Content Strategy
My career began in the publishing industry and has since transitioned to UX teams. I write and edit user experience, marketing, and help content.
For the past two and a half years, I’ve worked as a Senior UX Writer at Uber. I’ve primarily supported the driver team. One of my key projects was a repository of learning materials for new Uber drivers. I wrote articles, video scripts, and tooltips to make the first 30 days of driving with Uber a smooth experience.
Uber
The first part of this project was to develop carefully timed, in-app tips to guide new drivers. These tips start the moment they sign up to drive, and continue through their first trips and earnings.
I understood the pain points of driving for the first time from talking to drivers. I conducted interviews by-phone and at Uber hub offices. I wrote our new tip set to address the most confusing moments within the user experience.
The next step was to create a new learning center, titled Driver App Basics. In this new help area, drivers can read short articles and watch videos that walk them through their first days with Uber. This material can be accessed anytime through a personalized in-app driver inbox, or on the web at uber.com.
I wrote the content in Driver App Basics to act as a replacement for less reliable methods of driver education. I wanted drivers to come to Uber first, instead of various other third-party websites and YouTube channels.
Articles are accompanied by matching videos filmed in Cape Town, South Africa. I had a blast watching my video scripts transformed into real-life short films to aid drivers. Check out a couple of the videos I scripted below.
Marcoa Publishing
My most difficult job to-date was acting as the Managing Editor for all San Francisco Chamber of Commerce publications from 2004 to 2007. The Chamber had an exclusive contract with a company called Marcoa that published all their magazines, guides to the city, maps, brochures, and other visitor information.
Marcoa designated me their one-man representative, sending me out on missions to generate content for various print materials.
The San Francisco Guide to Living. I was photographer, writer and managing editor for four editions of this publication.
The Chamber Health Care and Biotech report, which demanded a lot of original research on an annual basis.
I was 'point man' for everything from interviewing a UCSF professor about what was changing in the local biotech industry, to biking around the city taking photographs of famous monuments, to writing and editing articles on San Francisco lifestyle, business, arts and culture.
Marcoa taught me the value of being a self-motivator, of "getting it done" and project managing my own work end-to-end. It made me a better editor, photographer, graphic designer, a better person really.
The Global Connections quarterly magazine showcased San Francisco's latest business innovations and economic development.
Content / design / photography samples from my time at Marcoa (click any image to enlarge):
Intuit
In 2009-10, I acted as lead user experience writer for the Homestead.com website builder for small businesses, powered by Intuit. I managed content through demos, help pages, and the signed-in experience.
The designs have changed since then, but much of the content is still intact.
StubHub
Part of my 6-month contract with StubHub in 2017 involved an overhaul of their transactional email system. While the development team was upgrading to a new CMS for emails, my job was to rewrite and redesign the HTML messages triggered automatically to sellers & buyers during ticket sales.
This was an amazing project because it allowed me to act as project manager, content strategist, and UX designer all at once. Tasks included:
Creating StubHub's first email inventory and running weekly email scrums;
Redesigning the HTML from the ground up, with updated logo treatment, headers, footers, even new buttons and links in StubHub's upgraded color scheme;
Rewriting each email to be shorter, easier to scan, and more usable to the customer.
(Below) Example of redesigned/edited email sent to a seller.
More than just a content strategy project, the transactional email overhaul involved designing a whole new system of wireframing.
I moved us out of the dark ages of Microsoft Visio and into clean Sketch files that were friendly to our developers. Then I edited each email to speak more plainly and simply to customers, with a friendly and casual voice and tone. (Click images to enlarge.)
Along with the content overhaul of these messages, I developed the first working process for producing new emails from start to finish. I identified process gaps and worked with product management to refine and improve over time.
Wells Fargo
I have always been attracted to help content. I don't mean laundry lists of customer service phone numbers, glossaries of terms, or virtual chat popups, but thoughtful, human content that strengthens a brand without directly selling a product. I like to write copy that gives customers information they might be surprised to find from the brand, useful information that aids them in their day-to-day life.
One such example was the Wells Fargo Tax Center, which I implemented as UX Lead and Content Strategist in 2013.
Without directly telling you how to do your taxes, the Tax Center provided a resource center for first-time tax preparers and anyone looking for tips and tricks to get a bigger return. (Click image to enlarge)