T-shaped Growth for UX Writers
Let’s see in which areas a UX writer can broaden their expertise
There’s a point in almost every career where a person grows from being a newbie, acquires all the necessary knowledge and experience, and gets fairly good at doing their job. As a UX writer, you may notice you’re spending less time on your day-to-day tasks, you’ve gained more confidence and finally become comfortable explaining your decisions and speaking up at team meetings.
You may ask, is that all? Should I just go on working like this? Well, yes and no. Of course, you’ve learned a lot and deserve to have some rest. However, where there’s not improvement, there’s stagnation. So basically, nowadays you have to constantly keep learning new things to keep up with the world, industries, and employer demands.
You can and should work on your core hard skills like writing, editing, and reviewing UI copy as well as your soft skills to improve collaboration. But I have another idea for you. It’s not new at all but a bit less talked about and obvious in case of UX writers. It’s about growing as a T-shaped professional.
Who are T-shaped people
Basically, T-shaped people have 1 or 2 main skills or areas where they have a lot of expertise. They are the core of their T, the foundation of it. Developers may have front-end or back-end dev skills here, for instance. For UX writers, that’s usually writing copy with all the stages and details that involves.
Apart from that base, a person can have a couple of other areas in which they are not as competent as in their main one, but still they know something about it and find it interesting.
See? That’s how we get a T-shape. And it’s not a secret that companies are willing to hire people who can do a bit more than what is implied by their job description. Being a T-shaped professional usually means you have a broader vision, greater knowledge of related areas, you’ll likely communicate with your colleagues easier and can help with tasks where your additional expertise might be in need. And you get paid more since you’re a bit more rare and valuable 😉
Building your T as a UX writer
As I mentioned earlier, the base of your T is most likely to be UX writing or content design since you’re an expert in it and that’s what you do most of your time.
But how to choose your additional areas? I would recommend listening to yourself first: what interests you most? What makes you excited, inspired, and eager to learn? Choose these areas, and you’ ll be a success! Or, apply a more rational approach: browse through job applications, see what employers are seeking in candidates, and pick what you like.
To make your life a bit easier, I wrote down a few areas that you as a UX writer or content designer can dig into to “widen” your T-shape:
- Design
Advancing your skills at understanding UX and building mockups can streamline your work process and bring communication with your designer to the next level. Check out Figma tutorials on their YouTube channel, learn a couple of tips and tricks, and never again fear auto layouts, prototypes, variables, and components!
- User research and testing
It’s really cool for a UX writer to study research methods and know when and how to apply them. To extend your expertise, try conducting a research or copy testing yourself: going through the whole process will definitely bring a lot of insights and get your brain working hard while analyzing your findings.
- Analytics
Understanding metrics also becomes more and more of a requirement form the writing folks, but there’s always more to learn. If you’re new to it, consider asking your team analysts about metrics that you track in your product. To dig deeper, try setting up and checking some metrics yourself to get more comfortable with the software and maybe even build a case about a piece of UX writing affecting business numbers!
- Accessibility and inclusivity
These two guys (or ladies) are on top now. They are also almost essential, because every UX writer needs to create content that is accessible and ethical. However, to really become an a11y advocate, you can study technical guidelines, find out how your product can achieve levels of accessibility, and raise awareness of this issue among your team.
- Localization
That’s much easier to learn if you actually work in a multinational company which builds a product targeting different markets. Here, there’s plenty of details to explore, from the technical implementation of localization to establishing the workflow with translators. If that sounds too scary, you can begin by noticing good and bad examples of localization in products you use and thinking of ways to improve them.
- AI writing
Another hype sphere which is transforming the way we work now and will most likely be still there for the next couple of years. It’s worth investing your time and maybe some money into exploring AI tools for editing and writing since they can significantly streamline your writing process and make you more efficient. Get the most of ChatGPT and other tools and use them as your servants.
- Conversational design and voice interfaces
Specializing in voice and conversational design also has potential. Designing userflows and writing for voice interfaces are not only fun, but also useful: you get to develop your logic skills when projecting all the possible branches of the conversation and learn how to better deal with various user emotions and corner cases. And, if you’re writing for a chatbot, you can gain some technical knowledge about how AI models work and train, which is also fascinating!
So, these were my suggestions of areas you can develop in to grow your sides of the T-shape. The list is definitely not full, and there are many other things you can embark on. If you ever feel stuck, choose what interests you and study it! 👩🎓
