🏢 Company: PNC Financial Group / CGI Technologies

🎯 My Role: End-to-End UX Content Strategy

🤝 Collaborators: PNC Financial Group · Federal program stakeholders

📐 Skills: High-Stakes Content · Federal Compliance · Plain Language · Form Copy · Error States

📌 Overview

During COVID-19, the federal government launched the Main Street Lending Program to provide emergency funds to small businesses. I led content strategy for the intake portal — a high-stakes project with zero margin for error, a compressed timeline, and real financial consequences for the businesses depending on it.

🤔 The Challenge

The stakes were immediate and concrete. Users of this portal were small business owners — financially vulnerable, often under acute stress, applying for emergency loans in a crisis environment. A confusing label, an unclear error message, or an ambiguous instruction could cause them to submit incorrect information, delay their application, or abandon the portal entirely.

The content challenge had three dimensions:

• Federal compliance — Every piece of copy had to accurately reflect complex federal lending requirements
• Plain language — Understandable to a small business owner who had never applied for an emergency government loan
• Stress-state design — Users were not browsing calmly. They were financially vulnerable and under pressure. The writing had to work for someone in distress

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⚠️ Compressed timeline. This was not a project with time for multiple rounds of iteration. Content strategy had to be right quickly, with minimal room for revision cycles.

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🫡 My Role

End-to-end UX content strategy for the intake portal, including:

• Form copy and field labels
• Instructions and guidance text