Taxonomy, templates, and systems thinking

tl;dr I rearchitected Sun Life’s disability claims flow and Meta’s developer platforms by translating complex compliance requirements into intuitive information architectures. Utilizing scalable taxonomies, structured templates, and centralized terminology governance, I streamlined high-friction user journeys to reduce system complexity and lower customer support volume.

Sun Life's first mobile style guide & empathy framework

Used user research and customer care insights to resolve complex language, complicated, highly legislated concepts, and fill personalization gaps across transactional, logged-in experiences.

Authored a comprehensive mobile app style guide based on the Canadian Press Style Guide, establishing rules to simplify dense legal, policy, and legislative terminology.

Created a scenario-based tone and empathy framework with integrated accessibility standards, guiding standards for bad news, policy shifts, milestones, and more.
- Introduced empathy to claim submission flows (see screenshot), telling the submitter to "focus on your recovery" as part of the disability claims process, a previously complicated, impersonal, analog process.
- Required FAQs in flow, keeping pertinent information in proximity to action.
- Framework and content still in use 6 years later.

Led a team of three UX writers in an initiative to operationalize these new empathy standards across customer touchpoints.
- Overhauled approximately 500 impersonal form letters into supportive, humanized communications by introducing agent signatures and a clear, helpful tone.

High impact work:
- Reduced form completion drop-off rates by 42% across the website.
- Decreased average submission time from over an hour to under 20 minutes.
- Lowered customer support inquiries regarding form ambiguity by 35%.

Cross-platform term audit and IA alignment

Audited terminology and information architecture discrepancies across five Meta developer centers: Social Technologies, Horizon, Wearables, Llama, and AI.
- Identified 70+ overlapping concepts across all centers, isolating the top 17 high-risk discrepancies causing developer confusion.

Partnered with product teams to eliminate siloed language and stop "shipping the org chart," aligning concepts across related product experiences.

Standardized contradictory UI terms across platforms. For example, resolving varying home page names (Home vs. Dashboard vs. My Apps) into a unified concept of "Home."

Disambiguated conflicting features, such as Required Actions, separating critical, access-breaking alerts from less severe notifications by renaming Horizon's feature to "Tasks."

Spearheaded an initiative to align top and left navigation layouts, documentation hierarchies, and interface elements like standardizing on a notification bell icon.

Example

Before: navigation was made up of fragmented information architecture across developer centers causing unnecessary confusion. It was clear different teams were working on each developer center.

After: A mock-up of the proposed navigation shipping in 2026. This design standardizes the top bar with global features (Search, Home, Docs, Team, Notifications, Profile) and moves center-specific tools to a project-scoped left navigation.

Other taxonomy, style, and systems work

Created a wiki-based style guide and template system to standardize compliance messaging, requiring clear policy links, specific violation triggers, and actionable fix steps to guide future project work.
- Implemented style guide for Meta’s App Review compliance messaging by leading a x-functional rewrite of over 200 common responses, helping developers retain or regain data access with minimal friction.

Spearheaded end-to-end creation of the dev platform-wide "How to write a use case" style guide serving as a resource for future project work to drive consistency and clarity.
- Partnered with product, legal, and policy teams to establish strict requirements, including dev-focused verb-based titles, mandatory product integration names, plain-language descriptions, and explicit mentions of unique requirements. Read more about this project here.

Term lead and reviewer for Reality Labs: Governed the strategy, tracking, and quality requirements for new product vocabulary added to Acrolinx.
- Led a cross-functional project to streamline the database taxonomy, aligning internal terminology with developer platform structures and scoped concept audits.