Sarah Park, Slack

Hi! My name is Sarah Park and I’m a senior product writer at Slack in San Francisco. I’m currently working on revamping our onboarding flow.

​​How did you get into content design?

​​My path to this point has been fairly meandering, which seems to be common in content design. I’ve always loved writing – but I also dabble in the design side of things and I worked as a map illustrator for several years. In 2007, I designed a personal finance app with my husband. Through that, I realized how much I love distilling words and visual details to make a user experience more digestible, intuitive and welcoming.

But I didn’t continue with content design then. We had three kids, and I began writing poems as a way to find meaning and humor in my experiences as a mother. We moved to San Francisco, the kids all went to school and then I felt ready and eager to work on a team. I rediscovered content design at that point – it had become a career in its own right! – while reading Nicely Said by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee. I knew immediately it was a role I’d love, full of the types of problems I enjoy tackling.

​​What does a normal day look like?

​​My days are a mixture of team meetings and solo writing time. Slack’s product writing team is embedded in our Design department, so we spend much of our time collaborating and coordinating with product designers and product managers. We hold weekly writing crits and attend user research sessions. Regardless of the schedule of meetings, every day includes my favorite thing: playing around with words.

​​What are the top 3 apps you use?

​​Slack, of course! It’s where our work moves forward and the messy job of communicating with other humans is given organization and clarity. Besides Slack, I spend my time in Dropbox Paper, writing drafts and briefs and in Figma. While our entire design team hasn’t moved over to designing in Figma, I’m crossing my fingers – its multiplayer mode is truly game-changing for content design.

​​What are the biggest challenges you face as a content designer?

​​On the whole, words are deeply valued at Slack. I’m lucky in this. Now and then my work gets mistaken for a final layer of polish, which means I get looped in too late to design the hierarchy of information and the flow of content. Another problem I occasionally face is that everyone writes and uses words, so everyone has an opinion – especially about a topic that is clearly valued in our company. So sometimes I struggle with having too many cooks in the kitchen and having to advocate for my choices more than other experts might.

​​What’s your biggest content pet peeve?

​​Overdosing on personality – a unique brand voice should be applied with a light touch.

​​Do you have any advice for aspiring content designers?

​​After reading Nicely Said, I reached out to Nicole Fenton for advice on how to break into the content design world. She warmly responded and her advice is what I now pass on to anyone who asks: Find or create content work around a topic you love. Freelance, offer writing help to non-profits you admire, go to meet-ups and read as much as you can on writing for the web.

​​Where do you go and what do you do for inspiration?

​​I love libraries. A well-stocked library is even better than a bookstore because I get to have a mindset of abundance instead of scarcity. Every book is mine for the t̵a̵k̵i̵n̵g̵ borrowing, even if I’m only mildly interested in the topic. Good libraries also provide so many resources and host helpful community programs, which renew my optimism about the future of humankind.

​​Where can people find you?

I’m Sarah Dunning Park on Medium.

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Thanks again to Sarah Park for taking the time to answer these questions.