Why I train designers to write

Making UX content effective can save millions of hours of human time — the most precious resource a human has.

UX content makes, saves, and protects the organization’s money, while serving the people who use the experience. Unfortunately, the vast majority of product designers have no training in writing for user experience (UX). In training (and in my book), I teach designers how to troubleshoot designs and improve their effectiveness using research-backed guidelines for usability, brand voice, and starter strings for most occasions.

Designers who write (and know when not to)

When designers know how to write in the user experience (UX), they leverage their customers’ language in their designs. Their designs are more effective, and faster to improve, because they’re applying a system of content-focused usability guidelines.

I don’t teach UX designers to replace content designers. Instead, I help them recognize when the problem they’re facing needs specialist help. Just as writers should learn the basic tools of prominence and visual emphasis, designers should learn the basic tools of language — and both groups need to be able to recognize when their skills aren’t able to meet the need.

Two people wearing yellow lean over a frustrated person at a desk, all of them gazing at some creative work. I like to think of it as illustrating two yellow #2 pencils who have come to life to help a graphic designer with a difficult content problem. Image by wayhomestudio on Freepik

To understand why people would spend time and money learning content design, it helps to know why they’d use it: “The words aren’t working.”

What content design problems look like

There’s a spike in (expensive!) support calls: customers don’t think they can just use the new feature.

The “easy” solution to a new regulatory demand was to add an interrupting disclosure to the conversion flow — which has caused a massive drop in revenue.

The new, hotly-anticipated feature needs to appear in the main navigation, but the right label for it is already in use.

Customers just aren’t clicking the prominent, well-designed button.

Each of these are content design problems: that is, they are interaction design problems that need solutions from a content perspective. They require deep thinking about the language, images, and icons in use, where they appear, and how customers, regulators, internal stakeholders, and others will understand that content. Solving these problems requires thinking about the systems that already exist, whether it’s similar concepts or even similar-sounding words. It also requires innovating new solutions, using language or images that build confidence, understanding, and trust.

These are problems that can cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars if they aren’t solved, whether in lost revenue, support costs, or subsequent litigation. That’s why it’s cost effective to invest in the content, and in people who can anticipate problems like these.

One of the fastest investments to pay off is to train designers (and product owners) to spot where these problems might arise, and point them in the right direction to solve them.

What content training looks like

In my workshops and classes, I start with a definition of what UX content is, and how it’s different from other content. This grounds us in “content for doing” — the core purpose of UX content, and how it meets business and customer needs.

I provide a framework for content usability, including specific criteria to make the content accessible, purposeful, concise, conversational, and clear. For example, keeping descriptive text limited to a width of 50 characters, and no more than 3 lines deep. Just knowing these “rules” helps a designer spot where their design might be in trouble.

Participants get hands-on practice analyzing UX content for usability with this framework. We work iteratively, collaboratively, to reflect on improvements and inspire new paths forward.

We use a practical framework to define brand voice, including guidance for concepts, vocabulary, verbosity, syntax, punctuation, and capitalization (when appropriate for that language.) These are meant to align to the principles of the product itself: what the product is meant to be to the people who use it.

Participants improve on the newly-usable content to make it recognizably part of that brand, making it come to life. By comparing rewrites created for different brand voices, people get to experience the power of language to convey the product principles.

In the longer UX writing classes I teach, we have opportunities for research, information architecture, conversational methods of design, and more. But even in shorter workshops (like this one starting October 4!) people walk away with a new toolkit of UX capabilities, ready to apply these frameworks to their own products.