In fall 2006, I began my contract at Fidelity right as the company was beginning to overhaul its retail site, Fidelity.com. Fidelity knew exactly what it wanted - improved organization of information. Customers didn't like reading large blocks of text online. If a customer went to the site expecting to find how much she was allowed to contribute to her Roth IRA for a year, she needed to find that information as quickly as possible.
My job was to take longer articles already on the site and edit them into pages that were brief, yet still informative. The task wasn't as simple as making the paragraphs as short as possible. As a financial company, Fidelity is required by law to deliver certain information. The marketing department also needs to make sure that the copy meets branding standards.
I also needed to take search-engine optimization into account. Last, but not least, I wrote text for images and Flash videos so anyone using a screen reader would grasp the same message as someone who was looking right at the screen. I worked with many different people to shape the copy, and Fidelity.com is even better as a result.
I have taken screengrabs of the projects I helped to revise, and additional notes are above each sample.
Which IRA Is Right for You?
This page, which compared the Roth IRA to a Traditional IRA, originally had much more text. Anyone who didn't know the difference between a Roth IRA and a Traditional IRA would have had a hard time figuring it out. I took the original text and boiled down the language as much as I could until it fit into a chart format. Now, a visitor can get the details quickly.
Rollover Checklist
I worked on revising the IRA section of the site, but I also needed to write a section helping people who were wondering what to do with money they had sitting in 401(k)s at former jobs. I had an old 401(k) myself, and I knew that I could increase my investment options by moving that money to an old Rollover IRA. But past articles I'd seen on the subject made the process sound complicated. I worked together with the project's business partners to develop a checklist. Eventually, I used the same process that I wrote about below when it came to transferring my money from an old 401(k) into an IRA.
