Designing at Scale

Margaret Gould Stewart

When you're designing at scale, little things really matter. Margaret Gould Stewart, Director of Product Design at Facebook, gave us a peek behind the scenes of that design process, as she described the challenges facing the team managing the Like button on Facebook. A team to manage the Like button. Amazing. But when you're designing something that will be used 22B times a day, around the world, in different languages and cultures, you have to do it very carefully.

Just as important as the design is the manner of introduction. Margaret recounted her careful introduction of the rating system for YouTube videos when she was at Google. Although there were 5 ratings, evaluations were clustering almost exclusively around 1 or 5. They carefully shared that rationale with users and had a graceful introduction.