Designer by trade, writer at heart.
I'm a content design lead with 8+ years of experience. I specialize in content strategy, UX writing, and turning messy, undefined problems into solutions that scale.*
At Instagram, I worked across multiple product teams to build 0 to 1 creation flows used by billions of people. I defined language systems across end-to-end photo and video sharing. And named everything from photo filters to fonts.
Before that, I got my start in adtech, as the founding product content strategist at Adjust, a B2B SaaS company, with a dashboard UI built for desktop and a ton of product documentation required to use it. I designed a help center, built a content strategy team from scratch, and created the infrastructure to support content across the entire customer experience.
Get in touch: joli.barretta@gmail.com | Based in Oakland, CA
*A manager once described me as "quite dogged." I took it as a compliment.
Instagram is a social media platform with 3B monthly active users owned by Meta.
Publish screen simplification
From 65+ actions to a scalable system
Challenge: Instagram's publish screen (the surface every person passes through to share a post or reel) had quietly accumulated 65+ actions with no governing structure. Our data suggested this wasn't just a craft issue: poor navigability was affecting production. And it was an opportunity for content design to lead.
What I did: Audited every action on the screen across posts and reels. Built a scalable information architecture to organize them, then drove the cross-functional effort to test and ship it: defining scope, setting milestones, and coordinating across teams without dedicated PM support until one was staffed. Once we rolled out our simplified experience, I created a governance model, embedded in Instagram's existing review structures and requiring senior leadership approvals, to make sure it stayed that way.
Why it mattered: The simplified screen shipped and exceeded the goals we set for it: increasing usage of previously underutilized tools and lifting the production metrics the Creation team cared about most. The governance model means it won't quietly accumulate 65 actions again.
Language systems
Building the terminology infrastructure behind Instagram's creation experience
Challenge: At the scale Instagram operates, inconsistent language becomes a product problem. Conflicting terms slow down teams, create confusion in the UI, and compound across every surface they touch. No matter the team, I kept finding the same issue in different forms.
What I did: Built a user graph decision tree with a cross-pillar team of content designers, synthesizing six term spectrums into a single framework so any CD could find the right language for describing accounts and relationships. Led a Meta-wide Reels glossary update, coordinating ten content designers and three terminology reviewers across the company to evaluate 80 terms and submit 25+ updates. Ran an IG-wide sharing terminology sprint to create a scalable language system for one of the most frequent actions on the app—defining the scope, building cross-functional buy-in, and publishing a framework that's now used across surfaces. Published the Camera glossary and co-authored the internal nomenclature for Instagram's unified sharing platform.
Why it mattered: Teams moved faster. Content designers stopped re-litigating the same terminology questions. And the language users encountered across Instagram got more consistent because the systems made the right choice the easy choice.
Creation tools & UX writing
Copy decisions at billions-of-users scale
Challenge: Instagram's creation experience is where much of the product complexity lives and where the UX writing decisions have the highest stakes. A label on the wrong button, a CTA that doesn't land, or a flow that assumes too much means, small copy decisions can have large consequences.
What I did: Wrote the in-product content for the end-to-end reels and post creation experience, including undo/redo, clip hub, text-to-speech, and multiple audio tracks. Designed and ran copy experiments across the creation experience, including a CTA change that increased Reels producer DAP by 0.5%, and a trim screen recommendation that lifted both producer and first-time producer DAU. Led a series of drafts reliability improvements that reduced the iOS and Android restore failure rate by roughly 65% and cut user-reported drafts issues by over 70%. Designed camera consent flows for iOS and Android that were adopted cross-family into the Threads (OG) and Edits apps.
Why it mattered: Creation is the part of Instagram that's hardest to get right—the stakes are high and the margin for confusion is low. Clear, well-tested copy in these moments directly affects whether people actually make and share the content that keeps people coming back to the platform.
Product naming
Scaling the naming process across the family of apps
Challenge: Naming at Instagram isn't just a creative exercise. A name has to work in multiple languages, avoid trademark conflicts, scale across a product ecosystem, and make sense to someone encountering it for the first time.
What I did: Named 100+ video and AR effects, 25+ photo filters, 12 text-to-speech voices, 4 sticker packs, and 7 original fonts across Instagram's creation tools. Developed naming standards for every creative asset IG offered and published Meta-wide AR effect content standards to ensure naming was consistent and scalable across the family of apps. Ran namestorms, conducted localization checks, and coordinated trademark reviews with legal. Provided consultations for other naming projects happening across the organization.
To manage the growing volume, built out a naming workflow from the ground up: a vibe-coded internal CMS to track the full creative asset library—helping deduplicate names and enforce naming conventions—and an automated intake system to manage requests, improve visibility, and reduce turnaround time. Developed an LLM skill to execute naming at scale. It proved especially effective for high-volume asset types like sound effects (for the Edits app), where the inventory reached roughly 1,000 and was still growing.
Why it mattered: Names are often the first thing a user encounters. Getting them right means the product feels intuitive. Getting them wrong could mean user confusion or a costly trademark or localization issue that surfaces after launch.
Adjust
Adjust is a mobile analytics platform that helps growth marketers measure their return on ad spend. It was acquired by Applovin in 2021.
Help Center redesign
Challenge: As a fast-growing startup, Adjust had outgrown its original approach to product documentation. It needed a content strategy that could scale with product development and the infrastructure to support it.
What I did: Audited all existing documentation, eliminated duplicates, and rewrote 50+ articles in a consistent format customers could follow and writers could repeat. Rebranded the destination from "Docs" to "Help Center" to signal a shift in audience. Migrated the site off GitHub and integrated it with a Salesforce CMS, working with engineering, design, and customer service to build and QA the new experience.
Why it mattered: Customers could find answers without opening a support ticket. Writers had a repeatable format that scaled with the product. And the content had a home: a real content management system instead of a GitHub repo nobody wanted to navigate.
From GitHub repo to self-serve destination
Product voice, tone, and content standards
Giving a growing team one voice
Challenge: Our product needed to sound like one voice: guidelines for how to write, and principles for who Adjust sounds like.
What I did: Ran design-thinking workshops to surface and align on voice principles. Built a tone map to guide voice volume decisions across different product moments. Defined the standards information architecture, wrote the guidelines, and ran group critiques to build shared ownership across the team rather than make top-down decisions.
Why it mattered: Multiple writers could ship content that sounded like the same voice. Onboarding new team members got faster. And the product had a consistent identity across every surface.
Organization design
Building a UX writing discipline from scratch
Challenge: Adjust didn't have a UX content strategy function. We needed to define who we were, how we worked, and what deliverables we owned.
What I did: Named the discipline and defined its scope. Built a career path so writers understood how to grow. Hired, onboarded, and managed all content strategists. Documented cross-functional workflows so the team could operate as a real part of the product development process—not a service layer that cleaned up copy at the end.
Why it mattered: The team went from zero to a functioning discipline with clear ownership, a defined identity, and writers who knew what growth looked like. Content stopped being an afterthought and started being part of how Adjust shipped features.