My role
Product design and strategy for a scalable consent system on Instagram, creating reusable patterns to standardize how teams communicate data use and user control. Partnered with Product, Engineering, Legal, Policy, Content Design, and IGDS.
What shipped
A reusable consent system of components, templates, and guidance aligned with Meta’s Consent UI Requirements and Apple HIG, enabling teams to build consistent, compliant experiences across surfaces.
The impact
Standardized consent patterns to reduce legal risk and design inconsistency while improving speed of execution across teams. Applied the system to launch a custom gender consent across multiple U.S. states, achieving 75.1% opt-in in contextual flows and 35.1% in blocking flows, while mitigating potential regulatory exposure exceeding $400M.
Problems
No centralized consent system, forcing teams to start from scratch or copy from old Figmas for each new regulation
Reliance on outdated, non-compliant patterns led to inconsistent experiences and created repeated rework
Frequent legal escalations late in the design process
Risk of violating Apple HIG and introducing dark patterns
No scalable way to ensure consistent compliance across teams
Goals
Enable teams to build consistent, compliant consent experiences without starting from scratch
Reduce legal escalations and last-minute design rework
Create a system that can scale with evolving regulatory requirements across surfaces
Establish Design as a strategic partner in privacy through clear, system-level guidance
Constraints
Consent experiences are built on a shared UI framework across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. The framework used its own components and interaction patterns, which did not always align with IGDS
Solutions needed to balance Instagram-specific design standards with cross-platform consistency and engineering constraints
Consent designs had to comply with Meta’s Consent UI Requirements and Apple HIG, limiting flexibility in layout, hierarchy, and interaction patterns
Process
Auditing IG for existing consent experiences
To inform and implement the system, we:
Audited existing consent experiences to identify compliance gaps and inconsistent patterns
Defined a roadmap to bring legacy consents in line with Consent UI Requirements and IGDS
Identified common misuse patterns to inform clearer guidance
Creating new components and documentation
In partnership with IGDS, we:
Defined and built reusable components and templates aligned with the design system
Published the system as part of Instagram’s broader design system and socialized it across teams
In parallel, we collaborated with engineering to ensure alignment with a shared consent UI framework used across Meta apps, balancing Instagram-specific patterns with cross-platform constraints.
Product principles
We grounded the system in three principles that guided key design decisions:
Simplify decision-making moments—give people the right level of context and control to confidently manage their privacy
Craft solutions that scale—ensure consistency across surfaces while anticipating future use cases
Meet people where they are—present consent at the right time and place to support understanding and action
Solutions
Guidance on when to use the consent product system
Introduced the consent product system, defined consents, and linked out to other resources.
Defining the parts of a consent
Set common terms to use when describing consents with guidance on each element of the page.
Dos and Don’ts
Provided extra guidelines for common mistakes found through the consent audit.
Product System in Action
Custom gender consent
We applied the consent system to launch a custom gender consent in Oregon, Delaware, and New Jersey, meeting regulatory requirements while minimizing disruption to the user.
Designed a progressive communication strategy to collect consent ahead of enforcement deadlines
Introduced contextual consent surfaces tied to profile editing, improving comprehension and timing
Used a blocking fallback for users who did not engage with earlier prompts
Result:
75.1% opt-in when shown contextually vs. 35.1% in blocking flows
Mitigated potential regulatory exposure exceeding $400M
Impact
Standardized how consent is designed across Instagram, reducing inconsistency and compliance risk
Shifted teams from reactive fixes to system-driven design
Prevented late-stage, blocking Legal feedback late in the design process
Improved discoverability of compliant consent components and templates, driving adoption across product teams
Established Design as a strategic partner in privacy and compliance