Content Design
Project I: Slack Sales Elevate Launch
I was Slack's first participant in their inaugural Content Design Apprenticeship Program with Sheila O'Hara.
My job was to create the onboarding UX copy for the launch of our IA4 Sales Elevate product, shipping out to over 1,000 Salesforce Sales Cloud customers worldwide.
Our goal was to guide participants as invisibly as possible through this new information architecture.
With multiple embedded charts, drop-downs, and tabs — we needed to show Sales leaders (with visual simplicity) what to focus on right now, versus which set-up features could be saved for later.
Sample UI mock-ups with placeholder text.
My role focused specifically on enhancing coach marks, microcopy, empty states, and modals. I worked exclusively with our Staff Content Designer to refine feedback, and provided her multiple iterations to bring back to her Slack product teams for discussion.
Some guiding questions I used in my approach:
- Is this necessary? Cut fluff.
- Can we shorten? Ibid.
- Is it clear? Clear is kind.
- Is it on-brand? Voice and tone matter.
- Does it lead with the benefit or value proposition? WIIFM ("What's in it for me?").
- Does it tell a story? The onboarding flow must cohere well.
- Is it too self-promotional? Nobody likes a brag.
- Is it visually cluttered? Simplicity reigns.
- Is it missing anything? See the forest through the trees.
By both zooming in and zooming out, I made sure the breadth of experience was covered before we shipped live to audiences.
Some of my hands-on copy iterations in Figma.
We were able to nix unnecessary coach marks and boil down the basics to what Sales Elevate customers needed to move forward. I was very keen on asking, Is this necessary to their success as a Sales leader?
If so, we kept it. If not, we knew it could be revisited at a later time through intuitive UI, tooltips, or content nudges outside of onboarding.
My skills as a decades-plus empathetic content creator helped me always put myself in the audience's shoes, asking, "Does this make sense? What would I expect next?" and also to lead with what helps the reader most in the moment.
Since the finished product is available exclusively to Sales Elevate customers, I am only able to provide a snippet of my work-in-progress contributions. Many of my suggestions helped influence the final product, particularly the onboarding coach mark sequence and UI text.
Demo clip for Sales Elevate on Slack.
Project II: AmeriCorps Library Intranet Redesign
As Senior AmeriCorps*VISTA National Operations Coordinator for a robust literacy program, my role was to own backend operations for our entire employee intranet — complete with a UX overhaul and careful curation of a digital space that aligned with our goals, values, and community.
Our intranet, known as "The Library," was formerly void of all personality and color. Quite literally, it only had monotype text in black and blue...and felt like one giant bruise for user experience.
My goal as sole manager of this platform was to bring our values and quirky culture into a new, functional, social engagement hub that simultaneously served our business needs. People would no longer log on only to retrieve a document (and log off just as quickly), but rather find community and cohesion across our 500+ person org in 15 metro cities nationwide.
I started with research.
I gathered focus groups to prove what people really wanted. What drives them batty? What do they wish were here that isn't? How can we better align our values to the vehicle of this internal tool?
Through that, I learned that different groups had different needs for this intranet. Some people, depending on role, wanted minimal involvement — to them, it was just a vehicle to house documentation: a massive database. Didn't have to be pretty, so long as it got them what they needed.
Other people skewed toward the opposite end of the spectrum: They desired community, felt isolated at their school sites, and wanted to connect to the broader mission for why they showed up every day to serve low-income students.
By listening to both the junior AmeriCorps cohort and senior staff needs, I was able to design a framework that fit our primary use cases and satisfied the team as a whole.
I also conducted my own research with our third-party vendor for which tools and layouts proved successful for other companies in the past. I reviewed previous employee surveys to see different pain points and gaps.
Most importantly, I kept our core values always in front of my face and asked myself how I could incorporate form with function, bringing these five to the design, layout, and intention of every aspect we created:
Reading Matters
Big Challenges Are Our Thing
Volunteers Get Results
Together We Are Better
Data Drive Decisions
Project plans for research and execution timelines.
Original wireframes.
Custom drawings with internal mascot, "Arpie," to support brand personality and core value: "Laughter Keeps Us Going." Arpie made several cameos in The Library, and I would include Easter eggs with him wherever I could.
We soon realized that different people preferred email to an intranet for daily communication. Other people adored having everything in one central place and used the intranet and its team pages more than any other means of communication.
To suit these diverse needs, I created a weekly digest that was emailed out to the entire staff with important highlights, directing people to The Library as our central engagement platform for further details. I branded The Library as our "social and informational hub," and used this catchphrase everywhere to create a culture around what this tool was, why we used it, and how it could benefit the organization as a whole.
I also recognized the need for ongoing feedback, and created a "Submit Feedback" card on our website that allowed people to offer suggestions in real time. I mirrored it off of our tangible Core Values Cards (which we handed out frequently around the office) to act as an inviting appeal and garner participation. By pairing this design with something already familiar and beloved to our culture, my aim was to make feedback just as easily welcomed as our practice of handing out these little cards. This helped me meet real user needs on a regular basis and implement qualitative data to further upgrade and iterate our platform.
I continued to find ways to inject greater brand values, personality, and visual appeal, as well as tools to suit the overall user experience. Over time, I was able to embed videos, custom font, corporate appreciations, carousel announcements, and scalable systems of team resources for each of our 14 regions.
First iteration of org-wide announcements landing page — still a colorful upgrade from prior intranet, but pretty bland.
Updated iteration of org-wide announcements, with custom brand fonts, prioritized by hierarchy of information, and with new central Systems Administrator created for easy change management.
Team pages to support remote collaboration; embedded maps and centralized resources gave a sense of cohesion both locally and nationally.
Rich media embeds made our work come alive.
Values Card and continual feedback loop; simple branding for vision of The Library's purpose.
Team portals to create both autonomy and unity across regions; peer learning forums for greater crowdsourcing and knowledge sharing.
Through peer feedback and iteration, focus groups, 1:1 interviews, and asynchronous modules, we were able to refine The Library into a model that worked for everyone. I then created a Library Ambassadors program where one representative from each region would be educated on The Library basics, so each team could be empowered with ownership to decide stylistic changes instead of relying on a single administrator for all design questions.
I chose to enable people in that way so that systems could better scale, and the decentralized knowledge would disintegrate siloed thinking.
People reported being able to do their jobs more efficiently, with a higher sense of unification and sharper focus. They could customize regional nuances while still having standard operating procedures across the nation.
The new design also put our vision at the forefront so we could better serve our mission — empowering children to be lifelong readers.
I also did further investigation of ways to automate our systems: This saved massive amounts of time in the coming years, where otherwise The Library administrator would need to manually input each of the hundreds of new incoming AmeriCorps members to the platform. Instead, I found ways to batch upload information so the data could be automatically incorporated into unique user profiles, thus making a more seamless process for incoming members and the lead administrator alike.
I feel proud that I was able to bring a brighter sense of color (both literally and figuratively) to my organization, and this first introduction to UX design began a world of curiosity in me for how to better unite words with purpose.
A revolving reminder of our purpose on the homepage.