Welcome to Lorem Ipsum, our love letter to content people.
Our 2022 season brought together nearly 200 writers, designers, and content creators from around Intuit. Session overviews and recordings are here. Some talks contain proprietary info and the links work for Intuit employees only. We hope to make it more widely available in future years.
Monday 9/19
Intro & welcome
On lorem ipsum
How did Lorem Ipsum get its name? What’s the process behind making a logo? Get a glimpse behind the scenes with Vidhika and Vivek.
About the speakers
Vivek Saigal is a Principal Visual Designer and illustrator who’s been at Intuit since 2015. He loves comic books, drawing, running, and perfecting his cappuccino skills. He believes capes are appropriate work attire, but has convinced no one thus far. Time will tell.
Vidhika Bansal leads the QuickBooks Advanced content design team, with past (more like parallel) lives as a research and behavioral science person. She’s convinced that words are magic and that stories—including the ones we tell ourselves!—can change the world. She also really likes pasta.
Understanding and evolving the Mailchimp voice
Madeleine will formally introduce the Mailchimp voice to our (not so) new Intuit community. Specifically, she’ll share her process for evolving voice and tone guidance while also combatting the tension of subjective feedback.
About the speaker
Madeleine Stein is a Design Manager focusing on content and design foundations at Mailchimp. Her role flexes a lot, but what’s remained constant since she started in April 2020 is managing the Mailchimp Style Guide and voice and tone.
Outside Voice 101
Let’s look back at what exactly Outside Voice is, how it began, and learn more about how we can all cultivate creativity and bond in new environments.
About the speaker
Mark Elder is a Principal Content Designer and has been with Intuit for 7 years. He’s worked in both marketing and product, and currently works on our new business tax products.
Shoot the messenger (Outside Voice)
Sketching can help you silence your inner critic and reach a flow state. Dust off your sketchpad—there will be an activity!
Supply list
- Paper
- Pen or pencil
- Dish towel or similar piece of fabric
- An object you can hold in your hand. A potato, a carrot, a small potted plant, a seashell. Something organic, with texture. Your phone or your coffee cup are terrible ideas. Your oldest sneaker is a great idea.
About the host
Zip Lehnus is a Senior Content Designer on the QuickBooks Ecosystem team. He’s been teaching an intro to urban sketching class, “Zen and the Art of Urban Sketching,” for four years.
New (and future) managers: Taking a seat at the table
For new (and upcoming) managers, there are a ton of unanswered questions in the move from IC (individual contributor) to people leadership. Join JJ, Scott, and a few new managers — Stephen and Osas — to learn more about the questions that come up when you take that step to leadership!
About the panel
Scott Shumaker leads content designers for QuickBooks Money. He’s a bike rider who collects vinyl records and enjoys complaining about electric scooters and loud music.
Jennifer Johnson (JJ) is a former journalist who leads the SBSEG Brand and Marketing (BAM) content team. After work you’ll find her planning a European holiday.
Stephen Curran is a new manager at Intuit, leading content design for QuickBooks Time and Workforce. Stephen obsesses over arcane 80s and 90s automobilia (the Swedish-er the better).
Osas Obaiza (for short) is a new Senior Content Design Manager and an Intuit boomerang. His true loves are movies, candy, and the awful (his words) Sacramento Kings basketball team.
Tuesday 9/20
Morning meditation with Mariel DuPont
Designing with words: How to collaborate more effectively as a content designer
Want to be more involved in critical conversations, collaborate effectively at all stages of the design process, and show up strong in presentations where your work is truly seen and respected? Rachael will share some tried-and-true strategies to collaborate more effectively as a strategic design partner rather than simply a “words person” who puts out last-minute content fires.
About the speaker
Rachael Hyland is a content designer obsessing over words in billing and subscriptions for QuickBooks. She lives in San Antonio, TX with her neurotic (but cute!) Australian Shepherd.
Let’s talk shop: Get to know your content friends!
Meet up and break out! We’ll gather into small groups to chat about hot topics. Your group chooses which subjects get you most fired up. Great convos + new content pals = 45 mins of awesomeness.
A UX hero’s journey
From our first gathering around the tribal fire to QuickBooks’ most recent user flow, humans have relied on shared storytelling to shape our interaction with the world. Using the framework of Joseph Campbell’s “Monomyth,” we can better understand how every user is the hero of their own story—and how we can validate their heroic journey with a well-crafted user experience.
About the speaker
Robert McNeely is a human being employed by Intuit! He’s spent a year and a half working on the QuickBooks Money Design team and has recently moved into the QBO Ecosystems team. He likes hiking, astronomy, television, and everyone.
250-word challenge (Outside Voice)
Flex your creative writing skills by penning a very short story or poem under deadline. Best short story and poem win a prize for each! Theme will be revealed during the session.
Write:
- one short story or poem
- max 250 words
- in 24 hours
Zoom in close or zoom out. Take us away and draw us in! Make it as personal or unrelated to your own experience as you like. But make every word count!
About the host
Sue Walsh majored in fiction writing and English lit, and loves conveying juicy ideas in just a few words. She worked as a tech writer for nearly 20 years before discovering she could get paid more to write less. Microcopy is her jam.
Brand voice treasure hunt
Join our crew of professional pirates on a hunt for brand voice buried treasure. Come ready to search for the best examples—we’ll supply the map. You won’t get a chest of actual treasure (sorry) but there will be bragging rights and awards!
About the crew
Angela Browne, Ronnie Jacobson, Vin Constabileo, Jessica Torres, and Kim Harris are professional pirates of the voice mission team. Avast ye, mateys!
Wednesday 9/21
World party panel
Hear from your peers in India, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Australia, and the US. Join us for an intriguing empathy-building session to learn what it’s like to be an “International Intuit Content Designer of Mystery”! What’s fun about designing content in another part of the world? What’s challenging about using content guidelines that were born in the US? What can we do to help each other bridge time zones and do great work together wherever we are? These questions, plus audience Q&A, will reveal all kinds of fun surprises!
About the panel
Meet Caro Zorrilla, Kesavan Nampoothiry, Jo Froude, Felipe Bugarib Mello, Zac Gold, Elizabeth Beasley, and Julia Falkowski! This lively bunch of content designers from around the globe are excited to get to know you (and each other).
Keynote: Humane content starts with healthy content teams
Workplace stress is at an all-time high. Depression and anxiety jumped by 25% globally during the pandemic. Everywhere you look, folks are struggling. And through all this turmoil, content teams have been under major pressure to “manage up” and “get a seat at the table.”
But you didn’t get into content or UX because you love building influence and evangelizing to stakeholders. You’re probably here because you want to make a difference for users—to make experiences more inclusive, intuitive, enjoyable, and accessible.
So what should you focus on: taking care of yourself or advocating for your users? Pushing your discipline forward or pausing to catch your breath?
The truth is, these are false choices. We actually can’t design healthy and humane experiences for our users if we’re working in unhealthy ways ourselves. In this talk, we’ll explore why that is and what you can do about it. You’ll learn:
- Why understanding and processing your stress is essential to doing responsible content work—and how to get better at it.
- What you can do to develop a healthier relationship to your work—without letting go of the passion that brought you to the field.
- How to recognize what is (and isn’t!) in your control right now, and start prioritizing where and how you spend your limited energy right now.
- Why we all need to become more trauma-informed in our content work, our teams, and our leadership approaches.
About the speaker
Sara Wachter-Boettcher is an author, speaker, coach, and strategist dedicated to changing design and tech for good. She’s the founder of Active Voice, a coaching and training company helping organizations build radical, courageous leadership practices.
Her most recent book, Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, was named one of the best tech books of the year by Wired. She also wrote Design for Real Life (with Eric Meyer) and Content Everywhere, and has been published in The Washington Post, The Guardian, and McSweeney’s. Find her at home in Philly, on Twitter @sara_ann_marie, or at sarawb.com.
Writing for visual content
How do you write an entire story (about taxes of all things), that educates, delights, drives action, and is less than 60 seconds? We’ll define principles for dynamic visual content that has proven to help customers. Harness the power of visuals and write beyond the words.
About the speakers
Melinda Rose is a Senior Content Designer in CG who just made the switch from customer success to XD. With an agency background, she has 7 years of experience writing all types of content.
Peder Rottiger is a Senior Visual Designer in CG, Customer Success with 10 years of experience creating video, motion, and visual content for consumer content.
Aikido: A path to deep design (Outside Voice)
Can a martial art help us grow as designers? Let’s find out! We’ll explore the practice of aikido, which aims to bring us in harmony with ourselves, other people, and the world. Through movement and reflection, we’ll discover how to build a deeper sense of connection with customers and partners and channel it into our work.
About the speaker
Scott Joaquim has been practicing aikido for 2.5 years, which means he’s just getting started. He hopes to have something valuable to share anyway. If not, he’ll bring out Chip, who definitely knows a thing or two about inner peace.
Listening: The most important tool in a researcher’s toolkit
To become the listeners who connect with strangers and establish a rapport to unpack latent insights, we first must distinguish how we might be listening vs how we must listen. We must lean in and listen to what’s being said and what is left unsaid. With deliberate effort, we can become better listeners and truly understand and empathize with others. Listening provides a way forward.
About the speaker
Anshul Agarwal is a Principal Design Researcher at Intuit. She developed a background in behavioral sciences during her Masters at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She believes in a person’s inherent potential and has written a book for young adults on overcoming the fear of failure.
Thursday 9/22
Morning pages with Christine Yoo
How to stay sane as a content designer
How do you stay sane as a content designer in 2022? It’s a question we’ve all (probably) considered and, as a result, have tried different coping mechanisms and strategies. We’re here to unpack it, share learnings, and reflect on the work and the relationships we’ve formed along the way. Oh, and we made a survival guide just in case.
About the speakers
Masa Zokaei Edie is a senior content designer at Credit Karma based in Los Angeles, previously on teams at Disney, Instagram, TrueCar, Capital Group, and Kaiser. She is the head organizer of Content Strategy Los Angeles and co-organizer of Ladies that UX, Los Angeles.
Kyle Alexander is a senior content designer at Credit Karma. Before Credit Karma, Kyle worked at Fidelity Investments as the lead content designer for their Bloom app.
Let’s talk shop (again): Get to know more content friends!
Meet up and break out! We’ll gather into small groups to chat about hot topics. Your group chooses which subjects get you most fired up. Great convos + new content pals = half an hour of awesomeness.
A poet’s take on UX
Take a moment and think of your favorite poem, song, line from a book. What does it make you feel? Joy? Hope? Longing? Sadness? The best poems stir up something in us. Mariel will share how poetry uses emotion to connect to people, and how you can use that skill to be a better content designer.
About the speaker
Mariel DuPont is a senior content designer on the money team leading content for the invoicing experience. Voted “Hopeless Romantic” in high school, she’s been writing songs (badly) and poems (a little better) since she was a little girl in the French Alps. Prior to Intuit, she worked at Uber where she helped launch Vouchers for Uber for Business.
Acrostic poem contest (Outside Voice)
Even poets need parameters! Together we’ll explore how you can create a one-of-a-kind poem with a shared Lorem Ipsum acrostic prompt. We’ll give you the guidelines—you give us your wildest, most wonderful words. Then we’ll pick a winner!
About the host
Carolina (Caro) Zorrilla is Mexican and a content designer who has worked at BBVA, Globant, and Mercado Libre. She loves words, books, music, hiking, and sharing her UX writing knowledge through courses and bootcamps.
About the judge
Christine Yoo is a content designer on the QuickBooks Advanced team. When she is not crying happy tears at the number of layers in a croissant, she can be found settling many a debate on adventurous choice vs. sticking to the tried-and-true at Trader Joe’s (all internally, of course).
Dubbing: Step 1 (Outside Voice)
We’ve all seen that foreign movie with bad dubbing. When the original speaker’s voice is replaced, strange things happen. We’re gonna have some fun with language replacement. Your homework: Pick a company with a unique voice and tone (one you admire or that’s fun). Bring an example of their content to share! Dubstep soundtrack optional.
About the host
If he’s not working with his amazing content design team…you’ll find Rob Jacques tending to his chickens, goats, and turkeys. Pulling weeds from his struggling garden. Or, most likely, planning his next vacation!
Friday 9/23
Let’s doodle! (Outside Voice)
Dust off a notebook and grab your favorite pen. It’s doodle time! Together, we’ll try out a few of my handy dandy doodle exercises.
About the host
Brittany Ritter is a content designer with a background in graphic and industrial design. She doodles daily, writes in all caps, and loves a good PB&J.
A local talk for local people
As we enter the new era of Global by Design, localisation is something that will (eventually) affect us all. Hear about some of the challenges and rewards of tweaking content for a local audience, and why there’s more to it than just swapping Zs for Ss.
About the speaker
Jo Froude is a London-based content designer who’s been making a living out of writing and editing stuff for more than 20 years. She appreciates clever puns and is offended by unnecessary exclamation marks.
Watering the roots: Growing a high-performing content team at Mailchimp
Sit down with a panel of Mailchimp managers as they talk about taking technical content and transforming it with Mailchimp brand standards. Will, Rachel, and Maegan manage a team of technical writers, strategists, engineers, video producers, scriptwriters, content editors, and instructional designers. See how they’ve built a fast growing team focused on educating Mailchimp customers.
About the panel
Maegan King has spent the last 3 of her 8 years at Mailchimp managing peeps on the technical content team. She’s a proud cat mom of three and collector of over 250 cookbooks.
Will Greer spent most of his 4 years at Mailchimp writing help documentation before becoming a manager. He enjoys writing screenplays and reading the latest non-fiction.
Rachel Grimes is a tech comm pro about to hit the 3-year mark with Mailchimp. She keeps busy reading, learning American Sign Language, and teaching her teenage daughter to drive.
Super-fun wrap-up party trivia
Do you often find yourself wondering why you know so many (seemingly) unimportant facts? Have you ever pondered how much important brain space is being occupied by inconsequential knowledge—like being able to rap “Baby Got Back” by heart, in its entirety?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, it’s your time to shine! Join me for a rousing round of Kahoot trivia, and give the deepest recesses of your mind a workout. No pressure, no expectations—just prizes (!!!) and LOTS of fun! See you there!
About the host
Stacey Chase is a Principal Content Designer on the QuickBooks BAM-XD (Brand and Marketing XD) team. When she’s not teaching agencies how to make em dashes, she enjoys watercolor painting, world travel, and being a devoted servant to her cat, Napoleon.
