18F/18f.gsa.gov

---
title: 'Nicole Fenton: A wordsmith joins the government'
authors:
- melody
tags:
- staff profiles
- useiti
excerpt: Nicole Fenton joined 18F in September of 2015. Before 18F, Nicole was a content
  strategist at Facebook, Lab Zero, and Mule Design in San Francisco. She started
  her professional writing practice at Apple, where she served as communications lead
  for five years and helped launch the original iPhone and iPad.
description: Nicole Fenton joined 18F in September of 2015. Before 18F, Nicole was
  a content strategist at Facebook, Lab Zero, and Mule Design in San Francisco. She
  started her professional writing practice at Apple, where she served as communications
  lead for five years and helped launch the original iPhone and iPad.
image: "/assets/img/team/nicole-fenton.jpg"
hero: false
---
<figure class="align-right">
    <img src="{{site.baseurl}}{{page.image}}" alt="">
    <figcaption class="align-center">Nicole Fenton, content designer at 18F</figcaption>
</figure><br>

*All throughout the summer, we’ll be profiling members across the 18F
team. Nicole Fenton joined 18F in September of 2015. Before 18F, Nicole
was a content strategist at Facebook, Lab Zero, and Mule Design in San
Francisco. She started her professional writing practice at Apple, where
she served as communications lead for five years and helped launch the
original iPhone and iPad.*

**Melody Kramer: Tell me about your path to 18F.**

**Nicole Fenton:** I studied English in college and I knew I wanted to
write professionally, but I wasn’t interested in advertising or
journalism. So I was thinking, “What do I do with my degree?”

I decided to apply to work at a company I respected, and at the time it
was Apple. But Apple doesn’t hire people like me for writing jobs right
out of college. So I applied to work in the call center. I answered the
phone and worked as an email support rep for a few months, and then
moved into developing training, documentation, and help content. I
eventually worked my way up to leading a team of writers who supported
the online store.

I was there for five years and worked on communications for product
launches and a global checkout redesign, so I learned how to manage the
content translation process, and write for different regions and
languages. I worked with all sorts of people across the organization —
sales, support, logistics, legal, and the technology teams who supported
the call center. It was a very cross-functional role.

I was lucky enough to work there when the original iPhone/iPad were
launched too. In doing that work, I realized I wanted to take a broader
approach to writing for the web. It was right around the time content
strategy was officially becoming a thing, and I very much wanted to
focus on that full time alongside designers.

Since then, I’ve been doing full-time content strategy work. I started
writing and talking about it more publicly. I freelanced and worked for
two client services agencies in San Francisco: Mule Design and Lab Zero.
I learned a lot working alongside designers and engineers, and I started
thinking about the ideal process for content work. I started wishing I
could collaborate with other content people—it’s rare to find a team of
writers and strategists collaborating on a larger product experience. So
I went to work at Facebook for a while.

That was really fun and challenging work, but I wanted to do more to
help people directly. I loved the people there and the level of scale
and impact — we could test things with very specific audiences and learn
a lot really fast. That helped me come up with a framework for content
testing and structured text. But it left me wanting more on a personal
level, so I decided to leave and cowrite a book, and then I spent a
couple of years consulting and speaking at conferences. And now, after
reflecting on my own needs and interests, here I am at 18F.

**MK: How did you find out about 18F?**

**NF:** I first heard about 18F through [Jesse Taggert]({{ site.baseurl }}/author/jtag/). We were friends
in San Francisco before I moved to New York. We always keep an eye on
what the other person is doing.

I would occasionally read the blog, and I also know [Meghana]({{ site.baseurl }}/author/meghana/) from my work
at the School for Visual Arts, so I was curious about the team.

As a strategist, I do a lot of thinking about goals and next steps, and
I realized I wanted to work in government. My skillset — writing in
plain language and designing forms and flows — is useful in this
context. I mean, who has more forms than the government? I love helping
people, and I’m not interested in only helping a particular demographic.
Our government is here to serve the people, and I believe that means
everyone.

I was also excited by the distributed nature of 18F. We’re a distributed
team, and we try to be as open and transparent as we can. We write
collaboratively and share our work with the public. All of those things
are appealing to a wordsmith like me.

**MK: What have you worked on so far?**

**NF:** At 18F, I’ve worked with [the United States Extractives
Industry Transparency Initiative (USEITI)](https://useiti.doi.gov/)
where I helped the U.S. Department of the Interior present complicated
information about how public land gets used for natural resource
development, and how the government distributes money from those leases.
I also served a three-month rotation as 18F’s onboarding lead, and
worked on a research project about digital transformation in government.

**MK: What was most surprising to you about joining 18F and the federal
government?**

**NF:** Most of the time, it doesn’t feel like I’m working in
government. Coming from the private sector and higher education, I
expected my process to need to change a lot to support policies or
existing structures.

Other than new hire paperwork, mandatory trainings, and needing to
understand how the government works, my process of writing and editing
and managing content projects is pretty much the same.

**MK: What do you hope to take with you?**

I don’t know if I can answer that yet. I am thinking through that now —
what do I want to learn in my remaining time here, and what should I do
next?

One thing I do know is that relationships are important, especially in
government. The government is huge and I’m still new here, so I don’t
know that many people. I’m trying to build strong relationships and
understand what other people are working on so I can support those
efforts or, at the very least, learn from their experiences.