Thanks for stopping by. I’m Sara, a doting cat guardian and budding gardener living in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. I’m on a mission to design for social impact and connect people across cultures.
I love working collaboratively in tight-knit teams across experience and product design, editorial strategy, marketing, content process, creation, and beyond.
Examples of pages and product flows with my information architecture, hierarchy and UX writing work are available in my portfolio. I’m also passionate about sharing knowledge about content and UX through mentorship, workshops, and public speaking.
Career interests include leading UX teams, taking content teams from 0 to 1, and developing digital strategies in civic agencies, retail, personal finance, and healthcare.
Design
I’m currently a Senior Content Designer at Intuit where I strive to demystify and simplify accounting for small businesses and enterprise solutions for medium-sized businesses at QuickBooks. Projects I’ve led include the content strategy for third party integrations, the content strategy for AI for mid-market customers, and information architecture for a new offering. I also contributed to Intuit’s design systems: I authored required field guidelines and created an app that uses AI to generate error messages.
Prior to this, I was an Associate Digital Editor at Embarcadero Media where I led the content strategy for the Peninsula Foodist publication and connected a diverse readership across Silicon Valley with local food news.
Before that, I was a Senior UX Content Designer at Sam’s Club, part of Walmart. I designed experiences for SamsClub.com, the Sam’s Club app, kiosks, points of sale and more. I led the business critical content strategy for membership, driving acquisition and retention for tens of millions of members, and redefined our voice and tone guidelines through a rebrand.
My proudest contributions at Sam’s Club include leading the creation of our UX team values as we grew from fewer than 20 to more than 60 teammates, contributing to our accessibility guidelines, and co-leading a grassroots effort to establish principles, guidelines and resources for building inclusive products, which reached more than 100 cross-functional teammates and achieved leadership support in 2020.
“’Inclusion’ might not be enough, because inclusion suggests that I’m joining someone else’s thing including me, whereas ‘belonging’ is suggesting that the thing I’m being a part of I have a hand in co-creating.”
john a. powell, Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at U.C. Berkeley
Before joining the Sam’s Club team, I sharpened my design point of view as a mentor at the Gakko Project in Japan.
Marketing
I have an extensive background in marketing, ranging from research at Pandora to helping startups get off the ground in a variety of industries.
I got my start in eCommerce as the first full time hire at Korean beauty company Soko Glam. I led a redesign of its blog, managed editorial strategy, created content, and managed freelancers, resulting in unique page views increasing by 300% compared to the prior year. Allure Magazine called it one of their “favorite blogs to read” after it launched. I led marketing and transactional emails, product content, digital influencer relationships, live events, social media, and the launch of The Little Book of Skincare, published by HarperCollins.
I also have more than a decade of experience in providing content services for both seasoned New York Times best selling writers and first time authors.
Film, writing, and multimedia
As an award-winning storyteller and journalist, I gravitate toward intimate portraits of people and place, and am especially interested in themes of culture, connection, and food. My video scripts and narration have aired for Fortune 500 executives, and my radio work has aired regionally on NPR partner stations.
My short story work received an honorable mention in Intuit’s 2022 Lorem Ipsum content symposium 250-word challenge.
My autobiographical documentary scrapbook was featured in the 2021 Bad Repertory Theatre All Roads showcase and the APAture 2021: Embrace | Film Festival, presented by the Kearny Street Workshop, Center for Asian American Media and ARTogether.
My journalism has received recognition for enterprise coverage of a local fire board that led to the first recall of elected officials in San Mateo County and video work that documented a federal policy during WWII that led to the displacement of Japanese, Italian and German families. I’m also an award-winning education reporter, with experience reporting in Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the largest in the U.S., and La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District, one of the nation’s smallest.
Read my written work in Resonate: Global Voices on East Asian Issues, the Half Moon Bay Review, The Six Fifty, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Daily Californian.
View my video work about development displacing longtime residents, a photographer taking a stand against domestic violence, and dessert bringing people together, previously published in the Peninsula Press and SF Gate.
Listen to my audio work through Wyoming Public Media and the Silk Knots Project.
Education
I’m a d.school alumna and Cardinal (Stanford University, M.A. Communication/Journalism – Stanford University communication merit fellowship and Asian American Journalists Association scholarship recipient), as well as a proud Golden Bear (U.C. Berkeley, B.A. East Asian Languages and Cultures – Chinese).
Get in touch
I mentor emerging designers and journalists, as well as people looking to make career changes. I’m also happy to help small businesses and independent organizations: If you have a content or UX question, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Stay in touch through LinkedIn. For inquiries, please contact me.