11 awards · ADDY winner · Cisco alumna
Shaping digital experiences
The best content design work is invisible: the error message nobody had to file a ticket about, the term that means the same thing on all forty screens. That's what I do. UX writing, content strategy, standardization, and accessibility for enterprise products. Most recently, I spent 4+ years in Cisco's IT Design org, and had a long run in marketing copywriting and content management before that.
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Explore public, shortened projects in the Public Projects section below. Most of these don't include images, but they do provide a solid summary of what happened.
“... Cate is one of the best brainstorming partners I have worked with. She is an excellent communicator, a gifted storyteller, and someone who knows how to turn complex ideas into clear and engaging experiences...”
“... Cate is a thoughtful, insightful UX professional and I counted on her to provide world-class content and UX feedback for our platforms. I especially appreciated Cate’s keen ability to cut through the noise and to anticipate issues in the user’s journeys before we launched new features, and her tireless advocacy for user experience, understanding and accessibility.”
Content design · strategy · accessibility
Public projects
The front door 90,000 people open every morning
I helped redesign a large enterprise intranet experience, improving content hierarchy, navigation, search, and pathways to frequently used resources. The work focused on making a complex employee experience easier to scan, navigate, and use.
The redesign increased employee engagement by 78%.
Read a shortened summaryData migration, designed for success
Employees needed clear guidance to move their data safely between company devices during a hardware upgrade. I led the content design for the migration experience, partnering with Product, Development, Research, and Technical Writing to refine instructions through multiple rounds of testing.
Final testing reduced reported migration failures to 4%.
Read a shortened summaryCisco IT content challenge: Bay to Breakers
Our team was challenged to reimagine a new way to communicate the information that a participant of Bay to Breakers, a race in San Francisco, would need to know to successfully complete the race. I reimagined the event experience through a mobile app, carefully reconstructing design and content that brought the experience to life.
The project earned an award and my figma skills improved dramatically.
Read the full summaryAwards & recognition
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ADDY Award
Recognized advertising work
An American Advertising Federation honor for a Thanksgiving campaign ad called Turkey Engine.
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Cisco
Innovation recognition
Eight awards for visionary thinking and impactful contributions on IT Design products.
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Multiple employers
Branding excellence
Two awards for successful brand launches with assets spanning print, digital, and commercial.
Accessibility advocate
I write for high-stress moments, low bandwidth, screen readers, and translation.
Plain language is an accessibility feature, but accessibility goes beyond the words themselves. It also means using a heading structure that’s easy to navigate with a screen reader, links that clearly tell you where they lead, concise alt-text, and error messages that explain what went wrong and what to do next.
- Build accessibility into the design process
- Make errors actionable and easy to understand
- Structure content for all users and assistive technologies
- Reduce cognitive load and ambiguity
- Rely on content for context, not visuals or colors
A skill collector
I'm quick to raise my hand for the thing nobody's done yet — which is how my career has ended up holding this many crafts. Over time, the skills have connected and compounded.
Off the clock, I’m doing genealogy research, volunteering to scribe old documents written in calligraphy, traveling, and trying out new recipes. Similar instincts, different mediums: research, documentation, patterns, and experiences.
- Content design
- AX content
- UX/UI design
- Agentic AI
- User mapping
- Content auditing
- Systems thinking
- Trust and privacy UX
- product naming
- Plain language
- prompt engineering
- UX writing
- Mobile UX
- Figma
- Information architecture
- Taxonomy
- Content standards
- Naming
- Editorial strategy
- Internal comms
- Social media
- Video and commercial scripts
- Accessibility
- SharePoint
- Accessibility auditing
- Learning articles
- Knowledge repositories
- Workshops and mentoring
- Cross-functional facilitation
Got a content issue?
Whether it’s too much content, not enough content, confusing content, content that needs management, or anything in between, I’m eager to work on it.
I’m open to Senior / Lead Content Design roles, content strategy, prompt engineering, accessibility work, editing, UX research, CMS work, branding, executive communications, and the occasional workshop.