Users Experiencing User Interfaces!

Actually, it’s User Experience/User Interface or UX/UI—and in the case of this portfolio, it all pertains to this type of writing.

Having built quite a few websites, and populating them with tons of content, over the years, I’ve come to know a thing or two about UX/UI design and how to write for it.

The first tenet of UX/UI writing is: never confuse the reader!

Content should be presented in an easy-to-follow straight-forward manner no matter creative the web team tries to be in the effort.

The following examples come mostly from websites but also from a few Mar/Comm pieces (that you can learn more about on and Marketing Communications page).

SeaChange International – Rebranded Homepage, Etc.

With my most recent client (as of late Spring 2018), SeaChange International, one of my major responsibilities as their Digital Copywriter was to help in the rebranding initiative with regards to the re-desinging and relaunching or their new website www.SeaChange.com.

Though Emagine was primarily responsible for the design of the new SeaChange website, I was part of the wire-framing meetings and my content was featured both on the Homepage and the Resources page. My feedback was part of the collaborative effort to build a brand new website that was both gorgeous, intuitive, and representative of the future direction of the company.

And I believe we accomplished that in spades!

The Customer Segmentation Markets content were my contribution to the Homepage as featured in the screenshot to the left. I did all the analyses for the customer segments and wrote all the copy that is further explored though the child pages from the Homepage links.

Also here on their Resources page under Solution Briefs, I wrote every single datasheet that is linked on this page.

Finally, the following datasheet (from the aforementioned page) is a UI-driven piece, detailed extensively on the Marketing Communications page.

Dedham Television – Rebranded Websites

Now Defunct

As detailed extensively on my Websites page, much of the work that went into the Dedham Television and Media Engagement Center’s websites (DedhamTV.com and DedhamTVLive.com); as well as, the Video-on-Demand micro-sites (VIDEOSNOW.DedhamTV.com, MeetingVids.DedhamTV.com, and SchoolSpace.DedhamTV.com) were all UX/UI driven as I built them.

Since then, they’ve gone in a different direction but you can see from the following examples where I was going with these sites. My vision for the organization, as their Senior Marketing and Communications Manager was to take it to a full-fledged OTT digital video streaming and commercial production studio.

Note: The layouts for these homepages are simple and elegant. The flagship website (DedhamTV.com) has everything a visitor needs to get the breadth of the organization, what it does, and where to find content. There’s interactive widgets (that would even live-stream broadcasts on the homepage), a carousel gallery of the latest posts, a huge button link to the DedhamTVLive.com video-stream sister site (where all the VOD, digital simulcasting, and location live streaming channels were hosted); as well as, search functions, breadcrumbs, quick links, a news ticker, social media links, right-navs of useful info and links, a Facebook live news feed, and an interactive GPS driven map. This homepage had it all—you should have seen what all the other pages were like (the best are preserved here in this portfolio)!

The new DedhamTV.com website pales in comparison with lots of missing content, broken links, poor UX/UI design, and a lack of vision for the future of Dedham Television. Visit the current site if you don’t believe me: www.DedhamTV.com. And what’s worse is that DedhamTVLive.com has been completely abandoned, languishing in website limbo slowly breaking down. It’s sad to see all that great work go to waste—at least I preserved the sites in their glory in this portfolio.

Make Tech Easier – UX/UI App Job Apps Review

At some point as a digital Mar/Comm writer, I not only get to create original UX/UI-based content but I also get to review other people’s or companies’ UX/UI work.

As a staff writer for Make Tech Easier (MTE) I got to do just that when I review five mobile device job search apps. I discussed the UX/UIs on these apps, features, benefits, and drawbacks.

You can read more about my MTE experience on my Journalism page. Also, you can go here to read all of the articles that I wrote for MTE.

Below is a PDF version of the article, the published linked version can be found here on the MTE website.

Velocity Domain Network Solutions – Flash Website

As detailed on the Websites page the Velocity Domain Flash Website was built with UX/UI in mind. Simple and elegant was always my goal when building a UI. It couldn’t get simpler and more elegant than the hyper-stylized VDNS flash site. If you have Adobe Flash installed on your system, click here to view the flash site as it was.

Rust Monkey Productions – Homepage

Now Defunct

Again, as detailed on the Websites page this was a great example of simplistic and elegant UX/UI design. The artwork is amazing, there was a news feed, and links to their portfolio and demo reel. We used a combination of iFrames, Adobe Photoshop, and HTML to build this creative showcase.

Cognex – Product Datasheet Redesign

As detailed on the Technical Writing page, I did a whole redesign to a datasheet for Cognex Corporation (to the left) they were looking to use for the launch of a new product. I must have overwhelmed them when I not only gave them 5 pages of details about the changes to the original document but also simply took the PDF and made the changes right in Adobe Acrobat Pro! It was almost convention-ready, all I would have required was the original fonts, or better yet, the original Adobe InDesign file (with the fonts). But the result for what I did was pretty impressive nonetheless. If you read this linked editorial document of the changes from the original, you will see that this piece was all UX/UI.