I’ve been with American Express as a UX writer for six months. Being a UX writer has been both exciting and challenging. I love what I do because I’m working on interesting products with smart and supportive colleagues who help me grow. But advocating for a relatively new practice within design doesn’t come easy.

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I always say, “The less words you want, the more time I need.” This gets to the heart of user experience (UX) writing: in order to be thoughtful and provide value to users, words need careful attention from the very beginning of the product development process. The spotlight is shining brightly on UX writing as an important specialist skill and I’d like to share a glimpse of my process as an integral part of a design team. (more…)

When I moved to Southeast Asia in late 2012 to teach overseas, one of the requirements of my training program, LanguageCorps, was to learn the local language. I decided to base myself out of Vietnam so I spent two weeks learning Vietnamese to build empathy for the students I would be teaching. During this process, my teacher encouraged me to take notes and reflect on what I feel, what I learned, and surprising insights.
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Every couple of months, I do a “life audit” to check in with myself. I evaluate what’s working and what’s not and then reset. I’ve learned that integrating small habits have made the biggest impact over time. I used to think that in order to have major breakthroughs in life, I need to make big lifestyle changes. In reality, any attempt to do so has been more discouraging. I’d like to share how 10 small habitual changes have made a big impact on my life.

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I’m finally ready to share my running goals for the year. It’s become an annual tradition of mine to write an article about on this topic as soon as the new year starts (see 2017, 2018). But this time, I waited because I needed to reset and think about what running truly means to me at this point of my life. Now, I’m mentally ready to push myself again and solidify my determination to becoming a stronger, faster, tougher athlete. (more…)

Every year, I reflect on accomplishments and highlights. I spent many days of 2018 running for miles on end and have used many, many of them to reflect on my life. It turned into a year full of dark days, but also incredible breakthroughs and it would be unfair not to share them. I have a feeling that 2019 will be epic, especially since I turn 30 in less than two months. Let’s take a look back on the highlights and my accomplishments of 2018.  (more…)