Hi, I'm Kelsey! I'm a self-proclaimed word nerd and lover of content strategy.
― summary ―
I'm a senior content designer with over 10 years of experience shaping content strategy, governance, and standards for digital products. I simplify complex experiences, create scalable content frameworks, and align cross-functional teams around clear, consistent, user-centered experiences.
― CASE STUDy #1 ―
As CDW's UX Content Design team matured, it became clear that a centralized source of truth was necessary to create consistency throughout the digital experience.
To address this gap, I led the development and launch of CDW's first UX Content Style Guide, establishing standards for product language, writing principles, accessibility, and content governance. Today, the guide serves as a centralized resource for UX content and continues to evolve alongside new products and technologies.
Establishing UX Content Standards Across Product Teams
Overview
My Role: Senior Content Designer
Timeline: Kicked off in October 2023; Launched to users in May 2024
Collaborated with: UX Content Design Team, Design System Team, Brand Team, Accessibility Partners, Product Designers, External Content Experts
Problem Statement
Without centralized UX content standards, teams were making language and content decisions independently, making consistency increasingly difficult to maintain as the organization grew. The guide also needed buy-in from multiple disciplines and had to complement existing brand standards rather than replace them.
The team needed a shared foundation that would:
Create consistency across digital products
Improve collaboration between designers, writers, and developers
Scale content quality as the team grew
Document best practices instead of relying on institutional knowledge
Establish governance for future content decisions
My Contribution
Defined the structure and content strategy
Researched industry best practices and competitive examples
Partnered with the Brand team to align UX guidance with existing voice standards
Collaborated with accessibility experts to incorporate inclusive writing guidance
Developed documentation for UX writing principles, terminology, and Design System usage
Socialized, launched, and maintained the guide across the organization
Key Decisions
Built the Guide Through Cross-Functional Research
Rather than creating guidance in isolation, I gathered input from internal and external experts. This included collaborating with Brand, accessibility specialists, former content design coworkers, and the broader UX content community to ensure the guidance reflected both industry best practices and CDW's unique needs.
Impact: The guide launched to approximately 95 members of the Digital and Product Design organization and was later shared with contractors, agencies, and other cross-functional stakeholders, establishing credibility and encouraging organization-wide consistency.
Treated the Guide as a Living Product
Instead of viewing the style guide as a one-time deliverable, I established an ongoing governance model.
As new product areas emerged, I continued expanding the guide with sections like Voice & Tone, Conversational AI guidance, terminology definitions and usage, Design System usage guidance, and component documentation.
Impact: Created a scalable governance model that allowed the guide to evolve alongside the organization, ensuring new products, capabilities, and content standards could be incorporated over time instead of becoming outdated.
Connected Content Standards to the Design System
Rather than documenting writing guidance separately, I partnered with other members of the Design System team to integrate content guidance directly into component documentation and usage guidelines.
This helped teams understand not only what to write, but when and how to use content within reusable UI patterns.
Impact: Embedded content guidance directly into the Design System component guidelines, making consistent content decisions easier to apply during day-to-day product design instead of treating the style guide as a separate reference.
Expanded the Guide to Support Emerging Experiences
As conversational AI became a strategic focus, I extended the guide beyond traditional UX writing to include voice and tone guidance for customer-facing chat experiences.
This ensured new externally facing AI products aligned with the same content principles as the rest of the digital experience.
Impact: Expanded the guide beyond traditional UX writing to support emerging product areas, including conversational AI, while maintaining a consistent customer experience across channels.
― CASE STUDy #2 ―
CDW was introducing single sign-on (SSO) for customers to configure in their accounts. While much of the initiative focused on backend authentication infrastructure and platform integration, the customer-facing experience required new setup, configuration, login, and account management workflows.
The project aimed to:
Make SSO configuration accessible to IT administrators responsible for managing organizational access
Simplify authentication and reduce login friction
Improve customer account security
Enabling Secure Authentication Through Self-Service
Overview
My Role: Senior Content Designer
Timeline: Initiative kicked off June 2025; First user launch planned for October 2026
Collaborated with: Product Manager, Principal UX Designer, Engineers, Integrations Specialists
Problem Statement
SSO introduced a complex set of technical concepts that most customers don't encounter during a traditional login experience.
The experience needed to:
Guide administrators through SSO setup and configuration
Provide clear feedback during connection testing
Help users recover from authentication and validation errors
Account for different terminology within Identity Providers
My Contribution
Designed end-to-end setup and onboarding content
Created login, success, and error-state messaging
Simplified technical authentication concepts for administrators
Defined terminology and content standards
Interviewed internal Integrations team members to better understand the current process and common issues during setup
Collaborated with Product, UX Design, and Engineering throughout implementation
Supported information architecture decisions within the navigation
Key Decisions
Simplified Technical Authentication Concepts
Standardized Terminology Across the Experience
Identity providers use different terminology for the same concepts, creating opportunities for confusion during SSO setup.
I established terminology standards across the CDW experience and advocated for language that aligned with users' expectations. For each step, I intentionally referenced the terminology they would encounter in each identity provider to reduce cognitive load and setup errors.
For example, what Okta refers to as the "Single Sign-On URL," appears as "Identifier" in Microsoft Entra ID, and "ACS URL" in Cisco Duo. Rather than forcing a single label on the user or creating dynamic states for each, knowing that this could change, we acknowledged these differences and provided guidance that helped users map CDW's terminology to their identity provider.
Impact: Improved consistency across setup, login, support, and documentation experiences.
Designed Meaningful System Feedback
Authentication failures can occur for many reasons, including configuration errors, identity provider issues, and validation failures.
I created messaging frameworks for success states, connection testing, and error recovery to help users understand what happened and what action to take next.
Impact: Improved transparency and reduced ambiguity during setup and login.
SSO setup requires administrators to work with unfamiliar concepts such as identity providers, metadata, and connection testing.
I focused on reducing complexity through plain-language guidance, contextual help, and action-oriented instructions that supported users through configuration tasks.
Impact: Reduced cognitive load during setup and increased confidence when completing configuration steps.
― CASE STUDy #3 ―
CDW was undertaking a major transformation of its returns ecosystem. While backend operations were shifting to a third-party provider and new return policies were being introduced, the user experience needed to evolve in parallel.
The initiative aimed to:
Increase customer self-service
Improve visibility throughout the returns process
Reduce operational costs
Create a more scalable and efficient returns program
Modernizing the CDW Returns Experience
Overview
My Role: Senior Content Designer
Timeline: Initiative kicked off May 2024; Launched to users February 2026
Collaborated with: Product Manager, Principal UX Designer, Engineers, Business Stakeholders, Third-Party Returns Vendor
Problem Statement
The existing returns experience created friction for both customers and internal teams. Key issues included:
Customers could submit a request for ineligible items
Customers had limited visibility after submitting a return request
Return statuses lacked clarity and detail
My Contribution
Designed step-by-step return flows and matrices
Simplified complex return policies into customer-friendly guidance
Established status and notification messaging
Aligned terminology across channels and systems
Partnered with internal and external teams to support new return functionality
Key Decisions
Introduced a Guided Return Flow
Improved Transparency of Return Journey
One of the largest pain points was that customers didn't know what was happening after they submitted a return.
I helped define a content framework for return statuses, next-step messaging, and product-level tracking that kept customers informed throughout the return.
Impact: Improved visibility, gave clearer status updates, and provided actionable next steps, giving customers greater confidence throughout the return journey while reducing the need to contact Customer Relations for updates.
Translated Business Policies Into Customer-Centered Decision Logic
One of the biggest challenges was turning complex operational policies into an experience customers could navigate confidently.
I mapped the underlying business logic, identified decision points throughout the journey, and designed content that explained eligibility, next steps, and policy requirements in context.
Instead of exposing customers to internal rules or requiring them to learn policy details themselves, the interface guided them through the appropriate path based on their specific situation.
Impact: Successfully aligned the digital experience with new return policies while preventing ineligible return requests, reducing customer friction, and enabling a more scalable self-service returns program.
The previous experience exposed customers to a complex process without enough guidance.
I helped redesign the experience as a step-by-step workflow with progressive disclosure and dynamic steps, breaking the return process into smaller, more understandable tasks.
Impact: Enabled customers to complete returns more independently, contributing to an increase in online return initiation from 10% before launch to an average of 47.3% during the first three months after launch.
― CASE STUDy #4 ―
As my role transitioned from supporting multiple product teams to focusing exclusively on customer-facing AI experiences, I was responsible for evaluating the quality of AI-generated responses in CDW's website chat experience.
I developed a content quality framework to define what makes an AI response effective and establish a consistent approach to evaluating outputs.
Building a Content Quality Framework for AI Outputs
Overview
My Role: Senior Content Designer
Timeline: June 2026-Present
Collaborated with: Product Managers, Principal UX Designers, Engineers
Problem Statement
I was responsible for evaluating the quality of AI-generated responses, but there was no established framework for determining what "good" looked like or evaluating responses consistently.
Without a structured approach, evaluations could become subjective and difficult to compare across outputs.
I saw an opportunity to turn a loosely defined responsibility into a repeatable system that could:
Define clear standards for AI response quality
Create consistency in how outputs were evaluated
Identify specific opportunities for improvement
Diagnose the root of an issue in a response
Provide a foundation for AI-assisted evaluation at scale
My Contribution
Identified the need for a structured evaluation framework
Defined criteria for assessing the quality of AI-generated responses
Developed a repeatable process for evaluating outputs and identifying failure patterns
Explored how the framework could eventually support LLM-based evaluation at scale
Key Decisions
Defined What "Good" Looks Like for AI Outputs
Used Evaluation Results to Surface Failure Patterns
Scoring individual responses told the team whether something failed, but not whether that failure was a one-off or part of a larger trend. I evaluated failure patterns based data to see which issues were recurring versus isolated incidents.
This gave the team the ability to prioritize fixes based on actual impact, rather than treating every failure as equally urgent.
Impact: Shifted the team from reacting to individual bad responses to identifying and resolving the systemic issues causing them.
Designed the Framework to Scale With AI
Traditional content review relies heavily on evaluating individual pieces of content. That approach doesn't scale when an AI assistant can generate thousands of responses.
I designed the evaluation framework with scalability in mind so that it could eventually provide guidance to an LLM acting as a judge. This allows for evaluation of hundreds, or thousands, of outputs while keeping human judgment involved in defining and refining what quality means.
Impact: Established a foundation for evaluating AI-generated content at scale while maintaining a human-defined standard for quality.
The team needed a consistent way to determine whether an individual response was successful. I took it upon myself to develop a criteria-based evaluation framework that breaks response quality into specific tiers.
This gave the team a shared vocabulary for identifying strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement rather than relying solely on subjective feedback.
Impact: Created a repeatable framework for evaluating AI outputs and gave the team a common standard for assessing response quality.
― EXPERIENCE ―
Content Designer
CDW | July 2022 - June 2024
I led content strategy across the product development lifecycle, partnering with cross-functional teams to create intuitive experiences grounded in research and business goals.
Senior Content Writer
Sprinklr | November 2021 - July 2022
I developed strategic content across the customer journey, translating complex topics into compelling narratives that supported marketing goals and created a consistent experience.
Senior Content Specialist
Sealed Air Corporation | July 2019 - November 2021
I led content strategy initiatives that improved the customer experience through content governance, information architecture, and customer-centered messaging that was informed by research and business goals.
Senior Global Communications Specialist, Digital Content
Sealed Air Corporation | January 2018 - July 2019
I led content development and strategy for Sealed Air's global digital presence, creating customer-facing web content and digital campaigns.
Senior Content Designer
CDW | June 2024 - Present
I lead content strategy for digital products and AI-powered experiences, combining content design and governance to create intuitive, scalable customer experiences.
Global Coordinator, Digital Content
Sealed Air Corporation | January 2017 - January 2018
I managed Sealed Air's digital content across the web, intranet, and social channels. I developed campaigns and content informed by analytics and audience insights.
― Skills ―
Content Design
UX Content Strategy
UX Writing
AI Output Evaluation
Design Systems
Content Governance
Accessibility (WCAG)
Information Architecture
User Research
Usability Testing
A/B Testing
Figma
Agile
Digital Marketing Coordinator
PlayPower, Inc | February 2016 - January 2017
Led digital content strategy across six brand websites and supported integrated digital marketing campaigns across the web, email, search, and social media.
― AWARDS & HONORS ―
Earned the highest annual performance rating (Far Exceeded Expectations)
CDW • 2025
Promoted to Senior UX Content Designer
CDW • 2024
Earned the highest annual performance rating (Far Exceeded Expectations)
CDW • 2023
Awarded Coworker of the Year - Design Team
CDW • 2023
