Organize your copy drafts like a pro

Make a clean-up in your Figma drafts so they can serve you well

Messy drafts situation

Even though UX writers now often have editing rights to designer’s Figma files (and thank god we finally came to this era!), sometimes it’s still more convenient to keep copy drafts in your space. This way, you can do whatever you want there: brainstorm ideas, collect feedback, iterate, review, and create many versions of text without making a trash out of the common Figma file.

For about 2 years of daily copy editing for 4+ products, I’ve never been really mindful about keeping the drafts clean. “Well, they’re drafts, they are supposed to be messy”, — that’s what I kept telling myself.

But with time, as the number or tasks and projects increased, my drafts started to look like a mess. Plenty of copy variants one next to another, duplicated screens, and hundreds of comment treads... At some point it got hard to find the task I was working on or identify which one of the copy alternatives was final and approved.

Just an example — and that’s not the worst state in which my drafts used to be 🙃

This is when I realized it was time for a massive clean-up. I did that (spend way too much time, tbh) and then decided to create a system that’d keep my drafts always neat and nice. Well, and I also made some kind of a New Year’s resolution to never clutter my drafts again 😂 You know, it’s just like with your apartment — if you don’t throw things around and keep it clean with 10–15 minutes of tidying up every day, you’ll never ‌need a whole-day cleaning session when you’re close to a mental breakdown, crying and regretting you ever wanted to do this.

If you feel this relates to you, try to allocate a couple of hours to making your drafts a cozy and organized place. Future you will be really grateful!

Tips for organizing

Here are some of my tips and tricks that can help you with creating a beautiful and working system out of your drafts. Still, it’s important to bear in mind that only you know what’s best for you, so any advice should be taken with a grain of salt.

• 1 Figma design file for all drafts

You can always have it open so that it’s easy to hop in there any time and start writing or editing. The only issue here is that at some point, this file can get bigger and load slower, but at this time you can make a new file or archive some old tasks by moving them to another file.

• 1 product — 1 Figma page

This works best if you’re working on several products or solutions. If you’re focused on a single product, you can have 1 major page with main flows and mockups + create separate sheets for some new big features.

I have a page for each product which I currently work with and store finished or legacy projects below

• 1 frame = 1 task or a feature

Remember to name it accordingly: “social login form”, “cookie banner”, or “account deletion flow”. I know it can feel too much at the moment, but it’ll help immensely when you need to find that one task where you wrote copy for a promo banner.

A part of my drafts with copy for features and tasks organized in frames

• Indicate status of the task

I use only 3 statuses: before — in progress — final. In before, I keep mockups with first draft copy that a designer or a PM gave me. Then, I duplicate them under the In progress status and make my edits, research, etc. Then, when everything is discussed and finalized, I paste the mockups with ready texts into the Final section.

This makes it super easy to see your impact and work. Plus, you can make a UX writing case out of any task organized in this way — just take the beginning version, the final one, and describe your thinking process, decisions, and discussions you had when working on the task in progress.

As for the actual indicators, you can pick anything you find convenient: a tag, just a heading, sticky note, emoji. Anything clear and distinguishable goes! I use emojis from Miro because they’re cool :)

Here are my statuses: Start, Work in progress, and End

• Add context in a static way next to the mockups

By context, I mean task description, business requirements, tech limitations, any research data you might have, and just about everything about your task. I recommend keeping context in plain text or boxes with text next to the mockup or a flow. Sometimes you can have context spread between several sources: conversations in DM with a developer, ticket descriptions in your task tracker, comments in Figma, meeting notes. It’s much more convenient if you keep all the information about the task just where you’ll need it — next to visuals and texts.

Sticky notes are my go-to for adding context and comments

• Keep your questions and comments in sight

Just on sticky notes close to the screens. It’s tempting to leave comments as comments, but they get lost so easily when you have plenty of treads. People who will answer your questions can post them as comments, that’s not a problem: you can read the replies and delete or update the initial comment based on their answer.

If you need, you can also make sticky notes of 2 colors: one for your questions, and another — for suggestions, thoughts, and comments.

Here I’m using yellow notes to give suggestions and red ones — to outline concerns for discussion

• Duplicate mockups for creating copy alternatives

If you need to create several versions of a screen or a UI element, there’s a plugin that can help — Pattern Hero. It duplicates the object and prganizes them in a neat column or a row. I usually edit texts in those objects and also add notes to them with brief explanations of why I like one option more than another or what made me change the wording.

Pattern Hero plugin for duplicating UI elements and frames

• Receive feedback from your reviewers in comments

Once you fixed what they pointed out, resolve the comment. If something important comes up during the discussion, you can pull the note to the screen and display it in a static mode along with other open questions you may have.

A part of a discussion with reviewers about an error copy

So, here is how your task drafts can look like when organized in this way:

Looks much better than a bunch of screens from our “Before” screenshot, right? :)

I know it takes time and discipline to get used to the system you’ve created. You’ll always be tempted to just paste a screen somewhere in the corner of the page and quickly edit something. But with time, the system will save you so much mental space and time when you’ll need to return to those old mockups. You might want to find out why you made this or that decision, collect examples of your copy for a portfolio update, or just reflect on your old writing — and all the details about your tasks will be there for you!

🎵 I’ll be there for you… Will have this song stuck in my head for a whole day now 😅

So, that was pretty much it about drafts. Let me know if some advice was new or helpful and share your own tips for keeping drafts clean in the comments!