In Rose's Words...

Episode 1: Hello world!

Welcome to the very first "episode" of In Rose's Words, my personal blog which examines user experience, content, design, strategies, tools, and technology at large. I've found that there aren't as many Content Design and UX Writing blogs out there as there UX Design focused blogs, and I want to remedy that in a way that combines the two in a way that helps bring visibility to the fact that Content Design and UX Writing are proper UX Design practices, just a much as UX Research and Interaction Design are as well. As an artist turned techie, what I write in this blog should be taken with a grain of salt. There will be (constructive) criticisms, and there will be some fan girl moments. We'll look at current trends, reflect on lessens learned, and theorize about the future. The point of this blog is really to discover UX in a new way and learn something new.

A little about me...

My name is Rose and I currently live in Boston, MA. My dog, Stella, and I lived in San Francisco for almost 10 years but decided to return home to the east coast during the pandemic so that e could be closer to family.

I have a background in the arts - I hold a bachelors and two masters degrees in the fine arts, mostly art history and theory. I went to New York University for undergrad and San Francisco Art Institute for grad school (RIP). After panicking about paying rent in San Francisco and supporting my dog, I went to a coding bootcamp at General Assembly in Web Development. It was not a great experience, and I abandoned that path entirely.

I ended up landing a technical writer gig as a contractor for Google where I created help center content for Gmail, Google My Business, and Google SaaS, among others. I also created a revised training plan to improve the onboarding experience for new hires, with support from my fellow Senior Writers, as well as the overall quality of the work produced by our team. This is what kickstarted my career.

At Google, I was exposed to what life at a FAANG company (so much free food and amenities), but I was tired of commuting 4 hours a day, so I cold called in and applied for a job as UX Writer at Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) to work at PlayStation and somehow got the job. I worked at SIE for a few years, and it was great to be part of the PlayStation 5 launch team - but the pandemic had taken its toll on me and I was homesick.

Towards the end of the pandemic, my mom helped me moved back across the country to my home state and I've been here in Boston ever since. Not long after moving back, I got a job at Meta working on Instagram Avatars where my team won first prize for the H1 2022 Hackathon. I led almost 20 Content Designers in a shared product space across Meta as well as organized a smaller subgroup of representatives from each org to align on content strategy decisions, terminology, shared resources, and direction. Unfortunately, however, I was laid off with about 10,000 coworkers in a mass layoff after having just been promoted to L5 (AKA Senior). Luckily, I maintained a strong relationship with my previous team at SIE and was invited to go back which is where I currently am and very grateful to be here.

what to expect from now on

Now that I've gotten the intros out of the way, you can expect more user-centered content in the future. Hopefully I can offer some insight and funny commentary on design books I'm currently, current design trends, and new tools.

There's always something new to learn and in this exponentially rapid changing world with the emergence of new tech and AI on the rise, there's a lot to play with and a lot to re-evaluate in terms of what user-centered design meant 5 years ago, today, and 5 years from now. I don't have all the answers, but I'm decent at asking questions. This will be a journey into design informed by curiosity, intuition, an open mind, and as many cross-references as possible.

until next time

As I build up momentum and speed with this, I'm hoping to post on average about once a week (fingers crossed and ADHD willing)!

If you've made it this far, you earned some good human points. Nice. I appreciate you and hope you come back for Episode 2: My Thoughts on "Articulating Design Decisions" by Tom Greever.