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10 Reasons Why All Designers Should Start Writing More
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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10 Reasons Why All Designers Should Start Writing More was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Why writing is the most important skill in design.
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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Why writing is the most important skill in design. was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Writing for the web and content design
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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Writing for the web and content design was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
It starts with words — why copywriting matters
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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It starts with words — why copywriting matters was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Rise of the UX writer
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.
http://ift.tt/2lIYHWK
Rise of the UX writer was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Writing for the Web: Developing Voice, Tone & Editorial Structure
Developing engaging content for your website demands a thoughtful approach to both structuring and choosing your words. Fortunately, best practice guidelines can help you ensure your ideas stand out and your writing is clear and compelling.
Determining the right voice and tone for your online writing is essential to making your readers feel engaged with your ideas. Of course different content demands a shifting tone (if you’re discussing a natural disaster, best not to be too light), but generally speaking, when writing content for your organization’s website, aim for a personal, upbeat tone. You do not want to appear too casual with your readers but you also want to avoid sounding bureaucratic or aloof. Your writing should sound like it was created by a human, not a corporate robot. It can be difficult to get your tone right, but studies show that it has a significant impact on your audience’s perception of your organization. Here are a few key points to keep in mind:
Use the active voice — it helps your writing seem less stuffy and it has the added bonus of cutting down on text length.
Avoid jargon! Just because a term is common in your organization, doesn’t mean it is well known outside of it. Speak the language of your users.
Keep your industry’s standards in mind and be cautious when deploying humor or playfulness. While incorporating this into your tone can help your writing seem friendlier, it can also turn your readers off and even damage your organization’s trustworthiness.
When in doubt, seek advice — a second pair of eyes can be crucial in refining and wordsmithing content.
Editorial Structuring
In previous articles, I’ve discussed how to use a hierarchical system for structuring your content. Content structuring also extends into how you unveil the information you’re conveying in your content, i.e. editorial structuring. The approach that fits best with how audiences read on the web is called the “inverted pyramid” style. In short, using the inverted pyramid-style means that you’ll present the most important information at the beginning of your publication, working down to the more discrete details.
Stating the main idea of the passage not only helps readers decide whether to engage further with the writing, it also ensures that if they do not read further, they will at least remember the central idea of the passage.
This style of writing can also help you structure your content effectively by breaking into smaller portions.
Front-loading your content with keywords not only helps your readers understand the central point of your writing, it also has SEO benefits since search engines rank articles with keywords at the beginning of the article higher.
The inverted pyramid illustrated. From Wikipedia
Readability
The” readability” metric refers to the complexity of sentences in individual word choices and sentence structure. Basically, it determines how easy it is to understand your text. While the level of complexity you need to use varies greatly depending on the audience you’re trying to reach, almost all writing can benefit from simplicity and directness.
Aim for middle school level (7th/8th grade in the USA), if you are trying to reach a broad audience.
Use Word’s grammar proofing function or Hemingway editor to analyze readability. Seeing the complexity of your writing is an illuminating experience that will help you understand patterns in your writing and be more conscientious about its complexity in the future.
Keep in mind that writing clearly and intelligibly is your primary goal. Readability tools can only analyze your text, they can’t tell you why your content may be hard to understand. For more information, consider performing a Cloze test on your copy with real users to determine how well readers can comprehend your text.
An example of a piece of text analyzed with Hemingway Editor. Complexity is conveyed through the red or yellow highlight, while suggestions specific words and phrases are given in blue, purple, and green. Example via ShoutMeLoud
Writing with Emphasis
Emphasis is essential to helping your reader understand the relative importance of information within your text, and helps reinforce and build upon the voice and tone established in your writing. Breaking up long passages of text with emphasized words or phrases also supports important points and increases the legibility and readability of your text.
Let your defined text styles do the work for you. If you have a style guide set up for your headings, styles for emphasis, etc., stick to it.
Don’t try to emphasize specific text too much, use italics and bolding sparingly — if your copy is well-structured with short paragraphs and well-defined sections, you won’t need it. As a rule, less than 10% of your text should be emphasized.
It may be tempting to mix emphasis styles (for example, combining bold and italic on one piece of text to show that it’s really really important), but generally this is a bad idea. Combining styles interrupts the reader and looks awkward, which can undermine the credibility of your content. If your readers misunderstand your intent or can’t find important information in your text, it means you have a content structuring problem. If you’re unsure, try getting feedback from your users to find the problems with your content.
Avoid using ALL CAPS in your body text. All-cap text is much harder to read than mixed or lowercase text. Additionally, many readers interpret all-cap text as the equivalent of yelling and it can be perceived as overbearing or rude, which is the wrong kind of emphasis you want on your writing! Note that all caps text is different than small caps text, which can be used quite effectively for emphasis, often as a heading style (your design team will figure out if this style is appropriate for your project).
This example from Smashing Magazine shows the correct way to emphasize text. Note that italicized text is best for emphasis when the reader is actively reading a passage, while using bold text brings attention to individual words while the reader is scanning a longer section of text for keywords.
A Note About Migrating Content
When you’ve undergone a website redesign, stray bits of incorrectly-styled text often find their way into your content management system (CMS) when content is migrated over from your old site. This text needs to be cleaned up so the appropriate styles are applied and are consistent with your style guide. For example, you may migrate over a blog entry that applies bold styling to the post heading, rather than the proper format for the assigned heading style. Inspect any content uploaded to your CMS to make sure that it fits with your style guide so that your users are not confused.
Conclusion
Effective writing for the web involves more than just stylistic finesse. Choosing the appropriate voice, tone and structure, ensuring your text isn’t too complex for your audience to understand, and emphasizing the right content all go a long way towards ensuring your ideas make an impact on your online audience.
A version of this post originally appeared by Quinn MacRorie on Constructive Thinking.
Writing for the Web: Developing Voice, Tone & Editorial Structure was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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