Trust & Safety Overview
Trust & Safety work can look incremental on the surface, but small improvements can have an enormous impact when they operate across millions of users. My work on the Trust & Safety organization focused on a fundamental tension: how do we protect users and meet rapidly evolving regulations without creating unnecessary friction or compromising the experience that brings people to Pinterest?
Across Trust, Compliance, Identity, and Internal Tooling, I worked with product managers, engineers, policy, and legal teams to turn complex safety requirements into clear product experiences.
How might we strengthen Pinterest's safety ecosystem in a way that protects vulnerable users, reduces regulatory risk, and expands as requirements continue to evolve?
The Challenge
Rather than treating each safety requirement as a one-off feature,
I worked across multiple teams to strengthen the systems, experiences, and patterns that supported Trust & Safety as a whole.
The work spanned P0/P1 safety and compliance initiatives across Trust, Identity, and Internal Tooling, with projects ranging from teen privacy and regulatory compliance to enforcement tooling and sensitive search experiences.
The Solution
Trust & Safety Org
Key decisions included
Prioritizing systemic safety improvements over isolated features
Balancing protection, user agency, and friction, particularly for teens and other vulnerable users
Translating complex and rapidly changing regulations into clear, usable experiences
Creating scalable patterns and systems that could support new requirements without requiring design involvement for every launch
Trust team: Graduation flows
In 2025, Pinterest automatically moved teen profiles to private settings as part of broader efforts to strengthen privacy and safety protections for younger users.
When those users turned 18, I designed “graduation flows” to explain the transition from teen protections to adult privacy options. Because steering users toward either a public or private profile could be considered a dark pattern, the experience was purposely written and designed to inform without persuading, giving users clear information and control over their own choice.
Trust team: Compliance experiences
Compliance was a constantly moving target. While on the Trust team, we regularly received new regulations across countries and U.S. states, each requiring us to quickly understand the requirements, translate them into product experiences, and deliver them within strict deadlines.
The stakes were high! A missed requirement could expose Pinterest to significant financial penalties and reputational risk. This made speed and accuracy essential.
Impact:
Delivered 100% of P0/P1 compliance and safety experiences on time
Delivered critical compliance initiatives across the EU, US, and Asia, reducing financial and reputational risk, including Florida regulations with penalties of up to $150k per violation per user
Launched the Reports & Violations Center across web and mobile 2 months ahead of the EU Digital Services Act deadline
As the volume of compliance requirements grew, I identified that repeatedly designing similar banners, opt-in, disclaimer, and modal experiences was not a sustainable approach. I created a reusable Trust & Safety subsystem that gave PM and engineering teams a consistent way to build and launch new compliance experiences.
The system enabled 5 independent teams to launch experiences within 6 months without requiring design involvement for each implementation, allowing the Trust & Safety organization to respond to new requirements faster and more independently.
Internal tools team
Trust & Safety also depended on the internal tools used by Pinterest agents and operations teams to review content, enforce policies, and respond to user appeals.
I designed these tools with the same goal as the user-facing experiences: to reduce friction and improve consistency and efficiency.
Impact:
Redesigned enforcement tooling used by Pinterest agents to identify Pins, boards, and users violating company guidelines, reducing median handle time for user appeals by 58%
Designed a content strike system that contributed to the deactivation of 600,000 additional violative boards involving adult content, self-harm, violence, and more
Led the Amazon SSO integration, delivering ahead of schedule with zero disruption and earning exceptional partner feedback, setting a new benchmark for Amazon's cross-company collaboration
Identity team
On the Identity team, I worked on experiences that helped Pinterest accurately understand, protect, and support users throughout the account lifecycle.
The work ranged from reducing errors during sign-up to helping users recover accounts and stay connected when something went wrong.
Impact:
Improved our birthdate picker to reduce default selection errors, reducing incorrect birth-month selection from 16.7% → 3.7%
Improved the duplicate-account flow, reducing the number of users who churned from 65% → 23%
Designed the email update flow, with 90%+ of users completing the OTP verification process
Trust & safety: Search advisory
Search Advisory banners appear when a user searches for terms that violate Pinterest’s policies, providing guidance and resources at potentially sensitive moments. My initial assignment was to redesign the banners so their backgrounds were more consistent and the overall experience felt more cohesive. But as I dug into the problem, I realized the design challenge was much bigger. Someone searching for terms like suicide or extreme dieting could simply be looking for information, or they could be experiencing a deeply vulnerable moment. We couldn't know their intent, so I pushed the team to establish Guiding Principles for how Pinterest should communicate in these moments: providing meaningful support and resources without making assumptions, feeling punitive, or adding to the user's distress.
Search advisory playbook
Search advisory final designs
