Indoor living room with a pink sofa surrounded by various lush green houseplants and a coffee table with glasses and fruit.Indoor snake plant Laurentii in a dark pot placed on a striped rug next to a white chair and radiator inside a room with patterned walls.Indoor snake plant in a dark pot next to a white chair with a plush zebra toy and a white radiator against patterned wall.Indoor scene with a pink sofa surrounded by various green potted plants and framed art on a blue and white wall.

Improving ad formats for messaging ads across Meta

One of Meta's highest-value ad products was losing users at the tap. I led the cross platform effort to fix it, turning a major drop off point into a growth driver.

Role: Design lead

Scope: Facebook and Instagram Feed and Stories.

Impact: +$150K daily revenue • Drove 6.5× half-year target • Aligned with 5 teams


Overview

Millions of people were tapping on a relatively new Meta ad product, and then dropping off. Not because they weren't interested, but because they didn't understand what would happen next.

"The CTA confuses me. Maybe a new window pops up? It's to message them, so it takes me to their page, to their website."
- Brazil participant in usabilty study

I led the redesign of messaging ad formats across Facebook and Instagram to fix this moment, unlocking revenue at scale while establishing a new design pattern for destination clarity across Meta's ad surface.

My Role

I stepped in as design lead across Facebook and Instagram to align five teams around a single question:

“How do we make the outcome of an ad obvious before the tap?”
Strategy
Unified fragmented research and prior experiments into a shared problem definition and evaluation framework
Alignment
Led cross team alignment across surfaces, orgs, and senior leadership, including Adam Mosseri for Instagram changes
Execution
Drove the design from explorations through shipped solutions across Facebook Feed, Stories, and Instagram Feed
Expansion
Identified and drove new opportunities beyond original scope, Facebook Stories was the 3rd highest ad impression surface and wasn't included

The Problem

Users successfully clicked ads but failed to transition from click to conversation start. The CTA gave no signal about what would happen next, users couldn't tell if they'd land on a website, an app, or a chat.

Up to 90% drop-off in developed markets after click
60–70% drop-off in Brazil and India

This wasn't a UI problem, it was a mental model problem at scale. Three compounding factors made it hard to solve:

Trained behavior
Users had been trained for years that ads lead to websites
Global surface
The solution had to work across Feed, Stories, and future formats in every market
Identity confusion
Instagram and Facebook both have native messaging, creating confusion with WhatsApp

We weren't redesigning a component. We were rewriting a mental model at scale.

Living room with pink sofa, wooden tables, and various green houseplants surrounding the space.Cozy living room with pink sofa, decorative pillows, green plants, and framed wall art including one saying 'ONE DAY I'LL BE READY'.Instagram sponsored post from Lucky Shrub featuring a Snake Plant Laurentii in a black pot placed on a wooden floor next to a white chair with a zebra plush and a white radiator against arrow-patterned wall.Snake Plant Laurentii in a black pot placed on a striped rug beside a white chair and radiator in a room with white walls decorated with black arrow patterns.
The current experience

Process

Comparison matrix showing Facebook ad design exploration and evaluation from current state to future feed ad format, with columns illustrating design variations and rows detailing factors such as ad clarity, cognitive load, design alignment, scalability, and business impact.
Framework matrix to evaluate designs

Step 1: Evaluation framework

Before exploring solutions, I introduced a shared evaluation framework to align five teams and reduce decision subjectivity.

Sharing this in a Google Doc before any designs let cross-functional partners give async input and reach alignment faster.

Scalability: Works across surfaces and future formats, not just Facebook Feed today
Design alignment: Builds on existing patterns; doesn't introduce new visual noise
Destination clarity: Is the outcome clear before the tap, regardless of CTA copy?
Impact: Expected effect on CTR, CVR, and conversations started
TikTok video showing a chessboard mid-game with the caption 'So dangerous!' and the comment 'Take that queens gambit!' with hashtags chess, chesstok, and chesstrap.Close-up of black Lenovo wireless earphones with water droplets on them, advertised at $0.89 on Temu.Man wearing a fitted pink t-shirt and light blue jeans walking outdoors, holding a black jacket in his left hand.
Competitor CTA analysis

Step 2: Key insights from research

Insight 01
Destination signaling is a learned pattern. Competitors consistently use icons and brand cues to preview the next step. Meta didn't. Users had no visual vocabulary for "this goes to messaging."
Insight 02
Past experiments showed subtle WhatsApp cues, an icon turning green after dwell, an active status dot, meaningfully increased conversations started. The signal didn't need to be loud, but small cues drive large behavior changes.
Design principle
Signal the outcome at the moment of highest intent, not before, not after.

Phase 1: Fixing intent on Facebook

Facebook corporate building at dusk with interior lights on, shared in a New York Times post about traffic soaring during the pandemic.Living room with a pink sectional sofa surrounded by numerous green indoor plants and a small wooden coffee table with glasses and fruit.Group of people practicing yoga indoors on mats, performing upward plank pose with palms and feet on the floor.
Link attachments on Facebook
Insight
Messaging ads looked nearly identical to website ads while users scrolled. Users would make snap judgments and missed the destination entirely.

Facebook Feed design explorations

I explored multiple directions and after internal alignment, converged on last two.

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Indoor living room with a pink sofa surrounded by lush green plants and a round wooden coffee table with a glass pitcher and green apples.Modern living room with a pink sofa, wooden coffee tables, and numerous lush green indoor plants around.Group of people practicing yoga on mats indoors, performing reverse tabletop pose on wooden floor in a tropical-style room.A group of people practicing yoga on mats indoors, performing a bridge pose with hands and feet on the floor and hips lifted.
Shipped icon and dwell experiments

Colored CTA on dwell (Shipped)

Insight: Users decide in milliseconds whether an ad is "for them." Signaling too early adds noise, too late misses intent
Decision: Delay the destination signal until the user has dwelled on the ad,  indicating real interest
Solution: CTA turns WhatsApp green (or blue for other CTAs) after a 3-second dwell, surfacing the destination at the moment of highest intent
Cozy living room with a pink sectional sofa surrounded by lush green indoor plants and a small round wooden coffee table.Indoor living space with a pink sofa surrounded by lush green plants and two framed artworks on the wall.
Slowly test towards a future vision

Future vision

To align with Future of Feed, I shared a version that colors the entire footer attachment to group the CTA and messaging metadata visually.

Facebook Stories: Scope I identified and expanded

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Updating Stories CTA's from buttons to stickers
Insight: While analyzing surface traffic, I found that Facebook Stories had the 3rd highest ad impression volume and wasn't included in the original brief.
Proposal: I proposed adapting interactive sticker CTAs from organic content to ads, a native pattern users already understood.
Delegation: I handed the work to a junior designer I was onboarding onto the team (IC3), used my influence to get it prioritized with the right teams, and kept him unblocked through execution.
Outcome: Became one of the highest impact wins of the half, and the project was a core part of his promotion from IC3 to IC4
Staff level note
As a IC5 at the time, the right move wasn't to own more , it was to create the conditions for someone else to do their best work on something that mattered.

Phase 2: Fixing Misinterpretation on Instagram

The same product failed for different reasons on each platform:

Facebook: Users didn't notice it was a messaging ad → intent problem
Instagram: Users misread WhatsApp as Instagram DMs → identity problem
Close-up of a person applying clear serum to their cheek, highlighting smooth skin and a septum piercing.Instagram post by Lucky Shrub showing a Snake Plant Laurentii in a black pot next to a white chair with a striped stuffed animal and a radiator against a wall with black arrow patterns.Instagram sponsored post by Lucky Shrub showing a Snake Plant Laurentii in a black pot next to a white chair with a striped stuffed zebra and a radiator under a window with arrow-patterned wallpaper.Snake Plant Laurentii in a black pot placed on a brown and white striped rug next to a white chair with a fur throw and a radiator.
Initial IG messaging ad CTA's

Two constraints shaped the design direction:

Constraint 01
8.6% of WhatsApp ads use non-standard CTA labels ("Learn more," "Shop now"), so destination signaling had to be visual, not text dependent.
Constraint 02
Instagram Feed changes required senior leadership approval, including Adam Mosseri, so solutions needed to be minimal and precise.

For messaging ads, a small destination label sat next to a chevron. Users would read "Send message" and miss the label entirely.

Four white ceramic vases with abstract colorful brushstroke designs in orange, blue, green, and yellow on a white surface.Four small white ceramic vases with abstract colorful shapes in orange, blue, green, and yellow on a white surface.Four ceramic vases with abstract shapes in orange, blue, green, pink, and yellow on a white background, displayed for sale on an Instagram post by luckyshrub.Four small white ceramic vases with colorful abstract shapes in orange, blue, green, and yellow on a white surface.
IG ad CTA explorations

Explorations

Explored replacing the chevron with icons and multiline ad CTAs to surface more business/creator context, but found it broke existing patterns and added feed noise.

We decided to move forward with icon + label + cheveron to maintain consitency.

Close-up of a person with septum piercing applying serum to their cheek.Close-up of a person applying skincare serum on their cheek with their fingers.Four white ceramic vases with colorful abstract brush stroke patterns on a white background.Four small white ceramic vases with colorful abstract shapes in orange, blue, green, and yellow, displayed on a white surface.
Initial IG messaging ad CTA's

Messaging destination icons (Shipped)

I moved the messaging icon to the start of the ad CTA, before the label.

A single small change with outsized clarity.

Instant brand recognition, no reliance on label text
Minimal visual complexity, no new patterns introduced
Works regardless of what the CTA copy says
Four columns comparing scalability options for WhatsApp icon ads with various app icons and actions under each option.
Framework matrix to evaluate designs

Scalling icons beyond messaging ads

Beyond the immediate fix, I proposed extending destination signaling across all ad types, turning a messaging specific fix into a scalable system for destination clarity across Instagram ad surface.

Impact

These changes transformed a major drop-off point into a growth driver:

+$150K daily revenue from CTA dwell improvements
+6.5× half-year revenue target (Facebook Stories)
+2–4% increase in conversations started across surfaces
+1.8% CTR lift (Facebook Feed)

More importantly, the work established durable organizational value:

System
Established a repeatable pattern for destination clarity across ad formats
Alignment
Aligned multiple orgs on a shared design and evaluation approach
Speed
Improved quality and velocity of cross team design decisions

Reflection

What Worked

Aligning teams before designing unlocked speed and clarity across five orgs
Grounding decisions in a shared framework reduced subjectivity and accelerated stakeholder buy in
Designing for both immediate wins and future systems multiplied the impact of each shipped change

What I Would Do Differently

Start with usability tests in Brazil and India as hypothesis inputs, not validation, early signal would have sharpened the experiment rationale
Expand scope beyond Feed from the start. Stories, Reels, Marketplace, and Watch upfront would have driven larger, more cohesive impact from day one
WorkMeta New IG AdMeta Ad FormatsMeta Profile+Monamies