About
Creating valuable resources — and a better user experience — for freelance writers.
Scripted.com had a simple mission: to create a platform that paired freelance writers with enterprise clients, minimizing the work those writers needed to do to find jobs. I joined the company (2013) as an Editorial Analyst — the first internal team member whose role was to improve the writers’ user experience.
Part instructional designer and part editorial manager, I spent the next year creating resources for our growing group of freelancers. On the education front, I developed a series of webinars to provide writers with critical information about new features and functionality, client preferences, and broader writing strategies (I taught creative writing and composition as a graduate student). To complement the webinars, I hosted weekly office hours, during which writers could drop into a chat and ask me anything they wanted. These office hours not only helped our freelancers quickly get the information they needed; they also tremendously improved rapport with our internal team. Working with a member of the customer support team, I completely rearchitected the FAQ, grouping FAQ articles into intuitive categories and rewriting all of the content in plain language.
On the editorial front, I led the writer-facing blog and social accounts. I developed the organization’s first writer-focused editorial calendar, wrote blog- and social-specific style guides (including voice and tone guidance), recruited talented blog contributors from within the writer pool, and revamped the existing newsletter. Using analytics data, I iterated on my initial strategies to deliver writers the content that mattered to them (more writer profiles and fewer posts about feature updates).
Finally, I launched the company’s first foray into qualitative research, routinely scheduling one-on-one interviews and feedback sessions with writers at various points in their Scripted careers. This feedback helped the engineering team prioritize their development of new features — and made the case to senior management that continued user research is the best way to improve a product.
Roles: Editorial lead, user researcher, instructional designer (Scripted.com)
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