About 2.0

From static, impersonal and ineffective content to a rotating content engine built for relevancy and backed by data.

What’s the project? A feature, similar to Instagram’s Notes, helps users quickly share availability or lightweight expression with their friends and family using a text + emoji format.

Make it easier to create an About and more useful in the moments that drive conversations.

We introduced a lightweight emoji + text format with duration and surfaced About as a thought bubble in 1:1 chat.

My Role:

• Helped define user problem and design solutions

• Built a tailored user-journey content strategy aimed at educating and bringing awareness to new users and reengaging existing ones.

• Led e2e content experiment

• Helped shape product & GTM positioning + naming

• Collaborated on UXR planning

• Established scalable logging

Solving awareness and adoption with content

Content strategy & product positioning

Entry point ghost text was a primary lever for awareness, education, and adoption. Content had a direct line to the feature's growth goals.

Constraints/Challenges:

1. UXR showed that users lacked awareness and feature comprehension

2. Users felt insecure or unsure of what to post for their About

3. Needed clear distinction from WhatsApp’s other feature, ‘Status’

• Status is a visual, broadcast, creation-heavy tool.

• About 2.0 was text-first, low-lift, surfaced intimately in a 1:1 as a thought bubble, not a feed post

My solution - a content strategy based on 4 principles

1. Simple and actionable — instantly convey this is an availability tool

2. In-the-moment relevance — prompts that inspire posting right now

3. Zero creation anxiety — lightweight, not performative

4. Spark conversation — inputs that invite a reply

I crafted a voice, tone and terminology framework with explicit guardrails to reinforce our availability/lightweight expression strategy and differentiate from Status’ richer, full creation experience.

For example:

• DO NOT USE “Create” or “Share” — too tied to heavy-creation

• DO NOT USE “Update” — owned by Status in the home tab

I led content experimentation partnering with DS, Eng, and Marketing, to validate what resonated with users.

Problem

Low awareness, engagement, and comprehension. UXR revealed a range of use cases for About from availability to lightweight expression — the content needed to speak to all of them.

My goal

Build an adaptive content engine that personalizes ghost text entry point based on behavior signals, moving the approach from static to dynamic and perpetually novel. The content needed to create a feeling of freshness, drive in-the-moment posting, reduce anxiety, and educate new users —all tied directly to moving top-line metrics:

• Group Creation DAU

• Send Session @ 14 (retention)

Leading XFN collaboration:

I led XFN collaboration with DS and Eng to create a 4-arm prod experiment testing four thematic approaches.

• Expression

• User-journey (new users vs existing users)

• In-the-moment (time of day, DOW, seasonal)

• Varying mediums (emojis + music)

To induce freshness aligned with the strategy, a user would see a new prompt every time they opened the app.

Results:
We saw impressive results. Key takeaways were that highly personalized/relevant and in-the-moment prompts resonated most.

Group Creation DAU

+7% = Expression

+5.64% = in-the-moment

+16% = Emoji (iOS)

+5% - 16% = seasonal

Marketing integration:

Seeing the impact the prompts could have on creation, our strategy shifted to include our marketing activations. I partnered with PMM to create prompts for World Cup 2026.

Presets

Before

A universal approach aligned with product goals

The preset redesign was a deliberate content framework — not a copy refresh — built to reinforce the feature's framing and educate users on how to use it.

Rooted in availability, scaled to expression — Presets span from hard availability ("Free to chat," "Slow to respond") to lightweight expression ("Traveling," "Hanging with friends") to keep the feature coherent and show its full range.

Novelty was core to the strategy: low-performing presets rotated out, seasonal and holiday presets rotated in for relevancy.

• Universal by design: Situations and feelings that are globally recognizable, evergreen, and age-agnostic. Emoji choices informed by chat usage data.

• Always invite conversation. Shifting from "Busy" → "Slow to respond." "Available" → "Free to chat" opens a door to conversation. "Feeling excited!" prompts "About what?" Every preset gives a contact a reason to reply.

• Educate through example. For new users, presets are the onboarding. They model the right length, tone, and specificity — lowering blank-canvas anxiety while showing what "good" looks like.

The range of explorations show a methodical approach to final content. Using a scale for tone and use case to find the right balance aligned with user need and product goals.

Universal

Rigid availability

Curation over comprehensiveness

The initial preset list mirrored the original About 1.0 approach — long, exhaustive, covering every scenario. I advocated to cut it down significantly.

Why?

• Users were already coming to About 2.0 with NO clear mental model of what the feature was, so presenting them with a wall of options would compound that confusion.

• Posting anxiety was a core barrier to adoption, a long list risks the opposite of its intention — instead of helping users pick something, it paralyzes them.

A short, well-chosen set of presets does more: it signals "this is easy," establishes the feature's range without overwhelming it, and makes each option feel considered rather than exhaustive.

Implemented logging = improved optimization

Previous presets had NO logging. I changed this. I ensured logging was implemented with DS for us to understand the user-value of these and which ones were not resonating with users.