Zinnia Sophia
Zinnia is a Content Strategy Director, Speaker and 6x Amazon best-selling author based in New York City and Miami.
She has consulted for top digital agencies like AKQA, Razorfish, Organic, Ogilvy and Sapient in New York, San Francisco and London. Zinnia has created digital marketing campaigns, redesigned products and created enterprise content at scale for IBM, Verizon and Ford.
After designing products and digital experiences for top brands in San Francisco, she moved to New York City and partnered more closely with marketing leaders. She saw how UX writing, product storytelling and content innovation at scale positioned brands more successfully in their go-to market strategies.
Zinnia is passionate about inspiring and mentoring creative leaders on how to tell better stories.
Presentations
UX Camp Fall 2024
Selling the Design – Tips on how design leaders can become better communicators and influencers
Start the journey of becoming a better storyteller and communicator as a design leader. Zinnia Sophia, Content Strategy Director at VML, shares her experiences and lessons learned in selling design to clients, marketing leaders, C-level executives and investors. She discusses the many faces of design influence and highlights the skills required for elevating the work to your department, company, industry or market.
Introduction to Selling Design:
- The journey from design expert to strategic communicator.
- Understanding the shift to a new business mindset.
Skills of Successful Design Influencers:
- Essential communication skills needed for influencing stakeholders.
- How to maintain authenticity while embracing your influencer archetype.
In this talk, Zinnia Sophia draws attention to the importance of salesmanship, persuasion, influence when selling design. Walk away with new communication strategies that position you as a thought leader. This talk is perfect for design leaders who find themselves in speaking and selling roles, encouraging them to embrace this new challenge with confidence.
UX Camp Fall 2023
Give my product a personality! How to write for products that anticipate, inform and delight
Can products truly have personality? The answer is yes! But how do we achieve this? In this talk, we’ll explore different ways content designers and UX writers can write products that anticipate, inform and delight.
We’ll workshop the process of defining personality for your product. Do products have to sound boring? How can you dial up or dial down the tone of your product depending on the customer moment? How can we use these principles to create strong UX writing guidelines for digital products?
Whether you are writing for tech, fitness or automotive, these exercises will help you create internal processes, documentation and direction as you continue to develop your product’s unique brand. Examples from Shopify, Verizon and Ford will be shared.
