Giving new content types a voice before they have a name. And sometimes giving them a name.

Podcasts on Netflix, The Culture Edit, and an upcoming content experience: three net-new formats inside a product people already (think they) understand. I set the language, the naming, the in-app copy, and the roadmap arguments.

THE PROBLEM

New formats arrive as engineering names and slide titles. Each one needed a vocabulary before it could have an interface—and the vocabulary had to survive translation, TV remotes, press, and even content-weary consumers. They also needed order in the chaos of new content types being added to existing, longstanding mental models.

What I did

• Ran naming and terminology work with product, legal, and product marketing
• Wrote onboarding and entry-point copy for formats with no precedent
• Defined podcasts roadmap and content strategy alongside PM, not after them
• Built the voice guidance the next writer on each format inherits

Outcome

Qualitatively, podcasts alone were seen as another reason for members to love their Netflix subscription. For podcasters, it signaled the start of Netflix as a destination for not just movies, shows, and games; having your show on Netflix's carefully curated slate became a point of pride on top of everything else.

Podcasts on Netflix

Shipped and iterated on. The hard part wasn't describing podcasts; it was explaining why they belong here, in a UI built for rows of titles, without a new mental model for every entry point.

A new content type's 'show' page posed a lot of questions:

• How does it feel familiar even though it's different?
• What evidence can we show without overwhelming?
• How do display episodes—and when are titles truncated?
• What about other languages?

Research helped answer a lot of those questions, but so did Netflix's complex and ever-changing design systems.

A lot of work also went into incorporating a new content type—from what shows up in the pre-query to what gets populated while typing and how much of it to show on different surfaces. The 'why' was always important in any decision.

And then there was Netflix's version of a podcast landing page. Here, members could easily find themed rows, discover new content, and pick up where they left off.

Biggest challenge: Expediting the path to playback given what is known about fans' consumption habits.

The Culture Edit

A midform lifestyle content type. I helped set the editorial voice, the name-adjacent language, evidence and metadata structure, and how it introduces itself to people who didn't come looking for it.

One of the challenges was conveying short duration without naming it that, since it's a subjective conceptive. The decision was to lean more heavily on how it's categorized and editorialized—and even its visual treatment.

Naming explorations

A peek at some of the thought and work that went into naming and describing this content type. Additionally, the ways in which it is mixed in with other content types across various different surfaces.

TBA NEW CONTENT EXPERIENCE

One of the bigger projects I've owned: content design and direction for a new experience that hasn't launched. Stay tuned!