Word nerd on the design team
Working as a UX content designer & strategist, my job is to make tech experiences make sense.
My favorite design tool is language — it’s time tested, cost effective, and incredibly powerful.
I’ve worked with big product & brand design teams at Meta, Indeed, and eBay.
I’ve also consulted on dozens of scrappy creative ventures — including a kids book, a card game, a theater production, and a storytelling startup — writing, editing, strategizing, and naming.
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Professor → Practitioner
I started my career in academia. My approach to design reflects that background. I like to think I bring the care and thoughtfulness of your favorite professor, and add a dash of scholarly rigor to fast-moving teams. I love making space for critical reflection and the kind of open debate that pushes ides to the next level.
I earned my PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa, where I studied theories of rhetoric and culture, and taught undergraduate courses in communication and media. I served on the faculty at Columbia College Chicago for several years before transitioning into work in tech.
This year I stepped back into the classroom as adjunct faculty at the University of San Francisco, where I’m co-teaching an interdisciplinary course on AI & the question of human creativity.
Product problems are word problems
Writers are often brought into the product design process too late. There’s a persistent notion that finding clear and compelling language is like adding icing to the cake. But anyone who has worked as or with a strong content designer can tell you, there’s something more fundamental at stake.
(And anyone who has studied rhetorical theory can tell you, this dismissal of well-crafted language as mere ‘ornamentation’ goes back a few thousand years; a new slide deck about the impact of content design won’t solve it.)
- Product design, like writing, is fundamentally about about metaphor, narrative, the architecture of information, and deep empathy for your audience. And lots of iteration.
- Product strategy is all about good storytelling.
- Shipping products requires, above all else, clear communication.
Getting the words right requires going deep and going wide, developing an understanding that cuts across user journeys and organizational silos. I use my word work to help drive larger strategy decisions, and find I’m most impactful in fuzzy new spaces where sense-making and disambiguation are most crucial and most challenging.
I’m a fan of
- Big ideas
- Little details
- Productive disagreement
- Meaningful crits
- Messy first drafts
- Polished final products
- Strong evidence
- Clear documentation
- Genuine curiosity
- Kind workplaces
And I would be happy to connect.
