Mass Design for Individual Users

She calls it "Designing for Humanity," as Facebook’s director of product design, Margaret Gould Stewart has an extremely important task that is crucial for this global brand.  Margaret and her team design digital experiences for Facebook users all around the world.  From company wide concepts to small details such as the Facebook “like” button, the product design team makes sure this mass design is at the same time personalized, a task that is as difficult as it sounds.

In her TED Talk, Margaret Gould Stewart explains how she must keep two things in mind above anything else while she is doing her job.  She must have audacity and humility in order to be able to successfully design at the scale that social media works.  Audacity is needed to realize that what they are designing is something that the entire world wants and needs, and something everyone will see and use.  On the other hand, Margaret makes a point that not everyone in the industry understands, one that I believe is one of the greatest keys to success in the digital marketing and social media world.  She understands that she must always have humility as a designer in order to successfully design for the whole world to see and use.  Humility in this sense means to understand that what the users want and need is far more important than the designers’ portfolios and what they would like to design.  Just as in creating any brand, the design and content Margaret Gould Stewart’s team creates are not meant to be done for themselves, instead it is meant for everyone that will use it all around the world.

The designer goes on to explain how “when you’re designing at scale there’s no such thing as a little detail.” All these details that may seem obvious or trivial to some, take time, energy, and talent to create successfully.  A great example of a small detail that has shaped Facebook members’ communication has been the “like” button.  A miniscule button that took more than 280 hours over several months to redesign in order for it to fit into Facebook’s new general design, this new “like” button is a great example of how mass design can also be personalized.  During this design process, the product design team made sure the button worked in different languages, different devices, and different browsers, all the while they had to work with height and width parameters set by guidelines.  Not an easy task, but the result was a success. 

Margaret Gould Stewart describes her job as director of product design better than I could describe it myself, she says there is a “never-ending thrill of being a part of something that is so big you can hardly get your head around it, and the promise that it just might change the world.”  Take a look at her TED Talk for more on this topic.