How I got here

Being schooled

  • Taught to read by age 4 by my immigrant mother, who instilled a strong work ethic and importance of learning

  • Developed my love of reading and writing, grammar, and sentence structure

Working my way up

  • Graduated college with a bachelor’s in creative writing

  • Got my first proper job in trade magazines, learning copyediting and feature writing and moving up to managing editor

  • Jumped to online editing and writing at a startup insurance website

  • Got laid off and moved on to educational publishing for high school accounting textbooks

  • Returned to the web for a health care site, learning about user experience, accessibility, cognitive load, and microcontent

  • Worked various jobs at universities, medical centers, finance and tech as a UX writer, content strategist, and content designer

 Why I love Content Design

  • Being able to work with words every day (see how I spend my day through some of my UX projects)

  • Collaborating with UX designers, product and project managers, engineers, and other partner teams

  • Learning every day, whether it’s a new software tool, a new industry resource, or a trivial fact about an obscure subject

  • Working with a team to solve complex problems and create data-driven user experiences

  • Solving content problems that clarify and guide users

  • Continuing to learn Figma as a content designer, which helps me collaborate better with UX designers

Things I think about in my content work

  • The importance of language and clear messaging around complex topics, something I learned from those early days of health care

  • My hero and threshold that prompts me to ask, can my mother understand this — my polyglot mother, self-conscious about her English even after 40 years in the US

  • Content guidelines, including for accessibility, which I first learned about through the health care website

  • Localization, working at global companies has highlighted the importance of paying attention to a global audience

SOME ACHIEVEMENTS

  • Established a content governance and website policy for Community Health Plan of Washington

  • Increased website traffic for the Cancer Institute of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

  • Delivered 200+ help articles across multiple system UI features for Xbox One gaming console launch

  • Decreased the number of customer care calls of ineligible users for the Auction.com Make an Offer program