Content designer
that gets right in the feels

Effective content strategy
for Google Pay loyalty program

Practical guidelines for the team to speak as one to our customers. When so many people in different roles and countries contribute to the development of offers on Googe Pay, it's easy for personal writing styles to seep in. Developed in collaboration with project managers, designers, engineers and researchers, this document is meant to be used as: a reference for creating content for the loyalty programa practical guide on writing style, voice and tone, and nomenclature a resource for managing communication standards  For reasons of confidentiality, I'm not showing the full document. Instead, I'm highlighting my depth of thinking for content strategy.  Take a look at the content strategy guide 

Impactful UX writing for
Google Pay India

Sometimes all you need is a few thoughtful words to reassure anxious customers. Google Pay India accepts payments via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) – a real-time payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for inter-bank transactions. Sometimes, this system breaks down when a user is transferring money. For the next 3 working days, a manual process of tracing the payment status would have to be done by the bank. During this period, Google Pay has no information on the status of the transaction. However, most users become anxious when a payment does not go through and tries to find out what happened by calling Google Pay's helpdesk. In 2019, there were about 3 million such calls monthly. And 45% of such calls were related to such "pending" transactions. This was becoming a real i$$ue – especially in terms of the cost of support. I was part of the team that was tasked to solve this issue. The team consisted of a project manager, a UX designer, an engineer, with myself as the content strategist. After rounds of discussions, we decided that the fastest way to fix the issue was to add a reassuring message at the point of an unsuccessful transaction. BEFORE: Users only see this message when a transaction is unsuccessful Message: Pending | x days left AFTER: New message manages user expectations and most importantly, reassures users Transaction status: Processing | Up to a few days Message: The banks are having some trouble. Don't worry, your money is safe and we're already on it. RESULTS After this feature was rolled out to just 50% of the users, call volume for this issue was reduced by 11.40%, representing a savings of about USD$635,224 on support costs for 2019. To date, the team continues to experiment with other solutions for this issue.

Results-driven UX writing
for DBS digiPortfolio

Why shouldn't investing be as fun and easy as online shopping? To bridge the gap between their high-end DBS Vickers brokerage and the cheaper but limited regular savings plan, DBS created digiPortfolio for investors.   About 6 months before the launch, I was hired to refine the product offering through UX writing. Working with a product manager, UX designer, marketing associate, compliance officers, and engineers, the challenge was to converse with customers in a way that is straightforward, human and still legally compliant. With my experience in advertising, I proposed the marketing tagline for the product:Invest. Sleep. Repeat. This was well-received by all the stakeholders and was used for marketing the product.  Within 3 days of its launch, 157 portfolios were opened by 97 customers, amounting to a total market value of around S$2 million. 

Capturing the sociolinguistic
variations of India English

What's plain language to you may not be so plain to another. Besides British and American English, there are other international varieties of English. Indian English is one such variety. it is influenced by the local languages, uses certain vocabulary, and even has its own grammatical norms. According to internal research by Google, only about 10% of the Indian population speaks English (120M people). However, many smartphone users have their devices set to English, even when they are better with Hindi or other Indian languages. 96% interviewed also said it was easier to type their native language using English characters. Hence, knowing and using Indian English is essential to creating an optimal user experience for our customers in India.  Towards this end, I actively visit India English websites, read the posts of our customers on the official Google Pay Facebook and Twitter accounts, seek the opinions of my colleagues from India, and ask the researchers whenever I have doubts. To share my findings, I created a living document that lists the words, terms, and phrases that are preferred in India. I also included some explanations of cultural concepts, definitions of acronyms, and expected formats like the address fields for a form. My efforts have been noticed by the localisation (l10n) team and they are continuing this work I've started in an extensive way. As I can't share the document I've created for confidentiality reasons, here's an example of a culture concept: Bank transfer Generally understood to be the method of entering someone's bank account number and routing number. And usually to someone who does not have UPI ID (Unified Payment Interface ID) or who does not use a payments app like Google Pay, PhonePe, or PayTM.  DO NOT USE:Pay friends via bank transfer Why?When a user says, "pay a friend", they are referring to payment by entering phone number or name on a UPI app like Google Pay, PhonePe, or PayTM. So semantically, you cannot do both at the same time – pay friends (use UPI ID) via bank transfer (enter account number).

Successful branding for
Goldheart Bullion

Coming up with a tagline that works for a new player in an established industry. I worked with Edenspiekermann Singapore to develop the proposition for Goldheart Bullion: It never gets old The value of paper money changes but precious metals do not lose their value. Buying physical gold and silver as an investment asset is a great way to diversify your portfolio. Either for your own peace of mind or as a nest egg for the next generation. For investment or inheritance, we believe that everyone should own some gold and silver simply because… it never gets old. Goldheart Bullion in 2017 was a new bullion retail brand that is the collaboration between Aspial, Singapore’s first mainboard-listed jewellery retailer, and Silver Bullion, an award-winning bullion dealer and safe storage provider in Singapore.  Involvement: brand proposition, copywriting for an educational and promotional brochure, copywriting for the website

A motivational manifesto:
Design 2025 Masterplan

Sharing good news from the government. With Singapore’s recent designation as a UNESCO Creative City of Design, the government believes that Singapore can become a global leader in design. The Design 2025 Masterplan proposes recommendations on how we can achieve this vision. Launched at the opening of the 2016 Singapore Design Week on 10 March 2016, this report was designed by Edenspiekermann Singapore. Read the report here(4MB PDF document) Read the news report by The Business Times

Thought-provoking
ad campaign for Singtel

Everyday objects look different through the eyes of Singtel Managed Security Services. Harmless or harmful? This was the proposal for a series of ads for Singtel Managed Security Services, a division under the telco's Enterprise Business segment. The client has approved the concept for the ads and has used the idea with the shark USB stick for their brochure. The ads highlight the emerging problem that tech wearables and the BYOD trend bring and are of particular concern to the target audience of CIO, COOs and IT Managers. By featuring common tech objects and being seemingly paranoid about them, Singtel shows the target audience that they are aware and vigilant about current threats and vulnerabilities. 

Creative ads for
Speedreading School

How do you help a client with a limited budget and a lot to say? These ads hook the target audience of office executives with headlines that fulfil their coveted desires. The promises made in the body copy teases the imagination of the audience, daring them to wonder if these seemingly impossible goals are not so impossible after all. And just by reading the text-heavy ads, the audience is unknowingly testing their reading speed already. The effect is to jolt the audience to buy into the value of such a skill.

Feature Writing

Long-form storytelling for magazines. Before today's mandate to publish shareable, catchy, and snackable content, you tried your best to master the art of writing a good read. Though this was a lofty goal which could never be reached by any self-respecting artist, it was the motivation for this writer.  Through feature writing assignments, I learned the useful skill of asking the 5 W's and one H.  I learned to interview people. To probe. To ask the difficult questions. And most importantly, to listen. I also learned to research, find and locate sources. And organise information. In the process, you find that story angle that is the heart of your story. Then you start to write. And rewrite. And write. And rewrite. Until the editor yanks that forever-draft from you.