Copy. Content. Comedy.
At its core, UX writing is copy that inspires trust and action in the product you’re engaging with. It includes UI text, flow microcopy, product nomenclature, and more — sometimes all on the same surface.
Elsewhere on my site, you’ll find samples of my UX writing on Lumosity’s Insight reports, including a breakdown of the Train of Thought Insight. Those combine content writing, instruction, UI, and feature naming.
Here’s a super-clear example: a diagnostic “Find Your System” tool for the American Standard Air Website re-design. Type in your zip code and instantly discover the perfect HVAC system for your weather, temperature range, and fuel source (electric, gas, etc.). I laid out the flow, did the initial wire-framing, and wrote the copy.
This 2019 campaign supported a pretty cool announcement: EAT Club chose to purchase enough carbon offsets to negate their entire carbon footprint, plus that of every EAT Club employee, in and out of the office. Work at EAT Club? You’re now carbon-neutral.
I wrote the video and support materials in close collaboration with EAT Club. The Duke and the Duck, the animation studio I brought in on the project, did a charming — and fast! — job on the video.
A leading office catering company, EAT club prepares, packages and delivers thousands of individual lunches every day. And while their model cuts down on food waste, they’re still conscious of the greenhouse gases created by cooking, packaging, delivery, etc. They created this initiative in order to address that.
For a person as passionate about music and branding as I am — and a fan of SPIN Magazine since high school — this is a dream gig. In SPIN ON BRAND, we track music/brand partnerships, technology, and culture issues that are important to the marketing community.
My goal is to make SPIN ON BRAND a useful B2B newsletter that’s actually entertaining to read. I do this by finding and writing stories about brands and experiences that appeal to both marketers and pop culture aficionados. It helps that SPIN gives me (mostly) free reign to keep the writing sharp, impactful, and witty.
To promote Skype’s newly-free-of-charge Group Video Calling feature, we made this documentary-style film profiling an actual two-man startup who used it to keep their business lean, mean, and profitable. I served as co-creative lead and script supervisor on this piece.
One of the cool things about training your brain with Lumosity: dynamic reports that surface interesting and useful information about your brain training.
Bob Schaefer, Lumosity’s head of Science, developed the content for each Insight. I’d step in and make the text layperson-friendly, tone-consistent, easy to scan, and wherever possible, brief. UX Writing, feature naming, and content design (for scannability) were all required for these projects.
Compare your progress with your local community, or compare your community’s scores to other towns & cities. This project required some intensive feature naming work and attention to detail.
What job does your skillset match? This Insight looks at a member’s gameplay and identifies occupations that match those strengths and weaknesses.
Created for Lumosity’s most popular game, this Insight shows a member’s gameplay progress and gives tips on improving their skills.
I founded UX publication WANT Magazine with David Gómez-Rosado back in 2009. We wanted to promote the discipline of User Experience, the art/science of making products and services enjoyable to use. It's part design, part psychology, part marketing, and to me, entirely fascinating.
It's since closed down but you can find it at the Internet Archive.
Communication Arts liked it enough to profile it in 2011. I conducted interviews with industry luminaries like Don Norman and Jakob Neilsen. As Managing Editor, I herded a team of writers, designers, and even a cartoonist to the finish line, each issue.
Proof that the smallest budgets inspire the most creative solutions.
CA Technologies, a 30,000-employee Fortune 500 company, wanted to create thousands of company evangelists by encouraging its employees to use social media. To that end, they wanted to distribute a video internally that explained social media's advantages and laid out proper etiquette (i.e. "Don't give away company secrets on Twitter," etc.) The vid needed to be fun and engaging, resonant to the company's wide age demo, and produced by their in-house A/V department on a *very* tight budget.
The creative solution I pitched them, and which they were kind enough to trust me with, was to make it look like a 1950s educational film, using old public-domain and rights-managed (i.e. free and cheap) footage, coupled with a 1950s-style VO and an extra low-maintenance shoot of a 1950s-ized CA employee as the clueless foil.
This was a virtual hand-off to their internal production team across the country. I provided them with a full animatic, a scratch VO, and dozens of carefully-curated clips. Time-consuming, budget-friendly, and more than a little bit of fun to put together.
I consider it a personal victory that I got the bees in there.
Working at Skype presented some fascinating opportunities — like getting to interview people who use Skype to improve their lives, careers, or relationships in unusual ways.
I had the chance to cover the Austin blues-harp player who supports his family teaching harmonica around the world. Or the psychologist who takes his practice anywhere he wants. Or the professional baby-whisperer.
Writing for the Skype Blog kept my journalism skills sharp while attracting new audience for Skype via engaging stories you wouldn't hear anywhere else.
How to keep kids off drugs? Zombies, obviously.
Created for Partnership For a Drug Free America, this game racked up a whopping 1.5 million plays in its first three months. In it, Earth has been taken over by zombies and it's up to you and your jetpack to save the human race! Part of the PDFA's "Above The Influence" campaign; aimed at teens.
I devised the basic concept with a pair of designers, and fleshed it out into a series of scripts and creative specs that became the basis for the game development. The results are no longer online, but the screen shots below should give you insight into the fun that was ZOMBIE ESCAPE.
From the display campaign that drove traffic to the online game.
