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 empower people with critical information that helps them make decisions about their organizations and communities.
Career interests include storytelling and development, leading UX and editorial teams, taking digital content teams from 0 to 1, developing service strategies for civic agencies, and teaching UX, design thinking, and journalism. I’m also passionate about sharing knowledge about UX, content, and journalism through mentorship, public speaking, and workshops.
Design and content strategy
As a designer and content strategist, I’ve created beloved experiences with top ratings for customer satisfaction. I’m an alum of Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and hold a UX Certificate from the Nielsen Norman Group.
I’m currently a Staff Content Designer at Intuit where I strive to simplify accounting solutions for small businesses and enterprise processes for mid-market customers. Projects I’ve led include the content strategy for third party integrations, the content strategy for mid-market AI, and information architecture for Intuit Enterprise Suite, a net-new product. I also contribute to Intuit’s design systems: I led our required field guidelines and created an app that uses AI to generate error messages.
Previously, 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 an experience designer and mentor at the Gakko Project in Japan where we reimagined the experience of education and delivered summer camps to students from more than 30 countries.
Marketing
I have extensive experience as a marketer, conducting market research at Pandora, helping authors hit best-seller lists, and helping startups get off the ground in a variety of industries including healthcare and travel.
I got my start in eCommerce as the first full time hire at Korean beauty company Soko Glam. I launched new brands and product categories, and made “sheet mask” a household name in the U.S. I led a redesign of Soko Glam’s 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’ve also provided marketing, editorial, and PR content services for both seasoned New York Times best selling writers and first time authors.
Journalism, film, writing, and multimedia
As an award-winning journalist and storyteller, I gravitate toward intimate portraits of people and place, and am especially interested in themes of culture, community, connection, and food.
My journalism received award recognition for enterprise coverage of a local fire board that led to the first recall of elected officials in California’s San Mateo County and video work that documented a federal policy that led to the displacement of Japanese, Italian and German families during WWII.
As an award-winning education reporter, I have 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. At the Los Angeles Times, I broke a story about employee misconduct at an elite private school.
I served as 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. I managed freelancers and also wrote my own original pieces, including a biweekly newsletter and feature articles. (I can’t say for certain that my article was the reason why, but the Michelin Guide did change its award descriptions after my story about the 2021 awards ran!)
Through creative nonfiction film work, I shed light on universal issues. My personal documentary film: “Dear Amelie: A Letter to an AI Native” screened at Intuit’s 2024 Lorem Ipsum content symposium, exploring the ethical, social, and environmental impacts of mainstream use of artificial intelligence through my lens as a technologist, journalist, and mother. 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, giving an intimate view into my experience as a multiracial woman.
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, NPR partner stations, 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; English minor). Go Bears!
What I’m like to work with
“Where to start. First and foremost, Sara is an unrelenting ray of sunshine regardless of the storms lashing about inside the building. She will take on any challenge. She is an agent of change. She champions new technology. She hits every deadline as if it were a thug stealing your mother’s purse. She is also a beautiful, lyrical writer who clearly chooses each word with care. She understands the news value inherent in something … She ‘gets it.’”
– Editor-in-chief Clay Lambert, Half Moon Bay Review
“Sara is an inclusive, professional, and well-rounded designer. During my time working with her, she has consistently excelled at making sound and intuitive content recommendations at scale. She tracks the rationale of content decisions, and as a result, provides documentation of past decisions as a reference for the future. Her systems-thinking mindset, action-oriented working style, and kind demeanor are all must for any team.“
– Principal product designer Becca Snyder, Intuit
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 writing opportunity or questions about content and UX, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Stay in touch through LinkedIn. For inquiries, please contact me.