Portfolio
Examples of some of my recent work. (You may also be interested in reading about my experience and skills.)
Helping product teams deliver great content

An example: the IBM Event Streams product UI
- I work with lots of different IBM product teams. For example, in 2019, I joined the IBM Event Streams team for 5 months.
- I worked with colleagues from marketing, engineering, product management, design, and sales to understand our customers' end-to-end experience.
- I ran a content audit to help the team work out what content they already had published, what user needs it addressed, and what needed removing, updating, or creating.
- As well as helping to improve the in-product content, I also helped the team design a new set of marketing pages.
- The team won a external design award 🏆 for the product and a separate external design award 🏆 for the product docs site.
Defining content guidance for IBM
- Back in 2016, I was asked to produce IBM Design's first voice and tone guide. I started by conducting thorough research to understand what aspects of writing designers and engineers were struggling with.
- I then focused on how we could best design and deliver the guidance so that it would be fun, useful, and easy to use. (I've written a little about this process in this article.)
- Later, as IBM moved to using the awesome Carbon Design System for all of its product UIs, I began contributing to the content guidelines within Carbon.
- This is something that I and others continue to evolve — inspired by the knowledge that Carbon is used by hundreds of IBM product teams, as well as many outside of IBM.

Carbon Design System > Content guidelines
Delivering UX writing education for IBM designers

The IBM UX writing course that I published in late 2022
- IBM has a community of over 3,000 designers. And while we have some dedicated content designers (like me!), many design teams don't have access to a content specialist.
- So, in 2022, I was asked to create a self-service online education course to help our many talented UX designers, visual designers, design researchers, and other design colleauges further improve their own UX writing skills.
- After getting input from a variety of design colleagues, I came up with a course outline that mapped to both our Carbon content guidelines and to the content heuristics used in our internal product design reviews.
- As I researched and drafted each module I then sought feedback from some early adopters, which enabled me to further refine the contents.
Leading a community of practice
- As recently as 2018, many people in IBM hadn't even heard of a content designer let alone worked with one.
- So I got together with the talented Maranda Bodas and a handful of others, and we formed a small community of practice, which we called the IBM Content Design Guild.
- From an inital meeting with just 7 of us, our community has grown month by month, and we now have over 300 people engaged with us, including UX designers, marketers, and tech writers, as well as content designers.
- We hold lively meetings where we share best practices and resources and we've spun up various work groups, covering different aspects of content design.
- It continues to be a real pleasure co-leading this wonderful and growing content community.

Our IBM Content Design Guild Slack channel