Symphony
Designing content for complex financial products
Senior UX Writer • 2022 – 2026
For four years, I was Symphony's sole UX Writer, working across a secure communications platform used by financial-services organisations.
I partnered with Product, Design, Engineering and Research across desktop, mobile, admin and Federation experiences. As the only UX writing specialist, my role went beyond writing interface copy: I developed content guidelines and reusable patterns, shaped product voice and tone, improved content and localisation workflows, and helped teams make content decisions throughout the product-development process.
My work ranged from complex user journeys and system messaging to onboarding, feature guidance, error messages, terminology, research, and conversational experiences.
What I worked on
Product content and user journeys
I designed and reviewed content across desktop and mobile experiences, including defining product tone, voice, microcopy, navigation, labels, errors, notifications, multi-step journeys and system messaging.
Content systems and standards
As Symphony's sole UX Writer, I created and maintained guidelines, templates and reusable content patterns to make product language more consistent and help teams make better content decisions at scale.
Research and customer insight
I worked with researchers on interview and survey language and analysed thousands of comments from Symphony's annual NPS survey to identify recurring themes and opportunities for product improvement.
Global content and localisation
I wrote US English source content for an international financial-services audience and worked with localisation workflows supporting French and Japanese. This meant considering clarity, concision, translation expansion and language-specific interface constraints from the source-writing stage.
Onboarding and guidance
I created feature tours, infotips, explanatory UI, summaries and help content to introduce new functionality and help users understand unfamiliar or complex features.
AI and conversational experiences
I worked on conversational interactions including bot commands for tasks such as summarising and finding information in chats, contributed to bot naming, and collaborated on an AI-assisted UX-writing plugin for Figma.
Case study 1: Symphony's Federation offering
Designing trusted invitation journeys for Federation
The challenge
Symphony Federation enables financial-services professionals to communicate securely with external users, including people using WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, and SMS.
I worked on the system messages that supported these invitation journeys. The content had to explain what was happening, establish trust and help recipients take the appropriate next step. But there wasn't a single recipient journey.
Some users had explicitly opted in and were expecting the interaction. Others had been pre-authorised by their organisation and might have little context for why they were suddenly receiving a message.
At the same time, some messages risked being classified by Meta as marketing content rather than utility messaging, creating a potential delivery problem.
The challenge was therefore not simply to rewrite individual messages. I needed to create messaging that could accommodate different user contexts while remaining clear, trustworthy and sufficiently task-focused.
Understanding different user contexts
A recipient who had actively requested communication didn't need the same explanation as somebody whose organisation had enrolled them.
For an explicit opt-in user, the content could focus quickly on confirmation and the next action.
For a pre-authorised user, the message needed to provide more context: who was contacting them, why they were receiving the message and what they were being asked to do.
This distinction influenced both the information hierarchy and the amount of explanation provided at different stages of the journey.
My approach
I reviewed the different user types, system triggers and messaging contexts across the Federation journey. Rather than treating each message as an isolated piece of copy, I looked at what the recipient would already know at each point and what information they needed in order to continue confidently.
I focused the content around several principles:
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Lead with the user's immediate task, rather than promoting the product.
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Provide context when needed, particularly for users who had not actively initiated the journey.
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Ensure the language used adhered to our style and content guidelines.
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Reveal information progressively, rather than trying to explain the entire service in every message.
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Create consistent structures that could be reused across related Federation journeys.
Designing a system, not 20 isolated messages
The work ultimately covered more than 20 messages across mobile and desktop experiences.
A key part of the project was making those messages work together as a coherent journey. I standardised language and structure so that similar situations were handled consistently while allowing the content to adapt to different user contexts.
The resulting approach provided reusable patterns that could support related messaging elsewhere in the product rather than requiring every new message to be designed from scratch.
What changed
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Reworked 20+ mobile and desktop messages across Federation invitation journeys.
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Created clearer distinctions between content for users who had actively opted in and users who had been pre-authorised.
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Reframed messaging around the immediate user task and Meta's utility-content requirements.
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Introduced more consistent language and structures that could be reused.
What I learned
This project reinforced that system messaging isn't simply about making individual sentences clear.
In complex products, the right content depends on what the user knows, what they expect, how they entered the journey and what the system needs them to do next.
Designing the content around those states helped turn a collection of messages into a more coherent system.