Project: UX writing for freelancer CRM platform

Opening up the world for freelancers, Noumena’s finance and CRM platform offers self-employed folks a whole host of tools and support to grow their businesses. I consult for Noumena on UX writing, content strategy, and email content.

Balancing design and content needs with stakeholder requirements and opinions.

Working collaboratively with designers and product managers.

Implementing new content processes.

Content design being seen as more than just a ‘words’ function.

As the lead content designer and strategist, I work with stakeholders in both marketing and design to identify and implement the content that will most appeal to users.

Noumena’s design and product team had mainly been writing the content, when they realised that a dedicated writer could probably do a better job. Not just because it is a job in itself, but also because english is not their first language and they struggled with some of the nuances. That’s where I come in. The first job on the list was to understand the product, its benefits, and the target user base. Armed with that information, I then set about writing a content strategy and tone of voice guidelines.

With the strategy and processes set up, I then moved on to working with the design team to write in-product copy. Working in Trello and Figma, I write the copy that appears on each product screen. Taking into account the user base, target users, Noumena’s tone of voice, and the overall user experience.

I also work with the design team to improve how the features are planned and implemented, advocating for a content-first approach and helping the team to identify what is a content problem, and what is a design, or even specification problem.

To help Noumena create a consistent voice and tone across all user touchpoints, I wrote content design guidelines. Working in collaborating with the product and marketing teams, the guidelines cover everything needed to write content for Noumena. You can read it on Google Docs.

Noumena is a fairly complex app, with a number of different features. When I first began working for them, they had an issue with users not understanding what they actually do. To solve this, and to set users up when they first enter the app I designed the content for a 3 screen onboarding carousel.

Noumena is a multi-faceted application, designed to support freelancers and help them grow their businesses. As a product it has many tools to do this. I collaborate with the product and design teams to deliver experiences that are easy to follow and ensure the users can navigate around the app.

Here are some of the screens for a consultation feature:

This is a screen from Figma where I collaborate with the designers on information hierarchy and in-product copy. On this particular screen I recommended adding the text around virtual consultations to provide more options for freelancers working with clients.

Consultations are fairly complex in Noumena. They take place in a certain named location (the social hall) and can be organised in a variety of ways. This is all important info for the user to understand and meant I had to include it in certain places that made sense.