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Andrea Drugay

Writer and editor in San Francisco. UX Writer @Dropbox. Lover of all things healthy and wise. Blogger, runner, yogi, author of books available @Amazon!

What stands out when we’re hiring at Dropbox

If you’ve been doing UX writing for a few years and are ready to showcase your work, there are a few ways you can build a portfolio that stands out. A portfolio is a great way to share projects with prospective employers, as well as make an impression with your UX skills.

Not all companies give the same title to UX writers. Some other titles include Content Strategist, UI Writer, Content Designer, and Product Writer. The point of this blog post isn’t to tell you what UX writing is. If you’re unsure, these recent articles can point you in the right direction.

What we love to see at Dropbox

When we review portfolios, we want to see your best work, presented in a way that shows us you know how to write for the web. But some portfolios are hard to navigate or lack context, which blocks our ability to best understand your writing.

The most helpful UX writing portfolios we see showcase a variety of samples across different types of UI copy. This includes:

Settings

Notifications

Errors

Landing pages

User onboarding

Tooltips

Forms

Menus

Product-generated emails

When we’re checking out a portfolio, these are a few things we look for:

Are your samples easy to navigate?

Is it obvious which parts you actually wrote?

Does your writing sound human?

Is your writing clear and succinct?

How do you treat errors, empty states, and other sensitive topics?

Does your writing show the user what to do and how to do it?

To help you create a killer UX writing portfolio, we’ve gathered some tips and guidance from our UX Writing team’s combined experience hiring writers.

Have your samples online

You don’t have to hand-code a website, but your portfolio needs to be on the web. If you want to show us you can work in UX and write UI copy, your website is a great way to demonstrate that.

It’s fine if you copy and paste your screenshots into a PDF — but they can sometimes be hard to navigate. Also, being prompted to download any kind of file gives us pause. It’s often a lot easier to click through pages and zoom into images on a website, which means we might be able to spend more time reading your samples.

Free websites + no coding required

You can get a basic website on a free hosting site like WordPress or Squarespace. These sites use templates that are easy to navigate and display screenshots of your work.

Another plus to having a web portfolio (instead of a PDF) is the ability to track your visitors. WordPress and Squarespace have simple analytics built in. You can see the number of visitors to your site, the pages they looked at, and how long they stayed. You can even use these analytics to improve your user flow and put your UX skills to use right away!

Example of analytics in WordPress

Showcase your words

It’s tough to know exactly what to include in your UX writing portfolio. Finding the balance between too many projects and too few requires a thoughtful approach and depends on the amount of material you have. Once you’ve decided what projects to include, there are a few ways to show your words in context.

Use screenshots, not live links or text files

This is probably the most important piece of advice in this whole post.

UX writing embodies the ability to use the right words in the right interface context (web, mobile, voice UI). Sometimes we get links to live websites without any other information. We don’t know if you wrote the headlines, the error messages, the blog posts, or if you just changed a few words from what somebody else wrote.

When you copy and paste your writing into a text file or plain text, we see your words (good) without context (not good). For a blog writing position, that might be OK. But for a UX writing position, we need to see your words in a user interface context.

Screenshots help us understand navigation, flow, and clarity of action. When we have context to get inside the user’s head, we can learn how your words contribute to the user’s overall experience.

(Obviously fake) example of a landing page screenshot

Highlight the parts you wrote

Using arrows or other highlighting tools, point out the exact copy you wrote. If you screenshot a page but don’t give us any context, we’ll assume you wrote every word on the page. If we interview you, we might ask how you came up with that fantastic headline and subhead. If it turns out you wrote the settings, not the headers, we’d rather know upfront. The point of a portfolio is to showcase your work — so make it clear which words are yours.

Arrow highlighting the writer’s copy

Even better: include before-and-after screenshots, so we can see where you started and where you landed.

Example of screenshots showing before-and-after pages

Go beyond the basics: case studies and themes

Screenshots let us see how your copy works with the overall flow of the project. But if you want to take your portfolio above and beyond, you can offer a glimpse into your process and work style. To show your teamwork and your ability to work cross-functionally, there are two great ways to do this: case studies and grouping by theme.

Create case studies

With a case study, you showcase your storytelling abilities along with your best UX writing samples.

Example of a case study

A basic case study answers these questions:

The project:

What was the problem and what was the goal?

Who were the main stakeholders?

What was your role?

What constraints were you working with?

What was your timeline?

2. Your UX process:

How did you make decisions based on user research?

How did you collaborate with other teams, designers, and PMs to learn as much as possible about user needs?

3. Your creative process:

How did you iterate on copy?

Why did you choose the words you did?

What were other explorations that didn’t succeed?

How did you make final decisions on copy?

4. The final product and results:

You don’t need to share confidential information, but we need to know how you measured success. Did you use analytics, testimonials, reviews?

How long did it take?

What were the main lessons learned?

Don’t feel like you need to create long-winded copy for a case study. Make it easy to read and scan, using subheads and bullet points.

Group projects by theme

You can show a bunch of projects within a theme, with a summary for each project.

Example of grouping projects by theme

For example, show ten landing pages for various clients or a series of onboarding emails with information about the project, scope, and process. Bullet points work fine here! We just need to know the basics, so we understand how the words you wrote appeared where they did and why.

Here’s an example of information you can include, either with each project or as a group:

Project: Landing page redesign

Scope: Create new headline, subhead, and 1-paragraph descriptive blurb

My role: Lead writer

Stakeholders: Project manager, lead designer

Goal: Redesign started in Q3; ship redesign by EOQ1

Challenges: How can we get more users to sign up for the newsletter when they sign up for our product?

Basic process: User research > Plan > Design/Copy > Prototype > Test

Results: 45% increase in newsletter sign-ups over the following quarter

Protect sensitive work

If the work you’ve done is publicly available, you should be able to share it publicly, too. If your work hasn’t launched, that’s “sensitive material.”

Example of a password-protected page on a WordPress site

If you want to include projects that haven’t shipped, you can create password-protected pages. This feature is free with WordPress, Squarespace, and other sites. You can share the password with a hiring manager in a confidential setting.

If your work is under an NDA and you’re not sure if you can include it even on a password-protected page, the best person to ask is your company’s lawyer. Some employers let employees show their work in a confidential setting. Some might require hiring managers to also sign an NDA. Others might not allow it at all.

Check the details

Finally, your portfolio offers the opportunity to advertise your attention to detail. Typos are a huge red flag when you apply to any writing position, but especially one where you’ll be revising and editing other people’s work. Double-check, triple-check, and use spell check. Also be sure to proofread your resume and LinkedIn profile.

Before you share your portfolio with the world, use this checklist:

Proofread it.

Make sure all your links work and go to the right places.

Make sure your contact information is correct and current.

Get rid of any unnecessary social media links.

Ship it!

After you pull together your portfolio and proofread it, consider having a friend test it out. Then make sure your resume is polished, and get out there and sell your best self to the world.

Every company’s hiring process is unique. During your job hunt, you might be asked to submit your portfolio with your initial application, before a phone screen, or before an in-person interview. You might be asked to walk through each page during an in-person portfolio review or over the phone.

Whatever the process, know that if you follow the tips we’ve laid out here, you’ll drastically increase your chances to get that much-awaited call. Thanks for reading, and best wishes on your UX writing job search!

Huge thanks to Justin Tran for creating the perfect illustration for this blog post. I’m always awed by our illustrators’ talents!

Want more from the Dropbox Design team? Follow our publication, Twitter, and Dribbble. Want to make magic together? We’re hiring!

UX Designer. Writer. Ex-Entrepreneur. Dad to Inty & Luna. Husband to Sandrita. Scotsman with an English accent. Living in Australia 😜

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. (Mark Twain)

These are my notes from a Google I/O 2017 talk by three UX Writer’s. It’s a great resource to start creating a UX Writing process within your organisation. Useful for anyone involved in putting words on interfaces.

Topics covered:

1. Introduction to Content Strategy

Maggie Stanphill, UX Director, Content Strategy, Google

2. Three UX Writing Best Practices

Alison Rung, UX Writer, Google

3. Building Brand voice for your new Product

Julian Appenrodt, UX Write, Google

4. Your UX Writing Checklist

Maggie Stanphill, UX Director, Content Strategy, Google

1. Introduction to Content Strategy

Google follow the principle, focus on the user and all else will follow. Focusing on the user starts with the content.

Content strategy is the crafting and development of all product messaging. UX writing is a speciality within this discipline. It focuses on helping users achieve their goals with language.

Language helps the user get where they want to go. By focusing on what the user wants to achieve content strategy builds loyalty and trust.

How Google incorporates UX Writing within UX

Writers work with Designers to think about information hierarchy on the page. This then guide user actions. Writers work with researchers to test hypothesis about language and inform our insights.

When you have the foundation of UX writing and you add brand voice, something amazing can happen. UX writing can survive with the fundamentals but it can thrive with brand voice.

Oh don’t use big words. they mean so little.

(Oscar Wilde)

2. Three UX Writing Best Practices

1. Clear

Often words used are software problems and not people problems. Pay attention to verbs. A verb is an action word. It tends to be the most powerful part of your sentence. In a perfect world it will relate some action to the user.

For clarity we remove technical terms and we put the action in the context of the user.

This is especially important when you’re writing a product announcement or an app update. Currently focus is on the technical specs of the new feature you’re releasing. Instead focus on the new action that people can perform. Jargon free offers context.

2. Concise

Concise doesn’t only mean short, it means something closer to efficient. When we are writing with concision we look at our message and we make sure every word on the screen has a distinct job.

The above is a common problem in product writing. Here we don’t need the header. This is typical in interfaces. Because the design field shows some pre-existing text field, we feel we need to fill it in. You should avoid this. When you can instead practice content first design.

Content first design makes sure your visuals are inline with what you’re trying to say. Not the other way around. So try not jam your message in boxes that weren’t meant for them.

Try to have designers work in parallel with writers.

Here we’ve removed the header. As you know we don’t read every word on screens, we scan.

We know that peoples eyes follow an F shaped pattern as they read over the screen. They read the first line. Then the second line. Then they start skipping down the page, catching only the first or second word of each sentence. For this reason we keep our text not only concise but also frontloaded.

Frontloading means to put your important concepts first. This is so people’s eyes catch those important words as they skip down.

Above most of the words are at the end of the sentence. We can fix this by flipping it around with the below

You won’t always be able to do the above. The principle will always hold true and you can use it anywhere you are writing for screens. Keep the most important text up front and then ruthlessly edit what comes after it.

3. Useful

The call to action (CTA) guides people to there next step. You want your text to help people get where they want to go. For that reason the call to action needs to resonate with what they want to do. Here OK is not a good call to action.

Try again is a good option instead, but this isn’t all we need. We need to give them an option if they’ve forgotten their password. If you forget your password and your only option is to ‘try again’ then you’ll be frustrated.

Paying attention to writing and the people you’re writing for is so important. It can uncover some of the basic functions that your app or website needs to offer. So if you don’t think of those edges cases and write for them you might see some drop off in the usage.

Best practice wrap up

If you pay attention to these three principles you’ll connect better with your users.

Good UX writing is not a science.

These three principles are not always in harmony. There is a kind of tension between them. They are competing with each other.

When we made the text clear it is still pretty long, and not so scannable. When it made the text concise it made it shorter but at the expense of some clarity. Finally when we made the text useful it became longer again and became less scannable.

Consider your user context and you’ll find the right balance between these principles. Think about what they want to do in the moment.

You can also look towards your products brand voice. Your brand voice should create the right balance of clear, concise and useful. This should be true to your products character.

Think about your products core function. Then you’ll begin to find the elements of that character. Then think about what makes it special, how it’s differentiated.

Below is what Google would do inline with their own positive brand voice. We don’t like to lead with a negative words like wrong. We are also ok to have a the text a little longer, a little less concise, to be friendly and chatty. Now this sounds like Google. It doesn’t mean it’s right for your brand. It’s up to you to build your own brand voice for you own product.

Make the most of your words.

(Claire Savage)

3. Building Brand voice for your new Product

Brand principles

Start with a set of brand principles. These can be 3 or 4 adjectives that embody your brand, and how you want people to perceive it. To come up with these adjectives you can do a brainstorming exercise.

Imagine you are signing up your product to a dating site.

What words or info would you put in your products profile. What is about your product that you think would make it stand out or seem most interesting to people.

What would make them want to swipe right and want to learn more?

You can then distil these qualities into descriptive words. These will then will become your brand principles.

With Google Pay the principles were: fresh, empathetic and approachable.

Now you have your brand principles. The next step is what these principles will sound like when you apply them to you writing. These will then become your writing guidelines.

Tone

You can then take it one step further and think about what your voice will sound like in different contexts. This is tone.

An easy way to remember the difference between voice and tone, is to think about like a person. A persons voice stays the same. The tone they talk to you in may change, depending on the situation or what they’re saying.

In an app this might be like talking to users in a different way for different circumstances.

Tone spectrum

For Android Pay we mapped these different moments on a user journey. We did it in a tone spectrum ranging from serious to whimsical. This makes sure that we are using our voice in a consistent way across the entire user experience.

For your product the two ends of the spectrum might called something different. Your tone might range from informative to inspiring or direct to humorous. Once you have created your two ends you then need to determine what moments in the user journey you’re going to map.

A good way to do this is to think about the distinct milestones or interactions in your user experience. These can be thing like on-boarding, education or troubleshooting.

To help you decide were these will fall on the spectrum you can then think about:

What the users goal is

What they might be feeling in that moment

What you’d like them to feel

Now do some UX writing 🤓

So you established your voice and you have mapped your tune. Now it’s time to apply both of these and do some UX Writing.

It’s time to decide what words will go in your user interface. That ends up being a combination of everything we’ve talked about today.

To be successful your interface text needs to be:

Clear

Concise

Useful

As well as reflect your brands natural voice

To show you how we get there we can walk through how the UX writing process looks like.

As an example lets try to see what we say to the user, the first time that they use Android Pay. We can guess that they’re curious. So we want to tell them what we can do with the app, as well as give them reason to move beyond this screen and set it up.

Step 1

At the beginning of the process we start with something descriptive like the below.

Step 2

We then think about the three principles of good UX Writing. This text is clear and useful but it’s not concise. We look at what pieces of information are essential. What parts could use visuals instead. We edit it to something like.

Step 3

For this we’ve ticked off clear, concise and useful and need to think about one more part. Tone. We’d ask ourselves, does this text convey our brand? Not too much, it fells pretty generic.

So going back to our brand principles we think about how we can make it fresher and more exciting. Even whimsical as this might be our first impression on the user.

In our final iteration we end up with something like this.

A/B Testing

It’s a little longer than before, but adding a little personality can do this. It’s up to you whether infusing this personality is worth the words. This is not always a clear decision. If you’re not sure whether some words will be more effective than others then A/B test it.

When trying to find the right words for your product never underestimate the power of A/B testing.

We ran an A/B test on the start screen on Android Pay. We changed the button from ‘add card’ to ‘get started and it resulted in a 12% increase in click throughs.

testing is a great way to confirm a hypothesis you might have. Or to decide between two different version of text, you’re not sure which will connect more with you users.

Bad writing slows things down. Good writing speed them up.

(Ken Roman)

4. Your UX Writing Checklist

With this checklist, you’re on your way to make your product stand out with language.

Standout UX Writing Checklist

ALWAYS

User First: Focus on your users

Clear: Write in a language free of jargon, and with context

Concise: Write in a style that’s efficient and scannable

Useful: Write in a way that directs the next action

On Brand: Define your brand voice and apply an appropriate tone

WHENEVER POSSIBLE

User First: Choose language that performs, proven by research and A/B testing

Bringing writers in at the end of the creative process, is like trying to put toothpaste in to a tube.

(John Steinbeck)

If you enjoyed this, have a read of my other UX articles:

UX Design For Your Life

24 Ways to Look Like an Awesome UX Designer

51 Research Terms You Need to Know as a UX Designer

53 Tech Terms You Need to Know as a UX Designer

How to become a UX Designer at 40 with no digital or design experience

Worth reading?

Please click the 💚️ below to help others find it, and leave a comment. Thanks for reading.

The new habits you’ll start doing & the career benefits you’ll get from them.

For the past year I set a goal to start writing more, to share my knowledge with the design community. Rather than bottling them up in private journals. Since doing so, I noticed new habits developing that turned out to be very beneficial in my design career. So the following points are ones of encouragement. Here’s 10 reasons why writing more will benefit you as a designer.

1. Reasons to talk to someone you normally wouldn’t feel comfortable to.

Writing will give you a reason to talk to someone that you might otherwise feel uncomfortable to approach. It could be a lead from a different department or even someone on twitter. Its a lot easier to approach people when you’ve got a specific reason to. For example, you might ask for their insights around something you’re writing about.

In my experience, people I perceived as daunting were actually very welcoming. If you’re sparking a conversation in their interests and showing curiosity in their knowledge, they’ll be happy and excited to chat with you.

2. Dribbble shows your style, but writing reveals your mind.

They say “a picture can tell a thousand words” but thats not always the case. Dribbble and Behance are fantastic channels to show your visual design skills and style, however this isn’t enough for UX.

UX is about your way of thinking, your processes and ability to work through what I like to call ‘non-sexy problems’. So write about it, reveal your mind to the world. You never know who might be reading. Someone who wants to team up with you? Potential future employers?

3. You’ll find yourself researching more into a breath of different topics.

When I’m working on an piece of writing, I’ll usually fall into this infinite rabbit hole of googling. One topic leads to another, which leads to another. You’ll end up with an endless list of topics, articles and podcasts to absorb in your free time. This extra knowledge can spark new ideas down the track.

Tip: If you’re writing about something controversial or highly debated, it’s important to learn about both sides of the augment. This will help you make an educated and open minded comment.

4. Build trust and better communication with clients.

Even though design is a visual industry, writing will always play a vital role. Whether its writing a slide deck, a presentation, storytelling or emailing clients. Great copy will go along way as it shows competence and allows you to get the message across clearly.

If writing isn’t your forte, you can use text editors such as Hemmingway and Grammarly to check your work. The more you review your writing, the sooner it will become second nature.

5. ‘UX Writing’ will help your users.

Speaking to the point above, not only is writing useful for internal communications, but it’s a UX role in its self. Companies such as Google and Amazon employ UX writers. It’s their role to create copy that helps a user understand the task at hand.

Although, you don’t need to be exclusively employed as one to do this. Google has written wonderful guidelines for UX writing. Just having that knowledge will allow you to create better user experiences.

6. Connect with the design community.

Having a platform online opens up a new means of communication with people. Go ahead, have a little stalk of the people following you. Is there anyone interesting that you want to reach out to?

Did you really enjoy an article? Then tell them! Everyone deserves positive acknowledge for their efforts. That response might be the difference between them continuing writing or giving up. Continue to be active in discussions and engage with others.

Did a designer that you admire share your work or liked the post? Take that opportunity to reach out and say thank you. You’re allowed to fangirl over it. I certainly do!

7. It allows you to collate your thoughts in a formalised way.

Lets say you’ve scribbled down a few notes about a subject. These might be scattered across different sticky notes and pages in your notebook. Now this might not be for everyone, but I find formalised writing helpful. It allows you to collate your thoughts and document what you’ve learnt. Similar to what I’m doing right now…

8. It thickens your skin for criticism.

Its extremely hard to put yourself out there when making your work public. Theres always a risk that people may disagree with you or challenge your ideas. Yet part of being a designer is having the ability to handle criticism and take it in a constructive way.

Just remember, theres a difference between criticism and trolling. People will always say things online that they would never say to your face. Ignore them and power on with it.

9. Improve how and what you’re saying through editing, restraint and self critiques.

Writing improves how and what you’re saying, thought the art of editing, restraint and honest self critiques. What is the most value information to the readers? Whats necessary to say? What isn’t? This is useful when speaking to clients or replying to curly emails. The art of editing will also benefit your verbal communications. Lets face it, sometimes we tend to speak before we think.

10. Medium allows us to learn from others, this is your chance to give back.

I’ve learnt a lot from other designers sharing their knowledge and I’m very thankful for that. So I want to pass on the information I know to help others. This of course is easier said than done.

It takes courage to do so, and I think we all experience classic ‘imposter syndrome’ at times. But look at it from the perspective of releasing a product or showing the first iteration of a design. We’re always learning and improving.

I’ll leave you with this reminder.

You might feel as though writing isn’t worth it because there’s people out there who know way more than you. Although, there will always be people who know less than you.

The knowledge you share will be reaching at least one person in a meaningful way, so don’t worry. Write for them, and write for you. Write for the 10 reasons I’ve stated above.

I hope you got something out of this article. Please show some hearts if you enjoyed it and drop a comment if you’ve noticed any of these habits forming as well. I’d love to hear from you!

Twitter | Dribbble

While you’re here, check out 22 Things New UX Designers Should know Before Entering the Workplace

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This week, Chris and Jon talk about why good writing skills are essential for doing good design. Obviously other things are important too, but writing is just one of those ‘core skills’ every designer must have. Stay tuned to this episode!

Also, here’s a link to the spreadsheet to check the length of your UI text in different languages! (It’s a Google Doc)

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Apps often have to ask a lot—fill out this form, enable this integration, keep up with these updates—before users can benefit from the app's full value.

After a while, necessary actions can start to feel like chores.

The key to motivating users to take meaningful actions over and over again is well-crafted in-app messages. Messages that can inform, guide, and delight keep users engaged from the first onboarding experience to the 100th time they log in.

A good in-app message can turn even the dullest actions can turn into aha! moments.

We'll explore how 10 apps have designed, positioned, and personalized their messages to users in ways that build deep, lasting engagement.

1. MailChimp: Nudge users to take action with personalized messages

Amid crowds of confused travelers at the airport, a woman bee-lines for a sign displaying her name. Personalization can mean the difference between chaos and calm. It's a great onboarding tactic, but can be used at any stage of the user lifecycle to keep the learning going.

MailChimp's welcome page following sign-up is a masterful example. Large text introduces the user's arrival, calling her by name. Then a box presents two CTAs, signposting the user towards two key actions that will get her to create her first campaigns.

MailChimp continues to personalize the dashboard long after onboarding. Returning users see a friendly greeting, based on their time zone and first name every time they log back into MailChimp.

Create simple dashboards that give your users a clear way into your app. Personalize to build familiarity and encourage a sense of ownership that will lead to greater exploration and engagement.

2. Tumblr: Use visuals to encourage more sharing

When trying to gain feedback or more data from users, many apps make the mistake of using too many words. Exhaustive lists of options fill the screen and users get frustrated before they're even situated in-app. From there they're less keen to engage with your actual features.

Instead, try getting that initial info from users by asking them to select pictures that match their answers. Tumblr is a place where people share their images and stories, so to get users off on an engaging foot, they use a picture board to collect their preferences and start customizing their experience straight away.

No matter what your product, images can help users engage quicker. Try replacing your “what do you do?” survey with pictures showing people performing different roles. Or try adding images to surveys or your rating system so that users can respond impulsively and get back to work.

3. Dropbox: Encourage exploration with a whistle-stop tour

If you redecorated your entire house, you wouldn't invite your friends in without showing them around. At the same time, you know your choice of wallpaper is probably more interesting to you than it is to them. Same goes for your product redesign. You want to show users how to take advantage of new features, but you don't want to force them into every nook and cranny.

Dropbox solves this dilemma with their redesign tour. When you log in, a modal window pops up inviting you to explore new features.

The tour illuminates how each new thing fits into the Dropbox flow with descriptions placed unobtrusively at the side and bottom of the screen.

Most importantly, they give users the option to exit whenever they choose. They even have a modal with the option to exit after 2 steps.

If you've redesigned your app, create an open-house tour—arrange tooltips to guide but let users roam on their own so that they're making their own discoveries.

4. Harvest: Keep training users with bite-sized tips

A high-level overview of a few features can be great for onboarding or introducing a product redesign, but when users are in a daily flow with your app, you want to ration out those tips so they don't feel like a to-do list.

Harvest, a time-tracking app for teams, offers users a single tip when they log into the app. The tip positions the value first, so it's quick to skim, and then follows up with a “get started” CTA that takes the user right where they need to go.

Users shouldn't feel like they're cramming for an app test — give a steady flow of bitesized tips so that they can actually take and learn from each one.

5. Evernote: Motivate users to do more with goals

Most users are juggling a lot of apps and tools in their daily lives. Give them an easy way to get reoriented by helping them set goals at the beginning of their session.

Evernote uses a modal window to get straight to the point by getting users to log their daily goals.

They present three options that reflect their core value, giving users a choice without being overwhelming. Depending on what the user chooses, they then provide a tip. Click “Organize Your Life” and they give an effective way to add their Chrome Extension—they know users will be better organized if they can quickly load Evernote from their desktop.

Prepare users to achieve more in your app by orienting them as soon as they log in and reminding them what their goals are. It's a great way to create engagement right off the bat and build towards retention.

6. Spotify: Provide an engagement leg-up with power tips

Engaged users will play around in your app and figure out how to use it best for their needs, but others will be more reserved, sticking to the pathways and actions that they discovered during onboarding without exploring further.

Get all users to engage further with give quick, easy suggestions to use the product better.

Spotify does this with a nifty top banner that offers single tips for more seamless interactions. Copying a URL triggers this shortcut tip, for example. Tips are triggered by certain actions, so they're always relevant to what the user's doing in-app.

Keep teaching users as they play by creating triggered tool tips streamlined to your UI. Users will feel stimulated and rewarded for taking action, which will motivate them to engage further.

7. Slack: Help users stay up to date with tempting in-app notifications

When a user logs in, they don't want to spend time sorting through updates in order to get to their work. Keep a separate but visible place for new features and updates in your app's interface, where users can be tempted by new things but not distracted.

See how Slack hides their updates behind a little red gift box in the corner of the screen.

When users are ready to explore, the icon expands. A bonus—the content is super clear and user-driven. “Give your team a heads up” is a great piece of copy. It's colloquial and totally focused on the user's pain point, allowing them to see the update's value immediately.

Give users the power to get straight back to their work when they rejoin your app by keeping updates out of the way and letting users find them when they're actually ready to take action.

8. Campaign Monitor: Make problem solving seamless with contextual nudges

Sometimes app users will need to complete an administrative step before they're able to take advantage of your features. This can add a lot of friction to your UX. One way to lessen this friction is to position these administrative asks in helpful places and at relevant times.

Campaign Monitor, an email marketing tool for teams, needs users to complete the step of authenticating their company domain. With this simple pop-up, users are briefly halted on their way to sending their first transactional email — they're situated in context and the action is easy to complete just by clicking the link.

When users need help in order to use your tool effectively, don't wait for them to ask. Give a clear, contextual nudge right where they need it before a problem emerges.

9. QuickBooks: Drive free trial conversions with subtle but persistent messages

Keeping track of free trials is a real chore. Each tool's trial expires at a different time—sometimes the user wants to upgrade, other times they want to escape before their card is charged. Helping users out with this management chore can score your app extra brownie points.

Accounting app Quickbooks leads by example by staying on top of users' trial status. During a free trial, a countdown sits unobtrusively in a top bar, yet its color makes it stand out on the page. It's easy to see and keeps the user constantly updated so they can focus on balancing their books.

Keep users aware of their account status without getting in their face, so they can actually discover the best parts of your app before the trial runs out.

10. Turbotax: Celebrate milestones for a sense of progress

The ultimate challenge for making app chores fun? Tax prep software. If an app can make you feel good while doing your taxes, you know it's doing something right.

Here, TurboTax makes filing easier and more fun by placing in-app messages and notifications as users complete stages. Messages, like the “You did it!” celebration message below, serve as markers through the prep process, to give users a sense of progress.

With these notifications, TurboTax makes something objectively dreadful kind of pleasant. Every app has some actions that just aren't that fun, but if you can use them to build a relationship, you'll set yourself apart from the competition and users will be more likely to stick around for the fun stuff.

If you haven't got anything engaging to say...

Don't say anything at all. Chores have no place in your app. Part of your work as you design and test your app is to put yourself in the user's shoes. Delve into every tiny action the user has to make in order to use your features to their full potential, and make sure every single one is serving a purpose — to deepen their engagement and get them to stick around.

You’ve probably noticed a new noise recently. An excited crackling in the air. A soft chattering about something called “content” (or “UX writing” to some), and how it’s actually quite an important part of product design.

You’ve heard from some of the great and good of the design world about why you should hire a writer [1], the importance of writing as a design skill [2] or why you should think about content early in every project [3].

But have you ever heard about how content can revolutionise the way you work? Well at BlaBlaCar, that’s exactly what happened…

Let me take you back in time (all the way back to early 2017), where our two protagonists were working on a massive project. Zeynep, Product Manager, and Martin, UX Designer, had been tasked with entirely reinventing the way drivers on BlaBlaCar offer a ride to passengers — the most important flow in our product. “Redesign the whole flow!” they were told. “Break everything! Innovate! Think outside the box! Break the box! Burn the box!”

It was kind of a big deal.

They looked at data, they did user research, they explored a myriad of design solutions. But they were stuck. Whatever they did, they couldn’t properly break away from the old design. Zeynep was frustrated. Martin was miserable.

A simple technique

But they’re nothing if not innovative, unpredictable types, and so they asked an unexpected source for help. They asked the Content team.

We accepted the challenge. And together with Martin and Zeynep, we came up with a simple technique that revolutionised the way we do product design.

We did what content people know best. We wrote.

We wrote a “user conversation”.

A conversation between a user and the BlaBlaCar app. As if the app were a human, and the user were a human too —because all users are humans, right?! [4]

Armed with our user research findings, one of us played the role of the user and another the role of the app. Together we imagined what the user would say to us and what we wanted to say to her in return. As we went along, we wrote it all down.

This was the very first draft, written in about 5 minutes.

Our gospel

It was messy, but it was magical. The user conversation showed us what emotions the user would be feeling, what questions we’d need to answer, and the logical order in which we should ask her to complete each action.

Once we’d tidied it up, the user conversation became our gospel. We printed it out and referred to it every time we had a decision to make.

A later draft that we printed out and referred to every time we had a design decision to make.

For example, we made a bold decision to ask the user where they’re going before asking them where they’re leaving from. This was informed by the user conversation — it was a more logical, human way to do it. We completely reformulated the way we advise users to limit the number of passengers and keep their middle seat empty. And there were countless other examples. Our final interface copy didn’t follow the user conversation word for word, but its utility was greater than that. It was the foundation of our entire design.

Over the next few months, we explored, debated, iterated and simplified. But the user conversation remained a solid reference point which kept us focused on the user’s real needs.

By the end, we had ourselves a new, intuitive, human flow that was a million miles from our previous form-based screens. Despite an increase in the number of screens, the same percentage of users completed the flow, and it led to drivers creating “better quality” rides and getting more bookings from passengers. Mission accomplished! Zeynep was now a model of PM serenity, and Martin a pure bundle of UX joy.

To give you an idea of the difference, here’s a screen from our old flow:

Notice the tiny “Max. 2 in the back seats” option? Well here’s how we ask that question now:

A widespread change

But that’s not all. The user conversation had worked so well that other PMs and UX designers started using it for other projects. It even became the very first step; people were writing it before they even so much as drew a workflow or opened a Sketch file.

Each time we write a user conversation, it tells us what we should ask the user to do, what order we should ask her to do it in, and what we should say to her at every step. It forces us to always respond to our users’ needs.

You can do it too!

Here’s a 5-step guide to writing your own user conversation:

Start by working out who your user is. Who are you designing this page, flow or feature for?

Think about what she’s come to your product to do, and what context she’s in — for example, is she trying to do something quickly and get on with her day, or is she taking her time over a big decision? How is this context affecting the way she feels — is she nervous, excited, uncertain?

Write out the conversation you want to have with her. Don’t overthink it. You all know how to talk to other humans (well most of you do, anyway). So just write it.

Start designing, with the user conversation guiding you at every step.

Enjoy an intuitive, human design that responds directly to your user’s needs!

The chattering about content remains soft, but it’s getting louder. And for good reason. Content can be the centrepiece of your design process, the pathway to building a more human product. So try out the user conversation and tell us how it works for you. And if you have any of your own techniques, tell us about them too!

It’s time to turn the chattering about content into a roar.

[1] John Saito: http://ift.tt/2pVrvMl

[2] John Maeda: http://ift.tt/2mUc8pS

[3] Jennifer Aldrich: http://ift.tt/2rQcYXj

[4] Richard Banfield: https://twitter.com/RMBanfield/status/867763217732448256

It’s often said that good product design is simple, and supporting all of the pixels and interactions we create are the simplest element of all, words.

A short snippet of copy sets the tone for a user’s experience, and it can make or break whether they’re able to achieve success using our products. So to go a bit deeper on the role and impact of words in design, I hosted a podcast with John Saito, UX Writer at Dropbox and previously the very first UX Writer at YouTube.

If you’re a Dropbox user, John’s written much of the language you’ve encountered in the core product and apps. More visibly, he’s best known for his must-read Medium essays, which explore everything from how we can improve push notifications to the principles of his trade.

Our chat covers how to find and document your product’s voice, when a startup should hire a writer, how to localize your content, and much more. If you enjoy the conversation check out more episodes of our podcast. You can subscribe on iTunes or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, but if you’re short on time, here are five key takeaways:

Unlike a marketing page, writers should avoid getting clever or creative with UI copy. The end goal is to write so clearly that end users don’t notice your word choice.

Every product has a voice, and that voice is going to evolve over time, so it’s crucial to document it. To create your style guide, sit down with every team across your organization and ask, “What do you think our voice is? How do we speak?”

The UX writing team at Dropbox has three simple voice principles to keep their work in check. They strive to be simple, straightforward and human.

UX writers need to be closely in sync with engineers, so that there is clear copy in the queue for even the smallest, most rare edge cases.

If there’s one credo to John’s work, it’s that in the world of UX writing short always beats good.

Adam: John, welcome to the show. To get started, you’re a UX writer Dropbox. So, what exactly does your job entail and where might of our listeners have seen your work on display?

John: A UX writer basically focuses on the product itself. For our product, we have a bunch of different services – the desktop client, Dropbox.com on the web, apps for Android, iOS and Windows phones. We also have apps for things like Xbox and random services like that. A UX writer will work on mostly the UI content for all those different services. Our work could also include things like email notifications or like push notifications that you might get on your phone. Basically, it’s any words you might come across in your user experience.

Defining the role of a UX writer

Adam: At a glance, some people might think you’re a copywriter for inside the product, but it’s a little more complicated than that.

John: Yeah, there’s two different kinds of writing within UX writing. One is the copywriting side, which tends to be a little more punchy or flowery. These are things you might find on the landing page of Dropbox.com, when we’re trying to get you to get excited about our product. The language has to be a little more exciting there. But you can’t always be exciting in the daily interactions. If you’re constantly saying really clever things in the UI, it gets really annoying, and so that’s the second side of UX writing. It’s this transactional, navigational type of copy. The goal is to not have your words be noticed, so it becomes a seamless experience. So as UX writers, we have to juggle between these two different kinds of writing throughout the day.

Adam: It’s interesting you say the idea of your work for it to be so seamless that it’s not to be noticed. A lot of great product designers have said good design is design that you don’t notice. I’ve seen many other people that do work similar to yours call themselves content strategists and content designers. Are these terms interchangeable?

The goal is to not have your words be noticed, so it becomes a seamless experience.

John: I have this discussion with a lot of people, and I hear a lot of different opinions on it. I think the reason there are so many of these different terms is because this discipline is very new. We’re trying to figure out for ourselves, what is this thing that we’re actually doing? Dropbox uses “UX writer”. We were looking at other companies and Google had been using the term UX writer as well. That might have played a big factor into what we’re doing.

The term I’m gravitating towards lately is “product writer.” I’m seeing more and more companies starting to have this role. Slack calls their team product writers, and I like term because it’s analogous to a product designer. A product designer would design products like apps and websites; a product writer would collaborate with a product designer to work on the same things.

Facebook uses the term content strategist, and to my knowledge it’s very similar to what UX writers do. I think content strategist sounds like it’s more important because of the word strategist – it’s this all-encompassing strategy for your whole product,. When it comes down to it, at least for my role, there is some of that, a lot of it is writing. I’m writing the text that people see in the interface. I’ve also seen terms like content designer, and that’s more appropriate for roles where there’s a really heavy design focus. You really aren’t a designer, you just happen to have a lot of content in your product. There’s a lot of different terms for us, and we’re still all figuring it out.

When to onboard a writer

Adam: Back in March 2013, you were actually the very first UX writer hired at YouTube. What was it about the state of YouTube at that time that made it the right time to bring in your skill set?

John: At that time, Google, in general, didn’t have many UX writers. Back then teams were starting to realize it might be nice to have a writer on a design team. Sue Factor was the first UX writer at Google, and she did a lot to define the discipline there. She created a lot of the early documentation about what UX writing is and over time people started noticing that need. Around that time YouTube was in the process of really expanding and realized they had this growing team of designers and maybe they should also have a writer to focus on our language. Because like Dropbox, YouTube actually has tons of different surfaces, from gaming surfaces, to the TV, to the websites and apps, and so on. They wanted to have one writer to oversee the language across all these different services, and I was lucky to be hired as the first writer there. Within a couple of years we slowly grew our team to four or five writers by the time I left.

Adam: YouTube, Google and Dropbox are mammoth companies. Most of our listeners are from earlier stage startups. Are you seeing more startups bring UX writers on board early, and is there a benefit to that?

John: I think so. I have a close friend who works at Gusto, a startup focusing on HR services, and his role is slightly different. He’s a UX writer, but he’s also a marketing writer. At companies like that, the main advantage to having a writer is that it helps your brand. It differentiates your brand from other competitors who may not be focused so much on language.

Startups have this advantage where they can really experiment with their brand. They can take riskier chances, and having a writer is just so powerful – to connect with your audience not just through your visual language, but through your written language as well.

Finding and documenting your product’s voice

Adam: Does a product have a voice? Is that something writers, particularly those brought into a startup early, help shape?

John: A product definitely has a voice, and that voice might evolve slightly over time, but it’s important to know what your voice is and to document it. At Google, YouTube, and Dropbox, we’ve always had a style guide or some guiding principles on what our voice and tone should sound like. The basic principle behind that is your voice tends to be the same throughout your product, but your tone changes depending on the scenario. For example, the tone you would use for an error message might be more empathetic than the tone you would use for your landing page. At Dropbox we have our voice and tone principals and a style guide. Our voice is to be simple, straightforward and human, and we give a lot of examples on how to actually carry that out.

Adam: What was your process for putting a style guide together?

It’s important to know what your voice is and to document it.

John: At YouTube, because I was the first writer there, one of the first things I really wanted to do was put together that style guide. All these people were coming to me with questions like, do we use this term, or do we use this term? Does this actually match how our voice and tone should sound? Within my first few weeks, I was on a mission to put together this style guide, knowing that it would be continually evolving. To do that I talked to everyone from our marketing teams, to our design teams, and so on to figure out and ask, “What do you think YouTube’s voice is?” Those interviews helped put together this rough style guide for YouTube, but it slowly grew over time to include things like how to write for internationalization or different grammar mechanics; things like, do we use the oxford comma or not, do we capitalize certain buttons or not? A lot of that came from engineers asking questions like, “What’s the right style for this?”

At Dropbox I actually joined after the style guide was initially created. I had a manager, Lisa Sanchez, who put together the Dropbox style guide. It’s hard to work on big projects like this if you’re constantly in the weeds working on UI copy every day, so when she had this idea for the style guide, she held a two-day offsite with different writers across Dropbox. They needed to figure out what the style guide should include, what the purpose of the style guide should be, what the audience should be, etc, and they came up with this rough framework. Over time it grew in the same way as YouTube’s, where you feed it with questions that you get. As you start writing you actually realize, oh there are different ways to handle this, what should Dropbox’s way be? Now we have the Dropbox style guide, which I love. I refer to it all the time. We keep it in Dropbox Paper, so it’s a document that we can just update at any point.

In terms of maintenance, we have a team of a few writers across the company who basically meet every month. We talk about changes or updates to the style guide or we discuss, things like, do we capitalize words after a colon or not, or heftier things like how we describe a feature to people. We meet every month and make updates every month. It’s probably viewed hundreds of times a week, or at least I view it what seems like hundreds of times a week. That’s our style guide in a nutshell.

Voice principles in practice

Adam: Our content strategy team has the three guiding principles for what they write. Our product speaks naturally, the way that people speak. The product speaks directly to the user, but never for the user. And the product helps the user getting them through complex ideas. Do you have similar principles at Dropbox?

John: Voice principles is what we call them at Dropbox. They are to be straightforward, helpful and human. Straightforward touches on the fact that we want to be honest and transparent with users. We don’t want to use super vague language, because we feel, especially when it comes to Dropbox, security’s really important, and so we want to be transparent. The second principle is around being helpful. Often times, rather than just telling people, “Hey, there’s an arrow here,” we try to help them with things like, for example, how you get out of that error state. What do you think a user might want to do and how can we help them get there? The third thing is to be human. That touches on the style of talking or writing – just talking to the people like a human, like you’re a friend. A lot of times when I’m reviewing copywriting by somebody else, often when it tends to be a little more technical, I can never imagine myself talking like that with another person.

The Dropbox UX writing team’s mission statement

Just the other day I came across this message that said something like, “Dropbox cannot complete this request.” There was a transient network error. This was a real error message, it might even still exist in our product today. But when I saw this I thought, oh my God, this is totally off brand. It’s rewriting something like that to make the language sound more human.

Adam: Another interesting tool you’ve created is your own thesaurus. Walk me through why you did this and what your process was.

John: I actually got the idea at YouTube, where I did something similar there. I call it a thesaurus, but it’s not technically a thesaurus. It’s more a tool for brainstorming around certain concepts. I found that as I was writing, especially stuff that was more like copywriting that you might find in a landing page, there were certain user benefits I was constantly writing about. At YouTube it was things like maybe music or being able to access your stuff on the go. There’s so many different ways to refer to this – at your fingertips, on the go, access anywhere, everywhere, etc. I realized there are all these similar phrases that I’m constantly using; why don’t I just document them somewhere, so I don’t have to constantly go back into this brainstorming process every single time?

An example from John Saito’s “thesaurus”. Read more here about how he built it.

At Dropbox it’s similar. There’s this bucket for collaboration because that’s a common theme that we use at Dropbox. Things like better together, collaborate, etc. If you look at the thesaurus there aren’t too many of these common themes we might write, but each theme probably has dozens of different ways to talk about it.I find it really helpful as I’m starting to work on something new and I need to feed my brain words that get me in the writing mood.

Adam: Do you share that with your wider team, or is this a personal thing for you?

John: I don’t know how often the whole team uses it, but it has come in handy as a team-wide tool. Recently we were working on this projection where we weren’t sure how to actually position the product. We put together three landing page options, all with different user values, and we used the thesaurus to populate the language for those three landing pages. The goal was to show that to users and see which ones they gravitate towards.

Where UX writing sits in a product team

Adam: How many UX writers do you have at Dropbox right now? How’s the team structured?

John: We have five UX writers now with a sixth one coming on board very soon. We technically sit in the product design team, and at Dropbox there are three pillars or groups within the design team. There’s the product design team, which the writers are part of. There’s a brand design team, which works very closely with marketing, and there’s also the research team. Research is embedded in all these different projects.

Adam: Within product design are you attached to a particular product or do you float around and touch everything that you gets released?

John: Dropbox, like many other growing companies, has gone through a lot of reorgs. It seems like almost every year we might go through some shuffling. Today there are two main groups. One group focuses on the paid features, another group focuses on the everyday users. I work on the side that works on the everyday features and examples of things that I might have worked on are the recently redesigned website and some of the newer features we launched, like a document scanning tool on Android and iOS, a tool for signing your name on PDFs in iOS, things like that.

Adam: You’re a writer that’s at the intersection of engineering and design. How familiar does a UX writer actually need to be with the tools those folks use? Are you expected to make changes directly in the code base?

People may never actually see some of these really obscure messages

John: We’re looking into things like that, but at the moment we’re not. We had similar processes at Google and Dropbox, but I don’t ever actually go into the code and update strings or anything. Sometimes as an engineer will be creating strings in the code, they might loop me in and ask, “Can you take a look at this passage of text,” or, “Can you take a look at these few error messages and let me know if they’re okay?” That’s how I might work directly with engineers.

A lot of times designers will focus on the main flow, and sometimes they do a work on some edge cases and error cases, but the fact is engineers have to create scenarios for all the edge cases. As a writer we will have to write these error messages, so that’s when we partner more closely with engineers. It’s for these really small edge cases. People may never actually see some of these really obscure messages, but we need to have a message just in case something does go wrong.

Short beats good

Adam: You’ve said that you’re a writer that actually hates to read. The fact is a lot of people do hate reading on the web and in many cases you’re writing for the web. How does UX writing make that easier for people? What tools or tips do you have?

John: Scanability comes up a lot. Users or readers on the web don’t technically read word for word. They just glance around and scan copy here and there. To accommodate for that, a key principle in UX writing is to be as brief as possible. That often means being really ruthless. Sometimes you orally want to say a lot of things, but if you say too much, they may not read anything. Sue Factor, the first UX writer at Google who I mentioned earlier, had this wonderful phrase, “Short beats good.” I love that phrase.

One of John’s core UX principles is that short beats good. Read more here about he designs words.

In UX writing, it’s more important to write in just a few words than it is to actually be more accurate. There are opportunities where you can talk more in depth, but it’s not the key navigational elements and it’s not headings. Those you should keep really as short as possible. And if you do need to explain things, there are other ways to do that through things like progressive disclosure where you’re giving information little by little, or maybe some of that information should belong in documentation, an email or something else where there’s more real estate. Short beats good.

Lessons in localization

Adam: You do a lot of localization at Dropbox. Does this philosophy make translation more difficult?

John: It’s actually better. The way localization works, at least for the product at Dropbox is, we write strings that get translated by translators and often as things get translated, especially into European languages, they tend to get longer. Some things could even double or triple in size depending on the words being used. Having shorter text is actually better for translators because it won’t break designs when your text gets super long. If you’re wondering if it make things more difficult to translate, we have a way to attach comments to each one of our strings and that’s how we give context to translators. So if we use the word “auto”, in the comment we can explain where this string appears and whether it is referring to auto as an automobile or auto as automatic. That’s how we communicate with our translators.

Dropbox Paper localized into French.

Adam: What other complications does a UX writer need to be aware of when it comes to translation?

John: I found that the more playful you are the harder it is to localize, and that’s something to keep in mind, especially for startups. Startups tend to be a little more playful in their language compared to these ginormous companies like Google or Microsoft.

I love that challenge. How do we capture this helpful, human tone and make it a little more joyful? And in all languages? One way we do that is through this context building so. Sometimes I will write actual alternatives for other languages. There might be something that I really want to use in English and I know that it will be difficult to translate, but I’ll give an alternative. If you really cannot, if there’s no good way to translate this in your language, you can translate it like this, which is a little less playful, but at least it won’t block translation. Our translators are good. I’m constantly amazed at how they can keep our voice and tone consistent across all languages.

Adam: With the emergence of voice UI and company after company shipping chatbots, how do you see the role of words evolving as the amount of interfaces we design for continues to expand?

John: It’s one reason why more and more companies are hiring these writers on their design teams. Language is now a critical part of design and experience. It’s natural to want to have somebody who’s really knowledgeable about words, semantics, style, word choice and tone. I’m excited personally to see this industry evolve and see more and more conversational UI.

Adam: John, thank you very much for joining us and we’ll look out for more of your writing on Medium.

John: Thanks for having me.

The role of UX Writer is trending right now, with big organizations such as Google and Dropbox actively recruiting. A few weeks ago Kristina Bjoran wrote a great article on How to Break into UX Writing where she identified that to land one of these roles you’re going to need to show that you’re more than just a pretty writer, and have UX design right at the top of your “Key Skills”.

UX writing is a still considered a relatively new role, a “unicorn skill”, outside of California at least. I checked LinkedIn for UX Writer roles in the UK - there were exactly zero results.

So chances are that your organization (or ‘company’ if you’re in the UK) hasn’t yet thought about hiring a UX Writer. Sure, you may have a team of UX Designers or Experience Developers, but how many of them are really into honing and crafting words. John Maeda says in his “2017 Design in Tech Report” that:

“A lot of times designers don’t know that words are important”

Now that’s maybe a little bit harsh. Most designers are massively overstretched and have to prioritize, and words just don’t come that high up the priority list. And this is what provides you with a massive opportunity.

The six degrees of UX writing

Before you get started, it’s worth evaluating what degree of UX writing your organization currently has. On the scale below then chances are that it’ll be somewhere between one and three. When you get involved you should target three and four as to where you can make a short-term noticeable impact. Your longer-term goal should be to reach five, with six as the holy grail.

1. Identify your opportunities

When I joined Alfresco over 4 years ago, there was a small design team, working on multiple products. Their focus was on delivering great new products and features. Of course this is just the same in most other places, and changing a few words is rarely seen as a value add.

One of Alfresco’s products alone contained over 40,000 individual words. A lot of the copy had been written on the fly by developers and there were things that could definitely be changed to improve the user experience:

· There was no consistency

· There were typos

· Some of it didn’t really make sense

But there was no process for making changes and every day more words were being coded that didn’t have any science behind them. There was an open goal for someone to take ownership of the product copy.

2. Start small

The best way to show you can make a difference and grab attention is to attach yourself to a new project for a standalone feature or small product. It’s all about taking baby-steps, you can’t change everything immediately.

Chat with the Product Manager and/or UX Designer and offer to take a look at the copy in your own time. Propose to them that you can help to make a nicer product that’s more likely to be adopted. Show them a couple of examples of what you could improve. Give them some figures to show how words affect user adoption (for example, 80% of people prefer sentences written in clear English, Clarity is King). It’s all about making a better product. Plus less work for them.

No-one’s going to say no to an offer like that right?

3. Short-cuts to validating your words

Most of the time our gut instinct on what reads better is usually correct. If your team are happy with your gut instinct then great, but wouldn’t it be even better to back yourself up with some real data as well? Prove that the words you use are going to improve the user experience.

At this stage you don’t have writing guidelines and you probably don’t have access to a user research team. Remember that this is a stealth start-up project you’re running here. Fast and light.

Fortunately, there’s a lot of people out there who’ve already done the research for you.

Chances are that your test project has design parallels with other products. So look at those products and see what words they use. Take a look at a few writing guidelines such as Google’s and Apple’s to back up your ideas. For each word choice that you make you want to justify why it’s an improvement. That can often be as simple as “this is what Google do”. Check out the John Saito article on how data informs UX writing at Dropbox — Designing words with data for more on this.

Focus on consistency, clarity and simplicity. You can think about a more formalized tone and voice later.

4. Record everything!

A key mistake I made when I first started reviewing and writing copy was not keeping a record of what I’d done. The team I was working with knew I was involved, but you really need some metrics to show the value you’ve added.

To begin with this doesn’t need to be anything too fancy. Just keep a record of the number of lines of existing content that you’ve reviewed, the number of these that you’ve optimized, and the number of lines of new content you’ve created. And get before and after examples. Ideally for everything you change, but certainly get some of your best work for future reference. This serves two purposes:

For your company — showcase your value-add

For yourself — you’re building a portfolio as a UX Writer

If your team is testing with users before you launch then your validation will done for you. If not, then you can run simple A/B tests yourself comparing the original to your optimized version, using online tools such as Validately (which has a free month trial option). Let’s be honest though, that sounds time consuming. So why not just test out your copy with coworkers, or even your family or friends.

5. Double down — users as advocates for change

Having started from an ad-hoc approach, you’ll hopefully have had a visible impact on product development. The products or features you’ve worked on will have clearer, more consistent copy, with a degree of user validation and competitor analysis. Your UX team and developers can appreciate the positive impact your involvement has, and you’ve recorded evidence of the improvements your brought.

Wouldn’t it be great if you also had users on side to support your efforts?

I had some ideas about how to improve our legacy product copy, but felt that to get real support I needed to prove that users felt the same way. So I set up a survey on SurveyMonkey and asked the team at Alfresco to share it with customers, partners, and users. The result was over 200 respondents, giving us lots of insight. The most important response was to the following statement:

My experience could be improved by changing the tone / terminology

There were also well over 100 specific comments such as:

“too technical”

and

“say it like it is, don’t assume you’re dealing with an Alfresco expert”

If you don’t have the means to conduct your own survey then just share these results with your Product Management team. A massive 49% of our users were telling us that by focussing on UX writing we could improve their experience. That’s a pretty compelling case.

6. Formalize processes

You now have solid evidence behind you, and a body of work that demonstrates the impact you can have. Congratulations! You’ve made real and tangible progress towards making UX writing a thing in your org. This is where the real works starts…

a) Create guidelines

Before you begin to formalize processes you need to set a benchmark. The simplest way to do this is to have defined writing guidelines in place. You can either reuse existing ones such as Google’s, or create your own as we did at Alfresco — http://ift.tt/2pwVESN.

In defining your tone and voice there’s a huge amount of info out there, but most of the time finding a style equates to keeping things simple, clear, and non-offensive. There’s plenty of research, for example Microsoft’s presentations on “No more robot speak” (Doug Kim, 2014), showing that a clear majority of people (including developers and other “techies”) want the product voice to be clear, non-technical, and not to look like it’s trying too hard. So just focus on these three things:

1. Consistency — Create a pattern of usage to avoid ambiguity

2. Empathy — Understand your users situation and help them

3. Simplicity — “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”

When you’re done, share this in a public space and advertise the fact that it’s now available. If possible, get someone senior to endorse it as the new standard to work to.

b) Integrate writing into the design process

This is nominally straightforward, but depending on the size of your org or any internal resistance, may take some time to for a new process to become the norm.

If you have a UX team or product designers then you need to align with their workflow. My experience is based on working in an Agile environment where UX prototypes and flows are created for developers to work from. There are two key factors to instil in your team:

1. The UX team work with you to create any new copy. To begin with this will likely be that they design protocopy, then you discuss the design and user flow with them and optimize the copy. This is the 5th degree of UX writing — if you make it to here then your company is doing UX writing.

2. The developers DO NOT code anything until they know that it has your approval. This will be a gradual process and is about developing their trust. I’ve found though that most developers would always prefer to defer to the “authority” (remember those writing guidelines) rather than making up some words themselves.

Summary

As far back as 1985 the Apple human interface group recognized the importance of UX writing with their motto “A word is worth a thousand pictures”.

30+ years later we’re starting to see this being realized in the role of UX Writer.

If your org currently settles for the 1st or 2nd degree of UX writing then they’re accepting the associated costs in user unhappiness. In today’s highly competitive markets, with everyone looking to disrupt each other, you have to be better than the competition.

You have the opportunity to make a difference. Now’s the time to make UX writing a thing in your org.

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Forget coding. The best designers are writers.

Design in tech matters, and companies are finally caring about design. This is especially true in software, where companies are hiring designers at an increasing rate.

But tech is changing, and as a result, the designer’s role in tech is also changing. Our daily interactions with technology are becoming less visual, like chat bots and connected devices, and as a result, visual design is becoming more obsolete. Luckily, good design is not just how it looks, but how it works and how it feels; so wireframing in Sketch or Photoshop just won’t cut it anymore.

Despite a decreasing emphasis on visual design, design isn’t going anywhere and it will maintain its importance over time if designers learn to adapt. Most design leaders, like John Maeda in his Design in Tech Report, argue that designers need to code in order to survive. But if you’re a young or aspiring designer, I’m here to tell you, to beg you, to ignore these people.

Design is about people, not technology. In order to design great products, you need to understand not just what you’re making, but why you’re making it. You do that by empathizing with your customers to feel their pain, and designers are effective only after doing so.

Like designers, great writers understand their audience. They do their research, because the plot and character development has to be believable, complete, and without gaps. They develop empathy for the main characters, fiction or non-fiction; understanding not just who they are, but how they became the way they are.

The context of use for something you’d make for a gardner is very different than for a neuroscientist.

The parallels between writing and designing are strongest when it comes to building context. Both require sensitivity to every plausible situation. Like writing, the design process considers varying levels of complexity in the context of use:

Emotional Context. How does someone feel when they are using your product— not just during, but before and after. What’s their mental state; are they using your product to aleviate boredom or are they using your product during a medical emergency?

Environmental Context. Where are they when they’re using your product? What are they doing with their hands? What else is fighting for their attention? Do they have time constraints? Are they using your product while driving or are they using it at their cubicle?

Social Context. How will they be perceived by others when using your product? Will it make them feel cool or proud? Or do they need your product to help them with a problem that’s too embarassing to share with others?

The answers to those questions will inform significant decisions around what a product does, how it looks and how it will be used. For example, it doesn’t matter what tech stack or programming language Snapchat is using, if I can’t get to my camera view in under 3 seconds to capture a fleeting moment, it becomes much less useful and valuable to me.

It’s really important to maintain that context every step of the way and hold true to it throughout the product development lifecycle. Great designers understand how to articulate and summarize context of use. They know how to share that story with other stakeholders so that product teams can have clear alignment. Sharing intimate details of the customer’s story allows the entire company to empathize with and rally around the customer’s pain points.

Whether it’s in the form of personas, storyboards, journey maps or even a plain old written narrative, great designers start with clear, compelling narratives about the context of the customer’s problem they’re solving for. Like storytelling, every design project has one or more protagonists, a setting, a plot, a conflict and a resolution. Both writers and designers arrive to the resolution in similar ways.

Granted, learning to code can help designers make technical decisions that impact usefulness. For example, Instagram, in it’s infancy, couldn’t afford to allow for both landscape and portrait mode, so the designers decided to make every posted photo a perfect square. It was a smart design decision because it meant you didn’t have to choose which way to take your photos. The designers could not have made that decision without a working understanding of code, so there’s a serious case to be made for designers who can code.

But at the end of the day, if you lose sight of the end-user, none of that matters. What companies need now and in the near future are designers that are writers and storytellers. Good writing skills enable designers to tell a strong narrative of the customer in a holistic, memorable way. The result is thoughtful design; creating products that people love and can’t live without.

Do you agree? Recommend 💚 or share this article if you do. Otherwise, leave a comment and let me know what you think is more important.

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An improv-inspired framework for better customer understanding and better product design

User experience designers are most likely to thrive when we can tell our customers’ stories compellingly. We are constantly defending the importance of costly features and investments by connecting our stakeholders to the real impact those changes would have on our customers.

But in many cases, just saying “This will help customers” is comically inadequate to get the job done. We must create an environment where our stakeholders can truly empathize with our customers, their pain points, and how our solution can improve customer moods and lives. Unless your audience is full of empaths, context and detail usually lead to better, more engaging story.

And yet, few of us got into UX because we wanted to write novels or screenplays — being faced with building that engagement and empathy in our stakeholders is a daunting task. Serendipitously, I’ve found that my time in improvisational theater has been a critical part of my design toolbox over the years.

Building Blocks of Story

At Unexpected Productions, when I teach improv to beginning students, our curriculum is focused largely on exploring the building blocks of a good improvised scene. We have a shorthand for these building blocks: CROW, which is an acronym for Character, Relationship, Objective, and Where.

The more developed these elements become, the more compelling the resulting scene. Not every good scene nails all four of these components, but it never hurts to double down in any category.

Let’s say we have a scene where two people are standing and talking about chocolate. Fine, and perhaps even funny.

Perhaps one of the characters chooses to display some low-status nervous behaviors physically. Things become a little more interesting thanks to this characterization choice: what’s going on here?

We may discover the relationship between these two characters when they refer to each other by name (Eddie, the nervous boy, and Sarah): perhaps these two people aren’t strangers but friends. Why, then, is one of them so nervous?

By a passing comment about “4th period class”, and later interaction with an invisible locker, we discover the where of the scene: it takes place in a school hallway.

And at some point, the audience discovers Eddie’s objective: to ask Sarah to a school dance for the first time. The conversation about chocolates is their way of building up to the subject.

By establishing CROW during the scene, it goes from a simple conversation to a story worth telling. Improvisors train to do this instinctively with just a few seconds notice.

CROW: Not just a talkative bird or a Game of Thrones plot device. Remember Character, Relationship, Objective and Where to help your storytelling and design skills take flight.

Heightened need for context

But what does this have to do with user experience? For the better part of a decade, user experience designers focused primarily on the craft of building interactive PC-based experiences. We could easily assume our customers were sitting down at a computer somewhere, and that their objectives were compatible with sitting at that device for extended periods of time.

In 2006, with the arrival of the iPhone, things began to change drastically. No longer could we assume a customer was sitting comfortably, or that they had plenty of time. Suddenly, the customer’s story in the moment becomes much more important. Where are they? What is their objective? Who’s around them? And how do they respond to the world around them?

The challenge has become more pointed in recent years. Not only are our customers not sitting at a PC — they might not even be in eyeshot of a screen at all. With a wider range of potential customer needs, objectives, and contexts, the storyteller’s burden on designers becomes even greater.

Applying CROW to UX

So let’s deconstruct CROW again, but in terms of user experience. What parts of your story apply to each of these building blocks, and how can you tease CROW out of your scenarios?

Character

I appreciate the definition of characterization I found in The Improv Handbook while preparing for my first teaching assignment. They divided the concept of character into three components:

Characterization: Physical traits, mannerisms, and habits. These tend not to change over time.

Attitude: Emotions and options regarding other stimuli — other people, objects, or situations.

Choices: The actions we take. But when actions are taken without a clear “Why” based on attitude, characterization, or other event, we see that choice as ‘out of character’.

When we look at our customers through these lenses, a few helpful UX-related questions emerge.

Do our customers have any physical mannerisms or limitations that would change how they use our experience? This question is tied to accessibility.

Does this customer persona have well-defined attitudes towards any part of our experience, or the situation our experience compliments? What is their emotional state when approaching our product?

Remember to consider the many characterizations that your customers exhibit. What are their attitudes? Common habits and preferences? How do they express their individuality, and is your product a part of that expression?

Relationship

This is perhaps the most challenging story building block to translate to UX, partially because the nature of the relationships in our stories is often harder to describe.

In improv scenes, relationships usually manifest via the shorthand of names. Two characters who refer to each other by name are not strangers. But the relationship is also a key to emotional reactions — the closer we are to someone (or something), the more likely we are to get emotional about it.

In user experience, the relationships we may have to explore broaden. Examine your scenarios and try to define the web of relationships surrounding your product!

Human to device relationship: How long has your customer owned the device they’re using? Is it shared? Do they own it? Is it expensive and treasured, or cheap and disposable? Does the customer anthropomorphize the device in any way? Did they name it?

Human to business relationship: Does your customer deal with you directly, or through a third party? Did they get to choose to work with you, or are they locked in due to monopoly or limited choice? What are their expectations of you in this situation?

Human to human relationship: In some cases, your product may be used by multiple people, perhaps at the same time — what is their relationship to each other? Do they trust each other?

The human-to-device relationship between a person and their phone is complex, and not without emotion. Have they anthropomorphized it? Named it? How do they feel about their device when they open your app?

If relationships are key to emotion in storytelling, so too are these relationships key to the elusive emotional state of “delight” in our products. If we simply satisfy the requirements, our customers are satisfied. If we deeply understand the relationships at play and honor those expectations, we are on the road to delight.

Objective

The design industry has specialized in identifying customer objectives for years, so this part of CROW should hopefully come naturally. Still, in the face of passionate defense of a particular feature or product, it can be easy to lose sight of the “why” behind our customers’ engagement with our products.

For designers, the O in CROW should serve as a reminder to doublecheck our assumptions. What have we defined as our customer’s objective? Is that truly their end goal, or simply a sentence written to get the customer to our feature?

In many cases, our hardware or software solution is part of a much larger objective and our goal should simply be to contribute to that goal while minimizing friction along the way.

For example — when setting a timer on Alexa, a customer’s objective is rarely simply “I want to set a timer.” Often, it’s “I want to cook dinner without burning my house down.” (Oh, is that just me?) When this objective is extended, we start to see that same cook might need multiple timers at once: one for the potatoes, one for the turkey. Hence, when the feature shipped supporting a single timer, customers started writing in begging for multiple timer support. The single timer satisfied a single goal but not the customer’s overall objective.

I see this loss of objective all the time in software development:

Marketing: We want to make the Subscribe to Newsletter link more prominent to increase engagement. Design: OK, but what’s the customer objective? Marketing: To subscribe to the newsletter. Design: No, but WHY would they want to subscribe? You haven’t explained that here.

Just increasing the size of elements or their prominence on a page won’t create quality engagement. If your feature isn’t supporting a genuine customer objective, engagement is meaningless. Sure, maybe more folks will click on that link — but if they don’t know why, they probably won’t share their email address in the next step.

In this situation, the next move is to examine your customers’ objectives to see whether the newsletter can genuinely and transparently contribute to those objectives. Your customer is looking to save money? Can the newsletter help them do that? Your customer needs to be on the cutting edge? Can the newsletter give them the information they need to be seen as a thought leader? If you’re not solving a customer problem or helping them achieve an objective, your product or feature will not thrive.

We can’t lose sight of our customers’ objectives. They’re not trying to turn a dial or browse a website — they’re trying to make music or find a store location. When we lose sight of objective, our “solutions” become self-serving.

It is when we lose sight of customer objectives that we risk totally failing our customers. Autoplay videos on social media sites are fairly controversial and widely derided. Why? In part because a common customer objective when visiting a social media site is “discreetly take a break or pass time in environments not conducive to sound.” Or in other words, a common objective is “Stay connected to people I care about during my workday without getting in trouble.” In other cases, autoplay videos fail because a different customer persona seeks to minimize their data plan usage.

Where

Last but not least, we come to environmental considerations. Human factors engineers are well-versed in considering the impact of our physical environment on our interactions. User experience designers have, until recently, largely been able to take environment for granted. Phones, tablets, and hands-free UI now open us up to a dizzying array of possibility.

Contextual inquiry is an excellent research tool to help us define and understand the where, and it’s often a lost art. We don’t know what we don’t know about a customer environment until we see it ourselves.

And even when we believe we understand an environment well — a kitchen, a living room- it’s still our job to remind our stakeholders that our customers may have divided attention, and that the decision making metrics we applied to websites don’t necessarily apply for apps or hands-free experiences.

On paper, improvisors would seem to have this story building block fairly easy. Limited only by our imaginations, wouldn’t it be easy to paint an environment for our scenes? But in reality, I find this is by far the hardest skill to learn for my improv students. Even when we do establish an environment, we usually do it verbally. It is very hard for the adult mind to project an imaginary environment onto a real one.

This challenge has real implications for us as UX storytellers. As a designer on Alexa, I had to rely heavily on storyboards to help my stakeholders visualize the “where” of my stories. It’s one thing to say “the device is in the kitchen while the family eats.” It’s another thing to draw the Echo, half-blocked by a kitchen counter and appliances, where the LED light ring can barely be seen.

To define your “where”, ask questions you’d normally observe at a contextual inquiry:

Is it a public or private space?

Is it usually noisy or quiet?

Where is the device located? Is it fixed or mobile? Does it need to be near a charger?

Is a conversation, or a device that makes sound, socially acceptable?

What is your customer holding? Are they multitasking?

Where is your customer looking? Do they see the device at all times?

Once you understand the answers to these questions, find your pain points. Your job is now to draw attention to those pain points, and to help your stakeholders somehow visualize the “where” in their own minds.

Environment and context matter in product design. Are you designing a mobile app? Will your customers have reliable internet where they’re going? In automotive design, parking lots and garages were a real problem. Define your environments clearly to see future problems.

Story as shared understanding

Now that we’ve explored CROW (can you remember the four components?) in the context of user experience, the next step is accepting that you won’t always need or use all four building blocks. Some scenes are compelling without all four building blocks well defined. However, weakness in one area should be mitigated with strength of understanding in another.

In many ways, CROW is simply a new lens to reframe our existing understanding of our customers. Most designers get at elements of all four building blocks on major projects.

But CROW is not just important for our understanding of our customers and products — CROW is critical when telling stories to our stakeholders. When pitching new projects at Amazon, any one of my storyboards could be taken out of context. I needed to ensure each storyboard hit enough CROW to be compelling in its own right.

By ensuring our design stories provide CROW, we avoid making too many assumptions about our stakeholders’ understanding of a problem. And a strong design story gives us all a strong shared context for collaborative decision making.

What story will you tell?

Cheryl Platz is currently Design Lead for Azure Portal and Marketplaces at Microsoft. Her recent career as a designer and storyteller includes time on Amazon’s Alexa, Cortana, and Windows Automotive.

Cheryl is also a veteran improvisational actress, with over a dozen years of professional experience on stages around the world. As a 9-year veteran member of the Unexpected Productions performing ensemble, she also teaches improv with their well-respected improv school at a variety of levels.

Content Designers are enthusiastic about language and constantly talk about user needs and how we read on the web. But, what is content design?

Content Designers are more common than I realised. For the UK government we’re Content Designers, but for other companies we’re Content Writers. Dropbox and Google have UX Writers, and some companies use Content Strategists.

Here, I’ve tried to clearly collect some of the main areas a Content Writer works in. Although not a definitive list, this covers what I’ve found is important.

Reading on the web and plain English

“Style to be good must be clear. Clearness is secured by using words that are current and ordinary.” — Aristotle

Plain English is probably the most important part of writing for the web. Users generally tend to:

scan the content, looking for keywords

read in an F shape pattern

be put off by jargon and ‘marketese’

A study by Nielsen Norman Group showed that 79% of test users scanned a new page, only 16% read it word for word.

This is why considering, and designing, your written content online is so crucial. You could write the world’s greatest prose on how to use your service, but users aren’t guaranteed to read it at all. Writing in a clear, concise language means the user can read the content quickly and get the information they need easily. The following are some good ways to do this.

Front-loaded headings

Users generally scan webpages for keywords. Using clear, front-loaded headings breaks up the content into manageable chunks and allows the user to easily navigate it.

Short sentences

Sentences should be kept short and clear. The Government Digital Services (GDS) recommend sentences should be no more than 25 words. Dropbox commit themselves to only 15 words or less.

Bullet lists

Lists within a sentence makes reading more difficult so use bullet lists where you can. Bullet lists can:

attract attention, supporting ease of scanning content

clearly separate the content, making it easier to read

emphasise the points you’re trying to make

Structuring content

The inverted pyramid — Sam Spurlin

As users generally only read 20 to 25% of content on web pages it’s best to think of the ‘inverted pyramid’ when structuring content.

This is the idea that the most crucial pieces of information are available at the beginning. Then, as you move down the page, these points are explained more. This means that users can get what they need from the content immediately, and read on if they want to understand it further.

Microcopy

It’s easy to think of content writing as just guidance and larger pages of information, but every word and sentence should be considered. The user will interact with all aspects of your service or website so making sure everything is consistent is vital. Microcopy is the small, helpful bits of text that instruct the user. One example is when subscribing to an email newsletter and it says “you can always unsubscribe at any time”.

Microcopy is something that often gets missed but can make a huge difference to how users interact with your website or service. The little touches help the user know they’re dealing with humans, even if it’s through a digital service. For the most enjoyable microcopy out there, @TinyWordsMatter is good to follow.

Microcopy includes elements such as error messages. Although a standard error message might mean something to someone who understands the intricacies of code, it won’t mean anything to a user. If the user is interacting with it, you want to build trust. Having a clear message explaining it’s nothing the user has done and it’s nothing to worry about (if it’s nothing to worry about) reassures them.

If you want your user to return, it’s best not to blame them or make them feel stupid. The Nielsen Norman Group has some clear guidelines that can help with writing error messages.

John Saito discusses microcopy, and its benefits, in more detail.

Working in teams

The easiest way to successfully write content is working alongside others in the team. Agile teams are particular good at getting different roles to work together. For example, working closely with a User Researcher will help support your content decisions, or changes, with evidence. You can test variations of your content and understand how users engage with it. This can then inform how you write, the words you use, and the presentation.

You can also work with a Business Analyst to understand the sort of enquiries your customer support department is receiving. If you group this information into themes you can get an understanding of what users are looking for, but also what they’re unable to find. You can then review your content, or add to it, to support this.

Building relationships

Probably the hardest part of being a content writer is making others in your company understand what it is you actually do. As content writing is still new to lots of companies your colleagues, authors, and owners of existing content may struggle to understand what you do. If they’ve never considered the user’s perspective before they might struggle to understand your use of plain English. Lots of people think using plain English is “dumbing down”, but really, it’s “opening up”.

One battle I’ve come across a number of times is the use of internal terminology vs. how users actually refer to things. Government departments famously use a wealth of acronyms and internal terms. If you want users to find your content, however, you have to use the same language as them. A good tool to help prove this to stakeholders is Google Trends.

Comparing ‘Content Designer’ with ‘UX Writer’ over the last 12 months in the US on Google Trends

Google Trends lets you enter different terms and compare the use of these in searches. This is a clear way to show your point with hard evidence.

I’ve found the more evidence you can provide a stakeholder showing your way of writing is correct and beneficial, the more trust you can gain. This means, in the future, stakeholders are more likely to follow your suggestions.

Style guides

After developing rules and a style of writing you’ll also want everyone else to stick to it, ensuring all content maintains a consistent voice. Style guides are an incredibly useful tool to do this. Style guides are your reference for how to write, how to structure, and what to avoid.

Maintaining the standards of writing is crucial for a consistent voice and tone. At first it can be hard to find and define this. Your voice should stay the same throughout. Your tone is what changes. This is because you want to consider your user’s feelings at every stage and your tone needs to change to support them. For example, if the user has completed a task, you’ll probably want to use more informal language that encourages and congratulates them.

Using active voice is also important. With active voice, the user does the action. You want to avoid passive voice, where the user has the action done to them. Using words like “was” and “by” may be a sign you’re writing in passive voice.

In summary

With the explosion in digital services and applications, content design is becoming more and more important. Although one of the main points of content design is the use of plain English, it’s also more than this. It’s having an understanding of how users read and recognise content on the web.

How we write and present content is crucial, but it’s also understanding the language users’ use and the most intuitive way users read. This makes sure the user can understand what they’re expected to do and they can complete the task quickly and easily.

But, ultimately, it’s about building trust. The user needs to trust your service to use it. If you can present your content in a helpful, friendly manner, reminding users they’re dealing with humans rather than computers, then they’ll engage with it.

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Someone once told me they didn’t see the value in copywriting.

It didn’t surprise me. They were just airing aloud what I imagine lots of people think.

After all, words are just words. Most of us use them everyday. And most of us write in some form everyday.

You don’t have to know how to code. You don’t have to be artistic. You don’t need to know how to use Photoshop.

And what’s more, why would you ask someone else to write about your business? Who else could possibly know more about it than you?

And that’s true. The client will always know more about the ins and outs of their own business.

And often, therein lies the problem. Stemming the information overflow. Curtailing the jargon. Sticking to what’s essential to the reader.

This can all get forgotten in a mass of detail about who’s who, what’s what, and generally how excellent your business is. (Because it probably is excellent. But there’s a better way to let people know it is — which we’ll come to below.)

So what is the value of copywriting?

1. It all starts with content.

“We can’t focus so much on technology that we forget the web is often, and quite gloriously, a transaction between reader and writer.” — Jeffrey Zeldman.

In a society where design is finally being acknowledged as a practical, solutions-focused tenet at the centre of all business and social innovation — not simply an aesthetic shiny glaze — something else has been happening too.

More and more creatives and companies are placing importance on a design process that starts with content. (Some creative industry titans, such as Jeffrey Zeldman and John Moore Williams have been extolling the virtues of content-first design for years. See below for recommended reading on the subject.)

So instead of delivering a beautiful website to clients, with empty spaces or lorum ipsum to replace with words — those words become integral to the design itself. The words are part of the design.

But why? If the design is fantastic, does the copy really matter?

The short answer? Yes.

2. User Experience

While people may not read everything you write — in fact, they’ll probably read a small proportion of what you write — that’s even more reason to ensure your copy is doing a good job of leading the reader to the right places.

Your copy should be giving them the information they want at a glance; and making their experience of your website intuitive.

Most importantly, your words are there to be useful.

It’s a mistake to believe that as long as the information’s in there somewhere, it will get read. Website content isn’t about filler. In an age where people are dealing with content bombardment and sensory overload on a daily basis, streamlining to include only what matters to the user, is a deft art.

User experience design has become increasingly important to businesses, who understand that if their site isn’t user-friendly, website users aren’t stuck for choice. They’ll simply move on to a competitor site within seconds.

And getting user experience right means taking into account just that — the total experience of the user. Down to the copy that explains the benefits of your product or service, to the words that tell them where clicking a button will take them. From the navigation menu, to the error message if something doesn’t go to plan.

When the words on your page are there for the benefit, clarification and delight of the user, they’ll be of more value to your bottom line.

3. Search Engine Optimisation

Factoring SEO into web copywriting is, fundamentally, an extension of the user experience.

Because, whilst yes, you’re optimising for Google and other search engines — at its heart, SEO has a human-centric purpose. Search engines exist as our means of navigating the vast web. And we use them to the extent that ‘googling’ has become a part of our day-to-day vocabulary.

So when we’re ‘optimising’ the copy on a web page — if we’re doing so correctly — we’re simply making it easier for internet users to find information which is relevant and useful to them.

Why copywriting matters?

Ultimately yes, it’s only words. But, coupled with design, they’re one half of the most important communication tool your business will ever have.

Get them right, and they’ll take you far.

Thanks so much for reading! (Especially if you made it this far!)

Recommended reading:

Why Content Comes First John Moore Wiiliams

Forget Coding: Writing is Design’s Unicorn Skill Katherine Schwab article on John Maeda’s 2017 Design in Tech report

The Best Kept UX Secret is…Writers? Ann Buechner

Originally published 13th April 2017 at writeonthesea.co.uk

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Screens are disappearing.

There’s a delicious irony in that sentence, right? I mean, you’re probably reading this article on a screen right now, (unless you make a habit of printing out your morning reading). But look around: human-computer interactions no longer exclusively occur through the keyholes of our smartphones, smartwatches and TV screens – something that Bill Gates predicted would happen back in 2002:

“…computers themselves will gradually “disappear” into the fabric of our lives. We are still a long way from a world full of disembodied intelligent machines, but the computing experience of the coming decade will be so seamless and intuitive that–increasingly–we will barely notice it.” ~ Bill Gates, The Disappearing Computer

Granted, he guessed this transition would happen by 2010 – but he was only off by a few years, so give the guy some credit.

As voice recognition and chatbot technology improves, these “invisible” user interfaces will replace screens as the default medium of interaction. Just as many modern websites & applications today tout themselves as “Mobile-First”, it won’t be long before those same innovators are applying the “Voice-First” label to their new offerings. Indeed there’s a non-zero chance that the next killer app may launch with no visual UI at all! Thus, today’s UX designers face a stark choice – evolve beyond the pixel, or look for a new career.

In this post, I’m going to explore some of the reasons behind the sunset of visual-first design, and explain why designers must learn to wield their prose and stories as fluently as they do their imagery, in order to remain relevant in the age of invisible computing.

Let’s get to it, shall we?

Why visual-first design will soon decline

Words are the new pixels

What designers can do to keep their jobs

Why visual-first design will soon decline

If we’re to understand why designers must learn to tell stories without relying on visual aids, we must first grasp the drivers behind the decline of visual-first design.

It’s getting old

In short, predominantly visual design as a source of innovation is approaching the maturity phase of its life-cycle.

Just like any product or service, visual-first design is reaching its maturity

Take a look around – aren’t websites all starting to look kind of samey these days? This is no accident. As new design best practices have been shared, and higher conversion rates achieved, this standardized knowledge has propagated to businesses and website owners all across the web. But this wasn’t always the case. 

In its heyday in the early 2000’s, flashy web design was THE competitive differentiator for any business that wanted to make waves online. The arrival of Macromedia Flash (that’s Adobe Flash, to you kids), brought rich interactivity and visuals to the previously dull and static World Wide Web, and boutique rich media design studios like 2Advanced and Big Spaceship blew people’s minds by pushing the envelope of what we all thought was possible with web design and motion graphics. And fancy pre-loaders (ugh).

With unique and eye-catching design prioritized over everything else, it used to be a generally accepted workflow to have your web designer simply create visual “buckets”, (stuffed with Lorem Ipsum, of course), for the copywriter/client to fill with content after the fact.

We now know this is no longer an appropriate workflow for truly effective web design – in such circumstances, the actual content becomes subservient to the design, which diminishes the effectiveness of both.

It’s being commoditized by economic pressures

Visual design is cheaper, more accessible and more standardized than at any time in the history of the internet. Sites like Upwork, 99Designs and Envato have democratized (some might say commoditized) visual design, while free access to blog tutorials, website themes, and drag & drop tools like Canva, mean that anyone can invest a little time or money, and walk away with a presentable design.

Automated design is coming

Meanwhile, procedural design engines like The Grid and Act-On, can automatically generate entire layouts based solely on the content you feed them, and simultaneously A/B test like 8 gajillion different page variations to find the ultimate killer converting layout. While the output of these tools may not currently match human visual designers at the top of their game, there’s been more than enough interest around them to validate the existence of significant demand for cheaper, automated delivery of good visual design. It’s only a matter of time before the technology catches up – and it’s a problem that need only be solved successfully once to greatly reduce the need for human involvement in the visual design process.

“In 2010 only 2 per cent of Americans worked in agriculture and 20 per cent worked in industry, while 78 per cent worked as teachers, doctors, webpage designers and so forth. When mindless algorithms are able to teach, diagnose and design better than humans, what will we do?” ~ Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Voice & text recognition technology has reached a tipping point

Following a powerhouse showing at CES2017, Amazon’s Alexa is the first application of voice interaction to have reached mainstream adoption, with almost 8 million Echo units sold since it debuted in 2015 – and more than two thirds of those sales happened last year.

One stunning stat in particular is that Echo owners have also increased their spending on Amazon by 10% in the last year. Consider all the effort that’s gone into optimizing Amazon to be the best-converting e-commerce store on the internet – and now consider that one of its biggest leaps forward came from removing the visual interface altogether!

It’s also worth noting that voice and chat interfaces are only just getting started, and haptic, gesture-driven interactions aren’t far behind.

The video above was posted in 2015, so who knows how far this technology has come since then?

Visual design is struggling to keep up with consumers’ needs

How many screens exist in the average urban-dweller’s life? Smartphone, TV, laptop, tablet, car, (maybe even the fridge, if they’re painfully early adopter). Effective visual designs today must solve for an ever-growing variety of contexts & circumstances – but the kicker is that each time there’s a new breakthrough in our display technologies and devices, we’re having to almost completely rethink our approach to creating visual interfaces that effectively capitalize on these new capabilities.

  This is becoming unsustainable – we can’t keep redesigning our entire visual methodologies with each new innovation, so there’s an immediate need for an intuitive interface medium that works in almost any context, and has enough future-proofing built into it to stick around for a while.

Words are the new pixels

So, I’m just gonna throw this out there: humans have been communicating with words for about 70,000 years. We all know how to use them and interpret them, and I’d argue that words are the only truly responsive UI element for all computing devices, past, present and future.

Words: they worked back then, and they still work now

Words work at all screen resolutions, on all devices, across all global cultures, and in almost any context. This is an indispensable trait, since your responsibility as a designer is to guide users as they hop between individual interfaces within an overall guided experience.

Words are built for sharing experiences, ideas & stories

No matter how well-designed your website & mobile app are individually, if the transition between them is disjointed, it’s still a bad experience for the user.

As a result, customer preferences are shifting from favoring individually well-designed interfaces – Brand X’s mobile app, Brand Y’s website, and so on – to expecting a seamless overall experience within a single brand, regardless of the context. Businesses are discovering that this seamlessness is essential for driving repeat purchases from customers in a recurring cycle, nicknamed the Loyalty Loop.

In short, users need compelling narratives to guide them through the entire experience – not more infinitely-reconfigurable visual interfaces.

Wall-E is a masterclass in visual storytelling – but few can reach that bar consistently

  Thing is though, unless you’re Pixar, it’s really hard to tell a compelling, understandable story without words. Thus, the shift towards designing cohesive narratives for customers across multiple channels is opening the door to competition with visual designers on their own turf. Copywriters, authors, linguists, voice actors, casting directors, screenwriters, hell even songwriters – are all about to get into the user experience game.

  These folks are already familiar with creating engaging non-visual content – and demand for their expertise is about to explode. Although voice interaction has penetrated the mainstream, there’s still a dire need to build & maintain customer engagement. Alexa’s total library of almost 7,000 Skills (that’s Amazon-lish for “Apps”) currently averages only 3% retention after 2 weeks – ouch!

What designers can do to keep their jobs

LUKE: “With the blast shield down, I can’t even see! How am I supposed to fight?” OBI WAN: “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.”

Effective storytelling is as big a differentiator for today’s UX designers as the “unicorn” status of designers who could also code in the ‘00’s and early ‘10’s – so here’s what visual designers should be doing to prepare for this shift.

Lorem Ipsum must die – Content IS the design, so it should be factored into your workflow from the outset of the project. No more punting consideration of content down the road (although Samuel L Ipsum is always welcome entertainment

Understand the structure of a good story – There are tons of ways to do this – learn from storytelling masters like Pixar, read a “Choose your own adventure” book, study Joseph Campbell’s timeless classic “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, or even play a text-based adventure game like Zork.

Tease apart and deconstruct these examples to learn how words alone can guide and compel users through an experience.

Learn the art of persuasive writing – Don’t fear the encroachment of writers on “your design turf” – embrace them, learn from them. They may know this new, invisible medium better than you do, but you know how to incorporate their work, and harness it to create compelling user experiences.

The legendary Zig Ziglar’s “5 obstacles to a sale”, and the Persuasive Triangle are great frameworks with which to start learning how to write persuasive, compelling copy.

In summary: Learn to use your words

Visual-first design is in decline, so designers must become familiar with telling stories via the invisible media of voice and text. There are a number of drivers behind this decline:

Good visual design is no longer a competitive advantage for online businesses – it’s expected

Economic competition & automation are making visual design cheaper and more accessible

Voice and text recognition technology are enabling viable alternatives to traditional visual interfaces

Visual design can’t keep up with the pace of innovations in consumer devices

Words are the ideal medium for accommodating this next phase of human-computer interaction. They’re universally used and understood globally, and are easily woven into stories that can fit into any user context.

From web services to apps and VR, we know that text is still important to create strong coherent digital experiences. But today’s copywriters are lacking the tools and the status to be invited to shape the future. Could the answer lie in a new identity?

Why are so many copywriters so poorly equipped to participate in design projects? A couple of years ago the world started to change fast enough for me to question my role as a copywriter. Almost everything transformed into software, the user was put in the spotlight and designers seemed to rule behind all the products and services I loved. Who were they? How did they think? How could I get to work with them?

I have long seen writing as a process and text as problem solving, but I feel that the conversation between copywriters isn’t as developed as that between designers.

So when I started meeting and talking to designers I discovered two things:

They have developed an efficient way of thinking and solving problems.

They think text is a bit of a pain.

These conversations sparked something in me. I started to explore my own process, my methods and my role as a copywriter. I also started to learn more about this change, about its nature and the possibilities that we as humans have created for ourselves. Then I formulated a question that I hope that other copywriters ask themselves:

What is my place in this big change?

In searching for the answer, I found a new identity.

Designing with words

Design is a broad concept. Many think of design solely as something visual, but after interviewing and working with designers I’ve discovered that design is about solving problems. A designer is just someone who is trained to do it for other people.

In order to solve problems with design, it helps if you’re capable of seeing design as a process. But there is no clear only way. Design is rather an explorative process where you often find unexpected things along the way.

Text is also about solving problems for other people, even if copywriters traditionally lack the designer’s processes and methods. Instead the copywriter often steps in at the end of the process and writes based on what she or he thinks sounds good. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

My exchanges with designers have changed the way I see my profession. The way of thinking as well as the process and methods around design can be translated and used by those of us who work with text as well. Those of us who work with text also have a lot of traits that are tremendously useful in a design project, for instance:

Analytical ability that comes in handy when it comes to understanding the situation and the problem.

The ability to formulate every step of the process in a clear and efficient fashion (many projects suffer from inadequate documentation and inadequately formulated insights).

The ability to handle large quantities of information and structure it in a manageable way.

Extensive experience of thinking from the user’s point of view.

From copywriter to text designer

These are the things I consider key for a copywriter who wants to be in on the change we’re seeing right now and keep being in on it in the future:

Stop writing start designing Learn how to solve problems using design thinking. If the solution then includes text you can write it, by all means. Don’t call yourself copywriter, call yourself text designer and stress the importance of you, as a designer, being included from the start, be there when you examine the problem, when you develop solutions that you test on real people and all the way to a final solution. Stress the importance of getting to build empathy for the people you’re solving the problem for, stress the importance of getting to test everything you do, stress the importance of helping out with structure and documentation in the project (after all, you can write).

Don’t be intimidated by design words like UX or CX, it’s just a masquerade of letters hiding things you (hopefully) already know.

Read books about design, about the processes, about the methods. Interview designers, cooperate with designers.

Start designing verbal identitites  Right now there’s a huge imbalance in the world that you as a copywriter can use. We have countless newly started companies that need to reach out instantly and influence the right people in order to have a chance of survival, all the way from customers to investors. These companies often have no idea about who they are or how they should talk about themselves. They need someone who can help them find their verbal identity, in the shape of strategically chosen messages and a tonality that conveys the right things. Help them.

Read about strategy, learn how to work with messaging, learn to design a tonality.

Keep the conversation alive

I’d like to have contact with and talk to other copywriters who want to be in on exploring the possibilities for the profession, other people who think along these lines, or along entirely different ones.

Do you want to join in and write for this publication? Get in touch and we’ll talk more.

tl;dr: If a user experience needs an explanation, something is fundamentally broken. Consider redesigning the experience until people no longer need it explained to them.

As Blaise Pascal wrote, “I made this [letter] very long only because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter.”

In hundreds of languages, over thousands of years, people have known that reducing text takes time. As a professional writer, here’s how I use that time.  In my first draft, whether an email or short story or user experience, I usually get to the point I need to make somewhere near the end. I start by moving that point to the top.

Then I examine the meaning in the rest of the content. I remove obvious information — anything that the reader would already know. I take out details when those details can distract the reader.

The last step is grammar. I seek out prepositions; many of them can be removed without losing meaning. Everywhere I’ve written “is” followed by a verb ending in “-ing,” I rewrite without the “is” and “-ing.” I also remove adverbs; not only are the sentences shorter, they’re better.

Fewer words make better experiences

In my work at Microsoft, I write text that appears to customers on screens. It’s part of the user experience (UX). When customers are confused by the UX, and aren’t taking the action we anticipated, I’m asked to wordsmith. Often, I’m asked to add more words so that the customer will understand.

I understand the urge to add more words. We want to explain until all the relevant facts are displayed. When a student is struggling, an explanation can provide a new way of thinking about the subject. Explanations can help a patient choose among treatment options.

Most often, the urge to add an explanation comes from a basic social impulse to ease experiences by talking.

It’s the same way people use conversation in waiting rooms, as social lubrication. When we’re adding words, it’s often because we think the experience is going to be uncomfortable.

Fewer words 101: In the classroom

Here is an example where a teacher has just created a new class in Microsoft Classroom. There are a bunch of permissions that help keep the school system secure and running smoothly, and those take a while to complete. But we don’t want to show the teacher a blank screen! So we initially wrote:

Screenshot of Microsoft Classroom in-progress design. Screen text says “Making something special takes time! We’re working to get your classes ready. Please check back soon.”

(These images are from design drafts. Microsoft Classroom is currently in preview.)

The title could be read at least two ways: We either are demonstrating enthusiasm that the teacher’s class is special! Or, we are defensive that it’s taking so long! The text communicates to the teacher what’s happening: we’re working to get your classes ready. It will take an indeterminate amount of time, but isn’t immediate.

The technical challenge is unavoidable, on our side: the delay time depends on how their school set up their system. We’ll just get the class data back when the system is ready.

So here’s the text I recommended:

Screenshot of Microsoft Classroom in-progress design, after I reduced the words. Screen text says “Almost ready…”

There’s no more information to tell the teacher except that it will be ready soon. There’s nothing they can do but wait, and check back later.  Teachers are astoundingly short on time. Why make them read more? We don’t have to tell teachers that their classes are special, nor that our product will be special.

Life or death example: Airplane safety placard

I’ve never been in an airplane as it made a water landing. But I have told flight attendants that I would be willing to open the emergency door, if I were asked to.

I’ve even imagined being in that state: panicked, but still alive; adrenaline coursing; heart pounding. Even as a word-savvy person, this is not the moment I’ll stop, read, and understand with great clarity.

On a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, I took this picture of the door:

Interior door of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, where a label says “VISUALLY ENSURE THE MODE SELECT HANDLE IS FULLY INSIDE THE RED PLACARD FOR ARMED AND GREEN PLACARD FOR DISARMED”

The label on the door has 19 words: “Visually ensure the mode select handle is fully inside the red placard for armed and green placard for disarmed”

My rewrite uses 11 words…

My rewrite for the interior door of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner: “CHECK BEFORE OPENING / HANDLE IN RED: ARMED / HANDLE IN GREEN: DISARMED”

…but this gets dangerous. Personally and professionally, I have no idea what it means for a door to be armed or disarmed. I estimate that 99% of people on a commercial 787 flight don’t know, either. If I were a UX writer for Boeing, I’d ask: What should most people understand when they read these words? Could we label the red and green areas directly, and serve people who are red/green colorblind, too?

Getting from A to B example: Good To Go website for Washington State’s toll roads

Washington State’s Good To Go! program exists to pay for highway and bridge infrastructure. Customers go to the site so they can pay tolls electronically, at lower cost than paying them by mail.

I am a citizen of Washington State, and I use the Good To Go service. I appreciate that the service allows me to pay at highway speeds without stopping at a toll plaza. I like that I can pay by credit card, without generating extra paper bills.

I am also frustrated each time I use the website, because it includes so many extra words. Here’s the first screen of the “open a new account” experience. It has so many words that it requires a scroll bar:

When a customer scrolls, only one missing item is revealed: the “Begin” button:

In contrast, if they used fewer words, it could take only one screen:

Interpersonally: Using fewer words face to face

There’s a rhetorical technique of inundating the listener with words. Sentences never end; instead, phrases are strung together with a series of conjunctions.

A flood of words is a red flag: If someone won’t shut up, they might be using words to wear down the other person. The words don’t even have to be true, if they are said constantly.

The listener may get details about the glorious future — details that are so specific, they feel like they must be true! Those are often alternated with stories of doom: how horrible it is for “those others” –the non-listeners — who were so foolish as to not be convinced.

It’s the script for every meeting where one person is convincing another to do something that’s not in their best interest.

To be more trustworthy, I use fewer words, in shorter sentences. That clarity gives the listener mental “space” to formulate their own considerations. I trust them to reach the same conclusions I’ve come to — without needing to drown them in words.

Using fewer words isn’t a panacea to fix every user experience; it’s just one guideline, together with all the others employed by excellent writers, designers, developers, program managers, and researchers. It’s how UX writers reduce the text to create experiences that let people to do more of what they want to do — not waste their time reading explanations of how to do it.

Related reading:

Revising Prose by Richard Lanham and How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark.

Whatever your profession is, you deserve a top-notch website. And if you are just starting out, we know that the process can be a bit overwhelming. So overwhelming in fact, that people often overlook the importance of one important aspect of every great website.

The foundations of every website that deserves our attention are appealing and functional design and appropriate copy.

Though the process behind the both of those is considerably elaborate, the surface is summed up in web design and copywriting. Each member of a team working on your website has an important role that serves the purpose of creating either of the two.

Developers are there to bring the designer’s ideas to life and SEO specialists are there to do their magic and let us writers know in which direction to pour our creative juices.

Together we all work on creating a harmony between copy and design that will make our final product worth your time and money. It’s important to notice that neither of the two hold the priority over the other. They are equally important and require equal amount of effort.

Design versus Copy

Credit: Stephen Harber, theonlywriterever.com

I have to admit, I struggled for a while before I found a good parallel that would help me get the point across in this post. I ended up staring at a pile of books by my desk when it hit me:

What was the last play you’ve read? Not seen, but actually read. For me, it was “A Streetcar Named Desire”. I first read the piece and then watched the 1951 movie adaptation featuring Marlon Brando. After I was done, I didn’t know why I wasted 24 years not watching this classic.

Even though I was smitten by the play, it was not until I saw the actual adaptation that I fully grasped the raw and sensitive core of it all.

Maybe it was my lack of experience in the area, but my brain wouldn’t wrap around the idea entirely on its own. I needed that visual aspect to fully enjoy what the play had to offer. That’s how it usually goes with the plays. While the message can come across the written word, you need the actors, the setting, the lights in order to appreciate the work in its entirety.

The case is not the same with novels but, as plays are meant to be adapted, it’s only with the adaptation that you get the full experience.

Credit: Pixabay

Alternatively, if you had the stage, the actors, and the lights in front of you, but there was no dialog, you would probably leave the theatre without the slightest idea of what you’ve seen. The message would never come across without the actual dialog.

Something similar happens when you are creating a website for your business. Your copy is meant to be incorporated in the design.

You can create the most beautiful layout. It can be flashy, it can be minimalist, it can have perfect loading time and amazing visuals to accompany the design. Still, it would all be in vain without the appropriate copy.

In the similar manner, you could have someone like Neil Patel write the copy for your website and it wouldn’t matter much if your website is looking crappy.

What is it that you do first, then?

I know, it’s the single most overused gif ever. Thanks, Imgur!

“Do you first prepare the copy or design?”

“How can I prepare copy if I don’t know what my website will look like?”

“Isn’t it simpler to first design and then just add the text where needed?”

These are some of the questions swarming around your head right now if you’re planning on hiring someone to design a website for you.

You would be surprised by how many times a small business owners start making plans about a website without even realising that copywriting is a part of the same process and something they definitely need to look into.

But in which order?

If your business needs a website (and every business today does), you need to know what you’re expecting from it. We talked a bit more about that in one of our previous posts. Once you know what you need, you’ll know what is the message that a copywriter should present to your potential customers. And that message is the reason you’re creating a website in the first place.

Understand their purpose

While copywriting serves to catch the attention of your visitor, the design of your website is what makes the visitor stay. The design will make your copy more prominent in the right places, emphasising the most relevant points.

It will also offer visual stimuli to make the entire experience more appealing. Of course, there are important design features that are not only dealing with the form but also functionality, like good navigation and good placement of calls to action.

What does that all mean? That means that you can’t start the process of designing if you have no idea what the copy of your website should look like. But it also means that you can’t start writing the copy if you don’t have the slightest idea about what elements the website should have.

Both copy and design are something that needs to be developed in phases. Once the designers have a basic outline of what is expected, they can create a picture in their mind of what it could look like and start working around it. So have the first, very rough draft of the copy ready for your designer. Or at least a very detailed brief that will point him in the right direction.

Lorem ipsum

While some say lorem ipsum is a convenient solution, the right word would be ‘lazy’. It takes very little time to incorporate in the design, and it leaves the designers more freedom with the layout, but does it actually help the process?

Lazy solution isn’t always a good solution.

Not really: If your web design agency uses lorem ipsum during the entire process and leaves it up to you to add the copy later on, the equality between design and copy we talked about above will be lost.

The focus of your website will be on aesthetics and not on the message and the impression you are trying to leave on your visitors.

To go back to our previous metaphor: It would be as if you used a script of another playwright to prepare the stage and costumes, cast the actors, and rehearse; and only to write your own script a week before the big premier.

Doesn’t seem quite right, don’t it?

Meaning that lorem ipsum doesn’t actually help the process, it only makes it a bit more complex. If, once you decide to add the copy to your website, you notice that the words don’t quite fit the design, you will either have to alter the copy or make the designer alter what was supposed to be the final version of the design.

If you alter the copy, you might won’t be able to get the point across and leave the impression that you wanted. And you might even realise by the end of the process that what your copywriter and your designer had in mind weren’t quite the same things, which prolongs the launch of your final product.

What if my web design agency doesn’t offer copywriting services?

Not every web design agency offers the services of creating copy, just like not every marketing agency offers the service of web design. But that is not something you should necessarily base your decision on when choosing with whom to work.

Agencies specialised solely in web design and web development most often have someone they can recommend based on their previous experience. Even if they don’t, those who know what they’re doing will gladly work along the side of a copywriter you choose, because they value your product, the time, and the effort it takes to launch a website.

When reversed, this can be a good filtering method when you’re hiring a web design agency: If they insist on working solely with lorem ipsum, simply don’t hire them!

If you have any questions about our process of designing a website, leave them hire or on any of our social media channels.

Until next Monday!

Image credit: momentumdash.com

Right now is a very interesting time to be a copywriter in the UK. As an industry, copywriting seems to be going through something of an identity crisis.

Image credit: dma.org.uk

On the one hand, you have the copywriting old guard: extremely skilled and experienced craftspeople who cut their teeth in the Golden Age of Advertising, or have followed in the footsteps of those who did.

Joy for these venerable wordsmiths is in delivering a piece of longform copy powerful enough to change a person’s entire worldview while they’re sitting at a bus stop. Or crafting a one-line zinger so taut and on-the-money it can cause a giggle-fit in a library.

Image credit: dma.org.uk

On the other hand you have the new generation of copywriters. Weaned on tales of the Golden Age, but presented with a drastically changed landscape, they’ve had to adapt to a completely different way of working: more platforms, more knowledge, less trust and less time.

Joy for these multimedia multitaskers is in hits, dwell time, shares, trends, virality and any other measure of effectiveness.

One side bemoans the other’s lack of craft and creativity, the other side can’t believe the first ever had it so easy.

And that’s just the view from the inside.

A 2015 DMA poll found that copywriters on the whole aren’t happy. 54% cited a lack of respect in the industry for the value of copywriting, while 28% believed that if a project’s budget were to be cut, copywriting would be the first role to go. Veteran copywriter Tony Brignull (pictured above) even went so far as to say that ‘Copywriting is dead’.

But why? There’s never been a greater need for copywriters. With the rise of voice user interfaces like Amazon’s Alexa, conversational UI and chat bots, AI and machine learning, and automated phone services, the whole industry is looking for ways to have better quality, more cost-effective dialogues with users.

These kind of information exchanges need skilled narrative and conversational designers — specialists in language and communication.

It’s an open goal for copywriting talent.

How did we end up here?

How is it that copywriters now feel pushed out of the conversation and relegated to the kiddies’ table? To understand, I think it’s useful to compare how the disciplines of copywriting and design have evolved quite differently over the last few decades.

As we touched on above, ‘copywriting’ today is such a broad term neither those within it nor those on the banks of it know quite where its edges are. A single role can include:

print advertising and marketing

digital advertising and marketing

TV advertising and marketing

social media and community management

technical writing

web content writing

video and voiceover scripting

content strategy (in the absence of a content strategist)

Just these few examples represent an enormous and insurmountable skillset for just one role, especially given how quickly the digital landscape can change. Ultimately this leaves your average copywriter spread very thin — a jack of all media, master of none.

So let’s park ‘copywriter’ for a moment and look at the other specialisms in commercial writing.

On the whole, they tend to be defined by subject matter. For example:

finance writer

legal writer

property writer

non-profit writer

corporate or business writer

This, of course, is a good thing. These industries are rife with technical terms, impenetrable jargon, obscure legalese and unique ways of working. They need subject matter experts who are also brilliant communicators to break down the acronyms and steer readers of all backgrounds through it.

But compare this to design as a discipline.

What was once simply known as ‘graphic design’ has split and split again into a huge range of specialisms. For instance:

visual designer

artworker

illustrator

UI designer

UX designer

graphic artist

web designer

app designer

games designer

illustrator

3D animator

photo retoucher

That’s without even touching development as a form of design. Which it is.

But consider these roles for a moment. They aren’t defined by subject matter, like copywriting, but largely by platforms and processes. They’ve evolved as a direct response to emerging technologies and user behaviours. Crucially, they’ve also evolved in parallel with developer tools and workflows (as Sandijs Ruluks illustrates here).

This means better and better integration of workflows, language and resources between designers and developers — to the extent that processes like atomic design are now possible.

This is great news for service design. But in all this excitement… who’s watching the words?

Skills gap

In my experience, when it comes to delivering new online tools and services there is a large and obvious skills gap on most service design teams: there’s no one to champion language.

At the early stages of a project, it often falls to designers and developers to fill this gap and make do as best they can. This is not their fault. And it’s not fair on them.

The result is that, despite the team’s best best efforts, copy will always come second to design. So at what point does it become important?

All too often as a copywriter I’ve been brought in part-way through or even at the end of a design project. And usually with the same impossible brief…

Finesse the design

Firstly, if you’re bringing a copywriter onto a project to ‘finesse’ an already-agreed design solution, there’s a good chance your design is more broken than you think. Secondly, you’re presenting the copywriter with a lose-lose scenario.

Let’s say it goes to plan. The copywriter recommends some substantial, impactful changes to the design and they take no time at all to implement. The project gets across the line and everyone is happy. But the copywriter’s input remains nothing more than a footnote. Copywriting remains stuck at the kiddie table. Fair enough, you might think. And I’d agree. Except this scenario never actually happens.

More likely is that the copywriter doesn’t have time to make substantial, well-informed changes, or there simply aren’t the resources (or appetite) to implement them properly. It’s too late in the project. So either the project hits the skids, with the copywriter to blame, or it crosses the line with poor or inconsistent copy and, you guessed it, the copywriter to blame.

All of the above outcomes serve to continue eroding the perceived value of copywriters (we’re already unhappy, remember), when in fact it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how to use them effectively.

How to start using your copywriter well

1. Understand the scale of their task

When thinking about copy for a digital design project, it’s easy to overlook quite how much there actually is. Bringing in a writer part-way through might seem logical. But consider the nuts and bolts of the UI more closely.

As well as the usual headers and body copy you’ve all sorts of hidden text and microcopy to factor in, such as:

contextual help and tooltips

error messaging

in-line validation

interstitial screen content

metadata

form fields

legal notices

UI animations

All of which can represent significant challenges when it comes to ensuring quality, accuracy, consistency and proper governance. A copywriter needs the time and resources to manage all of these effectively.

Nothing drags you out of a good experience like an ill-conceived error message.

2. Plug the skills gap

Designing a friendly, conversational UI without the help of someone skilled in narrative structure, language, nuance and persuasion is like trying to play ‘My Heart Will Go On’ on a tuba. A) It’s bloody hard work, and B) the audience may tap along, but nobody’s falling in love.

Every single user touchpoint and every piece of visible copy (including all the microcopy) is an opportunity to demonstrate your brand’s unique tone of voice and actively engage with the user and how they’re feeling at that precise moment.

On the day of your booking, AirBnB’s app pre-empts the question you’re probably opening the app to ask.

Are they angry? Help them resolve their frustration or give them somewhere to vent. Are they sad? Cheer them up or give them a shoulder to cry on. Are they anxious? Reassure them they’re doing the right thing. Are they excited? Give them a high five.

You cannot do this with visual design alone. It needs the right words, delivered in the right way, at just the right time. Great content happens when copy and interface work seamlessly together.

To achieve this as a service design team, copywriting needs a seat at the table, right from the start.

Barriers

What’s preventing copywriting from being an integral role in every service design team? I believe it comes down to four things:

Client understanding of the user and business benefits of good copywriting

Universal understanding of how to use copywriters effectively

Tools and processes to integrate designers, developers and copywriters

Platform-specific job titles for copywriters to clarify job specs and simplify recruitment

Copywriting isn’t dead

On the subject of point 4, earlier we touched on the enormous, soul-crushingly unachievable skillset required of a copywriter today, from print ad campaign concepting to in-app microcopy-writing. How did one role end up encompassing so much?

That is quite specific.

Perhaps in our arrogance we believed we could apply the same universal writing skills to any medium. Perhaps we’re a jealously elitist cabal that fears change. Perhaps we just don’t like saying no to people.

Either way, it’s meant that while an HR manager or recruiter can quickly find a suitable designer for a project, finding the right copywriter for a job is like searching for a needle in a haystack made of needles.

So perhaps it’s time we acknowledge that ‘copywriter’ as a descriptor is just too damn broad. What the industry needs are clearly defined specialists in platforms and processes that complement the specialisms of designers and developers.

One such specialist role is ‘UX writer’.

What is a UX writer?

The role of a UX writer is to craft and govern the verbal and conversational elements of a user interface. Working with UX designers, visual designers and developers, they weave business needs and user needs into an effective narrative structure that uses clear and empathetic language.

What does a UX writer do?

Here are just a few tasks to fill the billable day:

Integrate fully with design, development and client teams from the project’s outset

Adopt the same agile processes (if agile is your bag), workflows and delivery goals

Speak the language of designers and developers

Use the same collaborative tools (or at least, compatible ones) as designers and developers

Work with the delivery team to find verbal and visual narrative design solutions

Partner in user or audience research

Collaborate across the entire team (marketing, IA, project management) to improve copywriting and communication

Partner with content strategists to ensure the effectiveness, appropriateness and proper governance of language

Write amazing copy

Teach and empower others to write amazing copy

A UX writer doesn’t:

take all the copy worries away from the design and development team

work alone in a corner

berate people for grammatical infractions and drag the whole discipline into nazi territory

use page tables (at least exclusively)

Proof it works

I know what one of you might be thinking. Here’s yet another team member we now have to explain to clients — selling UX design is hard enough. We don’t have a workflow for this. We don’t know how to budget for this. It’ll never work…

Well it already is working.

On the west coast of America, UX writers are popping up in design teams for some of the world’s leading tech companies, from Google to PayPal. They’re already fixing the problem. (Kristina Bjoran has some great examples here).

And of course let’s not forget there are lots of agencies and organisations in the UK already employing highly skilled and talented copywriters as part of their design teams. They’re simply working under a range of job titles. ‘UX writer’ just gives their role some heft.

Benefits

So what can you expect as an outcome of having a UX writer on your team?

A more efficient design process: better results more quickly

More reliable user testing: prototype the complete design, not just the visuals

Less stressed designers: free to focus on what they do best

Better copy: no more second-guessing or copywriting by committee

Improved verbal and narrative design skills across the team

More detailed and collaborative style guides: not a forgotten document in a cupboard

Your move

So we’ve established there’s a problem with copywriting in the UK today. We’ve explored reasons why this may be the case and we’ve found a solution. The question now is: do you care enough to do something about it?

I’m talking to you, copywriters. And you, project managers. And yeah, you too, designers. This is a role that can’t work in isolation, but its benefits to the industry and design team as a whole are huge.

It needs early adopters here in the UK.

So what do you say? Let’s bring UX writing to these great and noble shores and show our US cousins a thing or two about UI design.

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