content like Avatar stickers and text post background images.

• Briefly provide context on complex and layered human emotions conveyed through stickers.

Translations

• Include English and non-English text art in global sticker labels.

• Use English and non-English punctuations in global sticker labels.

Process

There are many aspects of this project that I’d love to dive deeper and share my experience of leading, collaborating and influencing Facebook Avatars as a holistic product experience.

Expression meter: Created a meter for measuring the intensity of expressions. This unit of intensity brought clarity and flexibility in to the language system we wanted to develop and helped us in creating the guidelines for clear cross-functional collaboration.

Language system: Created a language grid for Avatars creation assets, stickers, and SATP labels. This spreadsheet was referred by Artists, Product Designers, Engineers, and other Content Designers on the Avatars 2D team and cross-company teams like FRL, Oculus, and Horizon.

Process document: Created this process document for the Artists and other Content Designers on the Avatars team. It helped our XFN partners plan asset releases with realistic timelines. The step-by-step guidance on writing the labels, entering them into the tools, and requesting translations would help onboard new Content Designers on the Avatars team.

Content standards: Wrote the Avatars accessibility content standards for new Content Designers on the Avatars team. These standards were also closely referred to by Content Designers across FB apps to write labels during an accessibility fix-a-thon for expressive content like stickers and gifs.

Product Experience

The product experience spans across the entire Facebook platform, from creating and editing your avatar to using them as expressions and conversations in messages, comments, SATPs to VR. The approach landed us in creating a simple and neutral, yet dynamic language system that is flexible and scalable across the platform.

With the help of simple to complex stickers, this video and the images below gives an idea of how this language system uses words, articles and sequencing to render a label for the selected sticker that screen readers can read and guide people.

Feed Network Toast

Nov 2021 • Product writing, emerging market

Instant feedback toasts are used in the Facebook App for in-context ephemeral feedback. In this project, we repurposed the toast system to notify people when content would not fully load. I designed the content for various scenarios and collaborated with the right partners to ship this on both iOS and Android in emerging markets.

Quick Promotions

Oct 2021 • Product writing, Deprecation messaging

Quick promotions are feed units that can be dynamically targeted and injected in the news feed to in-context and timely messaging by Facebook. They are usually used to launch new features, talk about settings or celebrate and event.

In this case, I used the QP format to write a critical message for a feature in the media settings being deprecated. Though, the QP guidelines are pretty strict, I worked with various partners including legal and comms to use this format to let people who had their media HD settings switched on, know about it and what they should expect after it is deprecated.

You’re all caught up

Dec 2021 • Product writing

We saw a huge sentiment bump on IG when they introduced the You’re all caught up feed unit. It reflected positively on the brand and helped people reduce screen-time and added to their wellbeing.

We wanted to take that learning and use it in the Facebook news feed. In our case, due to the nature of people on the FB app, we had to give more context about what it meant and what else they can do, if they choose to stay back in the app.

I designed the content for various intensities to add context for people take further actions on. I worked closely with design, PM and Engineering to ship this on both iOS and Android.

Udemy Teaching Center

Nov 2018 - Jan 2019 • UX Writing, Information Architecture

I designed the structure and wrote 27 long-form instructional articles to launch the first version of Udemy Teaching Center, a dedicated destination for content creators to learn and about planning, recording and marketing their courses on Udemy.

These articles were written using content from existing technical docs and interviewing subject matter experts on video recording and marketing.

Quick Links:

• Udemy Teaching Center

• Sample Category landing

• Sample Article