Not everything is about writing in UX Writing
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I remember when I first decided to become a UX writer. By that time I had already had some crossed experiences because I was a copywriter at a fintech, and until they got a dedicated UX writer, I was the one who used to get some UX copy demands from the product design team. I swear I can even hear them say “hey, you know that girl from the creative team? She writes (breaking news!), so maybe she can help us!”
And that’s how everything has just started. As soon as I fell in love with UX writing, I figured that I was a writer (seriously?). I mean… I graduated in journalism and have nearly 10 years of experience with all kinds of writing, from articles to advertisement pieces and tv commercial scripts. But here’s the thing: I was a writer, but I wasn’t a UX professional. So how come I could work as a UX writer?
Easy peasy: studying UX
To be a UX writer, I first decided to become a UX designer. And I must say that’s the best thing I could ever think of doing. Because being a UX designer meant:
- Understand the whole Design Thinking concepts (which is crucial, btw)
- Learn about some Research practices that taught me how to use a bit of data to defend my UX copy decisions
- Find out how I could pair with the UX designers and UX researchers in the future
- Use some methods to prioritize delivers
- Know all their processes and methodologies so I would be able to understand how is their workflow and where I fit in it, as well as make some specific requests to help with my assignments
- Adapt their processes and methodologies to create more concrete UX writing processes for the team and a more assertive UX copy
Ok, Natalia. So what?
Well, this is the turning point to finding out if you want to be a UX writer or not. Are you ready?
If you only want to write up short, creative sentences with nice words on a digital product, UX writing won’t make you happy.
As Yuval Keshtcher explains in this article:
“On the surface, UX writers craft the copy found throughout a digital product. This includes the text on buttons, menus, error messages, and more. We call these small pieces of text microcopy. In a more general sense, UX writers are tasked with delivering the messaging of the product from the inside out. To do this effectively, they must acquire a deep and thorough understanding of the user and often conduct UX research.”
This means that before writing anything, you have a long way up to the top, which involves research, data (a lot!), best UX practices, information architecture, strategy, testing, and a bunch of other stuff. And yes, knowing these processes and methodologies is extremely important to create a real user experience from end to end.
Torrey Podmajersky mentioned in an interview that there are very few differences between UX writing and UX design. We both use data. We both think of where are users in the journey, where they come from, where they are going, what are their needs and how can we help them. The main difference is that our final deliverables are in the form of words.
That leads us to one more thing: don’t think of your assignments as something independent from the product squads’ assignments. Indeed, there are still many product teams that only consider the UX writers at the end of the process, but thankfully there are many others that already understood that we, writers, need to be involved from the very beginning. So that’s one more reason for you to catch up with UX designers' and researchers’ processes and methodologies — besides it would be much easier for you to create a UX writing process in the team, but this is a topic for another article.
And speaking of it, don’t just limit yourself to evangelizing how important your presence is at the beginning of the process. In this case, acts are stronger than words, that I can assure you.
Recently the designer of my squad came to ask for my help on a microcopy task. He gave me the context of the screen, asked what I thought of that piece, and if I could suggest a better microcopy instead of that one. After I exchanged some words with the UX writing team, I came back to him, and, instead of giving him a new suggestion, I simply questioned “Is this information really necessary?”. And he was like “That’s a very good point. I thought you would bring an option more aligned with the voice tone. But I loved that you were a step before! It makes sense.” See the difference? We showed knowledge beyond the writing talking about user flows. It’s not that we couldn’t write it, but knowing UX principles as a whole allowed us to question and help with the architecture of that information — which is also part of our job in a sense.
I hope by the end of this article, you’ll find one thing is certain: UX writers can’t be lone wolves anymore (even if you’re the only writer on the team). For two big reasons: 1. wolves don’t work well by themselves; and 2. before any other thing, we are also UX professionals. This means that we are also part of the pack.
So, the summary of my golden tip is
Study UX deeply. Get involved with designers and researchers from your team as much as you can. You can use some coffee as an opportunity to get along, share experiences, find out a better way to cross your assignments, and even co-work. You can help each other more than you imagine.
UX writing is not about writing — at least not entirely. And if “Writing is designing”, we should let our team know that we don’t simply write words; we design strategies and write experiences.
A huge thanks for your contribution, @Leandro Pinheiro Tavares!
References:
What Does A UX Writer Actually Do?
