UX Writing
Why the world needs more UX writers?
Facts behind the scene of the UX writing world.
31st of Jan 2016, I established my first software company as a sole entrepreneur. Since that day, I have dedicated my time, energy, and money to build SaaS products that could serve as a pain killer for specific industries.
Software product interfaces consist of objects, design elements, and text. Where all components together frame the interface of a software product. Text plays an extremely crucial role as users heavily rely on text to understand the product and how it works.
The robotic, confusing, dishonest, misguided, or inappropriate text will lead to higher bounce rates and, of course, a higher acquisition cost. Putting more text to explain a software product won’t help either, as users will be scanning and skimming instead of deep reading your text copy! Users will stay up to 10–20 seconds on average on each screen. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-long-do-users-stay-on-web-pages/
Having the right amount of text in the right place and for the right user is the ideal goal. UX writers put effort, knowledge, and time to research, analyze, design, and test selected text before publishing it. While measuring the text’s performance will always be a running job.
With the different business positions and markets, brands are trying hard to leverage their branding into their text. Brand voice and tone play a significant role in designing the text for a particular software business.
Expanding in new markets is always the growth trigger. Many product constraints will arise, such as different payment methods, address structures, and product text language (English, Arabic, French, etc.). Address structures and payment methods might be a constrain, but text language is a complex issue where payments or address structures affect minimal pages in a software product. While the text, on the other hand, will affect every single page.
Simply translating is not a proper way, as languages differ in the number of words each language holds. As an example, the Arabic language contains more than 23.00 million different words in its word bank. While on the other hand, the English language has around 0.17 million only. If you are expanding from English to Arabic, you will use the wrong words in many cases. Putting Human-Centered Design into action among the text creation process will help to remove uncertainty in text usage. A UX writer must be consistent in the brand voice and tone without being confusing, dishonest, or inappropriate while applying a new language.
Unfortunately, there is a lack of resources in the UX writer’s profession, which is advantageous for calibers who are trying to switch careers. As all industries are digitalizing, the aim of hiring a UX writer who fits into the market context becomes tough.
