My writing work is grounded in several principles:

• Clear: Writing should disambiguate. As a writer, it’s my job to work through complexity to ease the user’s cognitive burden.

• Elegant: The best writing is usually (but not always!) simple and concise.

• Useful: The main purpose of UX and technical writing is to help someone accomplish a task.

• Guided: With research and data, I determine where the user needs help and how to best support them.

• Consistent: I use guidelines, patterns, and principles to create UX and technical content that’s persistent and repeatable across products and surfaces.

An end-to-end UX overhaul

Company: Avalara

Audience: All customers

Problem solved: Modernized and streamlined an outdated and cumbersome customer account experience.

Guided onboarding questionnaire

Company: Avalara

Audience segment: B2B, small-business owners

Problem solved: Helped prospective customers discover what tax-compliance products could help their business.

Simplified online purchase flow

Company: Avalara

Audience segment: B2B

Problem solved: Empowered small-business customers to feel knowledgeable and control during a complicated process—purchasing state sales-tax registrations.

Contextual help content

Company: Microsoft

Audience: Windows and Xbox users

Problem solved: This content appeared as standalone help articles as well as highlighted Bing search results

Troubleshoot problems signing in

Company: Microsoft

Audience: Windows users (with varying technical know-how) who need help signing in

Problem solved: Microsoft has detailed research on the most common reasons customers have trouble signing in to Windows. This article summarizes and organizes these common problems to make a useful index of issues for customers.

Help article for a content-management system

Company: Ingeniux

Audience: System administrators who already have some familiarity with Ingeniux CMS

Problem solved: This more traditional piece of help content (excerpted from a longer PDF manual) clearly and concisely explains a new feature, but in greater detail than topic- or task-based help content.

Writing for a developer audience

Company: Ingeniux

Audience: Full-stack developers who are building websites powered by Ingeniux CMS

Problem solved: This article gives an overview for developers on how they can start customizing a website built on Ingeniux CMS. To write it, I worked closely with Ingeniux engineers, both to ensure technical accuracy and to better understand what the audience needed to know.