In my data storytelling specialty
As a labor of love, I launched an internal patterns site, ranging from a persona's business or clinical question to providing developer specs for a chart based on open Carbon Charts.
I was invited to design and pilot the curriculum of an executive course on data storytelling that an educational team picked up to harden and repeat at scale.
I've spoken to audiences from the national Society of Women Engineers ("Storytelling for engineers"), to our worksite ("COVID data storytelling"), to our internal design bootcamps ("Designing for data density").
In healthcare
Collaborated with my Design Director and two data science colleagues to develop and patent (pending) underpinning a mental or conceptual model with data science/AI technology as the basis for business cases expressed via Enterprise Design Thinking workshops.
Design systems
Early proponent of IBM-wide design system that has since become open source. Co-leading the 2022 steering committee and still passionate about coming together as a company and beyond to support award-winning open standards.
In 2018, I made an impassioned, research-backed plea to use Carbon instead of creating a new, business unit-specific design system, with the support of my Design Director. We lost the battle, but oversaw the absorption of Watson Health's PAL into Carbon in 2020 due to lack of business unit funding.
Ironically, it made business sense for Watson Health to adopt a BI tool. I agreed with the case to not use Carbon Charts if it meant building most other BI tool functionality from scratch. It necessitated creating a data viz library more resembling Cognos with Carbon styling, and pressuring Cognos to adopt Carbon styling fully.
My widest reach, in information architecture and content
While leading the "Access Model" workgroup for the IBM Information Architecture Council, I worked with colleagues to define standards for navigation design, search engine optimization (SEO), and linking. The audience was an 1100-member community of practitioners.
I also contributed to content template and meta data standards for the same audience. My innovations in content capture were estimated to have saved my own product $750 K in writing labor and $8 M in translation over two product releases.
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So far, my standards had reached the technical writers who create official documentation for IBM products, and information architects concerned with the user experience of documentation sites.
I expanded my content standards work into the Total Information Experience (TIE) community of 4400 practitioners who authored any product technical information, including documentation, IBM RedBooks, Education, and Support bulletins.
I led or contributed to forming standards that remained relevant for more than 8 years.
Despite improvements in product-level information, clients still needed integrated, customized technical information for their solutions (many products together).
Client-facing implementers were the authorities on their clients' solutions, but they weren't the writers. They needed super-easy tools and templates to compile solution-level information for clients, reusing product information and with best practices in information design baked in.
I formed the first workgroup to cross organizational boundaries to address this client need. In three years, 22 of us captured 60 best practices and delivered a toolkit (templates included) on the IBM external site.
Programming projects unexpected from a tech writer in the 2000s
Developed a Java program to output products' DITA XML documentation into Confluence wiki markup
Developed a Java program to mine 800+ links from 5K XML topics and format them for web service