eliza marin.
Conversation designer, built on 10+ years of writing and research for regulated and consumer software. I find the knowledge buried in complex systems and give it a voice people can trust and act on.
what these words mean
A part of UX design with a tight focus on talking. It starts from what people need and the words they use to ask for it, then decides what the system answers, what it refuses, when it confirms before acting, and when it hands the person to a human.
A conversation designer owns those decisions and the tests that hold them, working beside the engineers who build the model.
The words that guide someone already using a product while they try to do something: the label on a button, the message when something fails, the line that confirms it worked. Each line has to serve the person’s task and the organisation’s goal at the same time.
The written record a person turns to while trying to do something. It is part of the product, and it lands inside the interface as often as beside it.
Gathering and analysing evidence about the people who will use a system, the tasks they have, and the context they work in. It runs before the writing starts, and again after, to find out whether what shipped works.
All three put words in front of a person. What changes is how much the person gets to say back. In a conversation they answer in their own words, and the system has to interpret them. In the interface they choose from what is on the screen. In documentation they navigate a text written before they arrived. Research is what decides which of the three a problem needs. The borders are not walls: UX writing in particular grew out of technical writing and UX design, and keeps borrowing from both.
by the numbers
ten years, in brief
Five roles across technical writing, AI content design, UX research, and enterprise documentation, each with the numbers it moved. Select a role to expand it.
A generator-and-reviewer conversation system for a GitHub pull-request documentation agent. A conservative grounding engine, designed under ISO/IEC 42001, ties generated claims to their source in the pull request, at 95% traceability; across two moderated sessions, human-in-the-loop governance cut manual corrections by 25% and time from trigger to publish by 30%, both small-n and directional. Built on five context-adaptive tone modes, seven conversation flows, and a three-tier delegation model that auto-applies above 0.85 confidence, suggests between 0.65 and 0.84, and hands to full review below.
In-product content and structured DITA documentation for Clinical One and Empirica, two regulated clinical-trial platforms whose users include the FDA and Merck. Every action in Clinical One is audited, and the content ships under ISO 13485 and ISO 82079. On the content I redesigned, progressive disclosure and in-app guidance raised task success by 40% and cut support tickets by 30%; clearer microcopy lowered interaction cost by 50%; a single-source DITA pipeline reduced documentation bugs by 70% across 40+ publications at 95% reuse consistency. Core contributor to the Redwood design system, recognised with the 2024 Indigo Design Gold Award.
Cross-border user research for an Interreg programme worth €201M: 100+ stakeholders, a baseline covering 12.4M citizens, and 255 coded findings that each traced back to source. A national needs study of Romania’s public administration, an institution serving 19M+ citizens, drew 1,782 open-question responses and shaped a training redesign, tested for usability before and after.
End-to-end editorial process across 400+ scientific assets, with turnaround cut by 20%. Single-source XML (JATS), convert-once-publish-many across HTML, PDF, and XML, and terminology standardised across every channel.
Onboarding and microcopy for consumer products, including a construction platform that reached 2 million people and lowered interaction cost by 50%. Copy grounded in 60 interviews across three rounds, run with the Berlin research team, and validated three times over, by card sort, A/B test, and an observational study. 2017 Innovation Award.
education, recognition, languages
MA World Heritage Studies
BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany · 2013–2017
2024 Indigo Design Gold and Silver. 2017 Innovation Award. Talks at Document360 and Product Makers.
Romanian native · English native
German C1 · Spanish B2
My hands are on the design layer: flows, intent maps, prompts, and the QA that keeps an agent grounded. Visual and UI design sit with the product designers I work beside, in Figma. I do not ship production application code. Platform consoles like Dialogflow and Lex have not been my daily tools, and contact-centre operations are outside my track.