What do you do if your best design work is a small project?

"Cayenne is a senior designer with more than a decade of experience, but she had one specific problem: her best work is small. Sometimes, your best work isn't part of a company-wide AI initiative with a $17M budget attached. Sometimes, it's the "one quick thing" she got asked to do that turned into some of her best work. The key to translating that kind of impact isn't to fudge the scale. It's to talk about the problem in more detail."

"The ask sounds simple. The problem isn't. In 2016, Meta (then Facebook) had a problem that would shape future social media interactions: people didn't know how to react to a funeral announcement. Hitting "Like" on news that someone's uncle died felt wrong. But 90% of Facebook's traffic came from mobile, where typing a comment was real friction. So most people stayed silent, and Facebook watched whole categories of human moments slip past the platform, including grief, sympathy, and shock."

A senior designer with over a decade of experience found that her best work was small in scope. Her challenge was communicating the value she brought when her work did not fit a large, company-wide AI initiative. The solution was not to exaggerate scale, but to explain the problem more precisely and in greater detail. A 2016 Meta problem showed how interaction design affects human moments: people did not know how to react to funeral announcements. “Like” felt inappropriate, and typing comments on mobile created friction. As a result, many users stayed silent, and categories of moments such as grief, sympathy, and shock were missed on the platform.

Read at Medium