Launching verification for Reddit businesses, establishing and maintaining design consistency, and component design.

Role

Product Designer

Team

Design Systems

The Reddit Product Language (RPL) is a product design system created to help Reddit teams build high-quality digital experiences.

Impact

Shipped 4+ designs for Reddit Verification to build trust and community.

Created foundation guidelines to bring consistency to Reddit’s user role and identity system.

Shipped a breadcrumb component end-to-end.

Partners

Design Systems Crit
Product Manager Engineering Lead
Product Marketing

PROJECT 1

Verifying Business Users and High-Usage Accounts on Reddit

Problem

Users can’t identify real and fake profiles on Reddit. This increases the potential for misinformation, impersonation, and a lack of credibility, undermining the overall quality of content on Reddit.


Design Proposal

Verification is essential to promote trust, reduce misinformation, and ensure authenticity on a social media platform. A verification system communicates authenticity while being scalable to different types of users on Reddit including businesses, organizations, public figures, and government officials.

Read the launch on techcrunch.

DIVING INTO THE DESIGN DETAILS

01 / Verified businesses on Reddit have an “Official Profile”

02 / Government Officials also have an “Official Profile”

PROJECT 2

Bringing consistency, scalability, and simplicity to Reddit’s user role and identity system

The current user role and identity system is inconsistent across Reddit and doesn’t scale well as more features are added. The goal is to refine the complex identities across Reddit into a cohesive system that provides a guidelines for how teams can scale as identity evolves.

My role involved bringing designers together across different teams to align on a consistent set of guidelines to represent identity, brainstorming colors, styles, and layouts, and creating designs on mobile and web.

 

Reddit’s current identity system is quite complex. A user’s identity is made up of their username, avatar, role, and much more.

Design Explorations

I played around with a variety of color, style, spacing layouts and made recommendations for how elements of identity can be displayed within various parts of Reddit such as profiles and feeds. Some snippets are shown below!

Users can have multiple badges and identity statuses on their profile which helps to establish trust & credibility

PROJECT 3

Designing a breadcrumb component from end-to-end

Components are pre-composed units of interfaces that help designers design more quickly and efficiently. Having a comprehensive set of components is essential for the growth of a mature design system.

What is a breadcrumb

Breadcrumbs are a hierarchical navigation tool consisting of links to help users track their current location by showing their position on the current page.

Why build it

Having a breadcrumb helps users feel more comfortable navigating back and forth between related pages, improving overall retention and discoverability.

Learnings

Learnings

Thank you Reddit for a great experience! I loved working with everyone on the design systems team and learned a lot during my time there.

  1. Gaining technical Figma experience - Components can be built in so many different ways and it’s up to the systems designer to make those crucial technical design decisions that can make or break a component’s utility.

  2. Design system problems are complicated, but this complexity is also what makes them so interesting. As a systems designer, you’re not only building for the everyday consumer on Reddit, but also other designers that build Reddit.