Resume

Problem: There is no easy and effective way to organize, search, and re-use old text messages (focused on Apple’s Messages app).
Solution: Research, design, and prototype an app that works in conjunction with Apple Messages.
Related OKR(s): Stop the madness of losing the immense value tucked inside text messages that become nearly inaccessible after being older than 30 seconds.
KPI(s): Downloads of the app, if I ever make it. In the meantime, happy with visits to the project page for the app.
Role: I ideated, researched, designed, and built this from the ground up.
Explore: https://hellotumo.com/ux-portfolio/cat-herder/

Problem: SSIR’s content lacked consistent SEO when I came into the role.
Solution: Train the editorial team on the basics and importance of SEO and provide a simple tool in the CMS to create SEO and visual headlines, balancing the needs of volunteer authors, editors, and search engines.
Related OKR(s): Increase discovery of SSIR content via search engines to generate new subscribers and fans.
KPI(s): Search referral traffic; in a clean two years of tracking the data or so, it rose by 61%.
Role: I championed the importance of SEO, instructed team on writing SEO headlines, and defined the specs for a CMS tool that allowed the display of more creative headlines while sending SEO headlines to Google.
Explore: The visual headline of “We’re Beating Systems Change to Death” and SEO headline of “Why Scalable Solutions Are Better Than Systems Change at Taking On Social Problems” on this article: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/liberating_a_captive_market

Problem: SSIR’s authors and others cannot easily grab the formatted academic citation text for articles on the website.
Solution: Assign DOIs to all articles and create a one-click step to share formatted citation text or to download it as RIS file.
Related OKR(s): Increase engagement and satisfaction of an important audience—scholars using SSIR’s content to note their own accomplishments or inform their research.
KPI(s): Clicks on the tool; informal communication; increased visibility of SSIR in scholarly research.
Role: I reviewed the various approaches to citation tools, assessed organizations that provided DOI minting and APIs for building citation tools, ran light user tests with a colleague, wrote requirements, wrote citation style guide, and performed QA.
Explore: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/how_science_philanthropy_can_build_equity

Problem: Inconsistency in author bylines created problems with making accurate academic citations (another product outlined above). Additionally, there were few if any author pages on the site listing all of the articles the author had produced, which left SSIR users without an easy way to find all of the work by a particular contributor. There was an existing tool to solve these problems, but it was underused and required the conversion of hundreds of text bylines into database entries.
Solution: Rather than an error-prone, manual typing of authors’ names into a byline field, use and improve the existing tool to fill in the author byline fields with a selection.
Related OKR(s): Increase site engagement by providing author pages for every author that listed their articles, giving users an easy way to explore the work of an author they enjoy.
KPI(s): Visits to author pages; increases in traffic to individual articles from author pages.
Role: I developed the specs for the changes to the CMS and the front-end display of author pages, performed QA, and trained the staff on how to use the tool.
Explore: The byline on any SSIR article will link to that author’s page. Here’s one: https://ssir.org/bios/elizabeth_good_christopherson.

Problem: Practitioners and researchers needed an easy way to sort and pick the ways to measure the factors involved in people’s struggles with poverty.
Solution: Rather than start from scratch analyzing huge volumes of research on getting people out of poverty, provide an easy way to explore and use tools that are backed by world-class Stanford social psychologists.
Related OKR(s): Help organizations reduce poverty.
KPI(s): Visits to the tool; informal mentions of the tool; backlinks.
Role: I worked with UX designer, developers, and Stanford psychologists to create the specs, performed QA, and crafted language to describe the tool.
Explore: https://sparqtools.org/measuringmobility-selector/

Problem: Social change advocates using SPARQ’s toolkits often managed issues of identity and needed an easy way to help people understand and discuss their own identities.
Solution: I built a tool (using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) to select common identity descriptions and download an image file of those choices.
Related OKR(s): Help organizations increase the equitable and just treatment of people with different identities.
KPI(s): Visits to the tool; informal mentions of the tool; backlinks; downloads of the image “map.”
Role: I developed this entirely from scratch based upon academic research and conversations with Stanford psychologists on the team.
Explore: https://sparqtools.org/map-your-identities/

Problem: The Bodhi Manda Zen Center’s website needed to be modernized and streamlined to make it easier for visitors to find out information about the Buddhist retreat. The center also needed to raise awareness about a campaign to raise funds for major renovations of its facilities.
Solution: I reorganized the home page and other sections, reworked text across the site to be simpler and scannable, built PayPal buttons that made it easy to donate a number of ways, and refined its presentation of its Amazon Smile program.
Related OKR(s): Help BMZC attract new residents and strengthen its finances.
KPI(s): Visits to the site; visits to the news page and donations page; time spent on site.
Role: I analyzed and improved the website’s information architecture, edited text, and made it easier for site visitors to take their desired actions on the site.
Explore: https://bmzc.org

Problem: I needed a way to efficiently clip articles I found online and send them into the SupChina CMS (WordPress) so to provide readers a high-quality, no-noise, Twitter-like feed of important news about China’s politics, business, and culture. It was one pillar of a content strategy I developed called “islands and streams.” This content also needed to be effortlessly added to SupChina’s app on a daily basis.
Solution: The developer and I created a bookmarklet (a tiny bit of JavaScript code stored in a browser bookmark and activated upon a click) that allowed editors to clip, tag, and edit content from various websites on the fly, and then send those pieces to our CMS. Another tool (which I built on my own) would scan these clippings and produce HTML that was used to update the app.
Related OKR(s): Provide readers a near real-time, scannable snapshot of the latest Chinese news across business, politics, and culture, creating a 360-degree view of a country that was often seen through a narrow prism that focused on the most egregious acts of the nation’s government or severe social problems.
KPI(s): Visits to the home page; activity on outbound links; app downloads.
Role: I developed the specs for the curation bookmarklet and communicated them to the developer. I also built (using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) a tool on top his work to convert a page of curated articles into code to update the app.
Explore: https://supchina.com

Problem: When I joined SFARI (Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative), the editorially independent news team shared the same website as the broader organization. This made it difficult to balance news content with organizational announcements, confused readers about the nature of the content they were reading, limited the evolution of the site, and added complexity to the coordination of different teams. The CMS also lacked features that were common to journalism operations but less essential to other types of information producers.
Solution: Each team at the foundation needed its own website to serve their distinct goals, workflows, and pace of output.
Related OKR(s): Help people trying to understand autism get what they need quickly and easily, whether news articles or something else. Improve the different teams’ abilities to do their best work and give it the best presentation possible.
KPI(s): Time on each site; visits to each site; referral traffic from one site to the other.
Role: I developed the specifications for the project, wrote the RFP, analyzed proposals, logged and resolved bugs in conjunction with an external project manager and web development team, performed QA, and conceptualized production tools (such as a way to load Word files into WordPress).
Explore: https://spectrumnews.org (all of this content was formerly housed at sfari.org)

I joined The NYT’s opinion desk in October 2011 to work with the global team in Hong Kong. One of our main projects was the launch of the blog Latitude. I web produced all content, built multimedia features, and collaborated with authors around the world.

Problem: Getting more people to the paper’s website in part relied on local blogs and other sites linking to our content, but we had no efficient way to reward people linking to us by visibly and clearly linking back, which would in turn drive more traffic to us.
Solution: Things were a bit undisciplined circa 2005, and I built a tool that worked in conjunction with Google to automatically search the web for sites linking back to a specific article and then show and link to those sites in a list that automatically appeared at the base of an article page. This was a hack (inspired but WordPress’s trackback-in-comments feature) I’d never execute today for technical and editorial reasons. Even in the relatively early days of the internet, the mini-app struggled to expunge less-than-ideal sites linking back to us. However, our parent company’s development team took the idea and ran with it, adding refinements to the concept before shipping it as part of the corporate CMS.
Related OKR(s): To make The Trib’s website and important part of the local online ecosystem of blogs and other sites. This, in turn, would ideally help generate subscriptions.
KPI(s): Increased backlinks in terms of quantity and quality; clicks on our links to external sites.
Role: I developed the specifications for the project, wrote the code, and built a module in our CMS that would add it automatically to article pages.
Explore: The website, abqtrib.com, no longer exists. More about the paper’s story is here.

As a Medill journalism graduate student at Northwestern, I capped my degree by building a community news website (goskokie.com) with a small team and co-authoring a report on the insight we gained into hyper-local citizens’ media (HLCM). I produced animations, visual elements for the site, tools to capture community contributions (such as a public voicemail that people could call to leave tips and reports), and helped present our findings to journalism industry leaders.