Once upon a time, I thought being a writer meant waking up late and spending hours in a dimly lit room hunched over a laptop with my brow furrowed, in my own private world.

And yet, as a UX writer on a product design team, my days are full of stand-ups, brainstorms, project kick-offs, writing workshops, and design sessions.

Go figure. Projects move fast, and there’s little time to withdraw into an interior writing world to perfect ideas before sharing them.

Beware of silos

Before I joined a design team, my creative writing and publishing background trained me to keep unfinished work private.

Work-in-progress seemed like a sacred personal space where I could burrow into my own ideas.

And for team projects, I might spend hours in private docs, refining concepts, and polishing language.

Here’s the problem. Eventually, you emerge triumphantly, ready to present your work to the team, only to realize that the project has changed direction or new constraints have emerged.

Time to start over.

Sure, sharing a crude sketch or your messy, unorganized notes can feel awkward, even risky. But as a UX writer, sharing early saves me time and breeds creativity.

A more collaborative approach could make you a more nimble, savvy writer too.

First person, plural

Think about the last thing you wrote for work. Was it a design spec, an error message, a splash screen, or creative brief?

Have something in mind? Good.

No matter the format or style, writing is about getting your point across. And it usually helps to get feedback from people along the way.

The next time you’re working on a spec or a project with multiple stakeholders, take a look around.

Is it just you and the tumbleweeds in that Super-Important-Project-Doc?

If so, proceed with caution. It’s easy to get blocked and stuck in your own head. Writing for products can’t be done on your own. You need partners.

Share broadly

Taking cues from product designers and other UX writers, I’ve traded in my reclusive writing habits for more inclusive ones.

Collecting feedback from designers, engineers, and product managers in copy docs throughout my writing process shapes how and what I write.

Together, we craft more creative solutions informed by our diverse perspectives.

Make your work a team effort

Welcoming people into your process may take practice. Here are 5 ways to make your writing process more collaborative.

1. Lay out the welcome mat

First things first. You’ll be getting feedback from people with different expertise and approaches to problem-solving. You’ll need an open mind and a way to share ideas in a central place.

You could use a collaborative editing tool like Dropbox Paper. Create a doc and share it with your team.

Try thinking of your shared doc like a writing salon, a comfy living room full of color and light where everyone is welcome to add ideas.

Welcome exploration and encourage people to share their thoughts.

Humans inspire humans

Seeing a coworker’s face show up in your doc can motivate you to keep working and build out your ideas.

I like to imagine that the faces in my doc belong to a crowd of supporters sitting on cold metal bleachers at a track meet, cheering me on, some even ready to jump in and grab the baton when I get winded.

2. Timing is everything ⏰

Are you ready to share? Think about it.

You’ll be inviting people to share and help inform your thinking and writing choices. Before you do, you might want to pause. Sharing too early can put you on edge and make it hard to get down ideas.

So, give yourself a moment to capture your initial thoughts before inviting people to comment and add their own.

Share early

Capture your initial spark and outline your vision for the project: sketches, handwritten notes, brainstorms.

Decide on a set amount of time you want to work in “solo writer mode.” This could be 30 minutes, an hour, or a few days. The point is to be specific and track your time.

The simple act of sharing can move your work forward, so go ahead and invite someone you trust to weigh in.

After you’ve heard from one person, reflect on their feedback. Make changes if you need to, then start inviting more people.

Give ’em a bird’s eye view

Make your plans visible at the top of your doc or at the very bottom. Even if you’re not sure of everything, push yourself to share anyway.

If you like outlines, go ahead and include one in your doc, or try including a sketch or to-do list.

It may be tempting to apologize for mistakes and half-finished sections. Instead, add a brief comment in the doc that sums up what you want to work on.

3. How are things going? 💬

You can use your shared doc to make sure you’re on the same page with your team.

Ask questions

When you share work-in-progress, be specific about the type of feedback you‘d like. For example:

Trying to decide between 3 different directions? Ask people to comment on what they think is and isn’t working.

Struggling with a problem section? Highlight that part of the doc and ask for advice.

Or share a list of questions at the top of the doc and check them off as you gather answers.

Nearly finished? Bravo! Ask someone for a quick proofread.

Banish writer’s block

Words are hard. Feel like you’re stumbling around in the dark? Check in with design partners and stakeholders.

Are unanswered questions holding you back? Is the purpose of the project clear? Do you need more data?

Let people know that you’d like their help clarifying the goals.

Whatever’s going on, capture your concerns in a doc. You could start a section called “Open Questions.” Or just pin comments throughout a brainstorm or meeting notes doc.

Then, invite someone else and get things moving together.

4. We’re in this together ✊

Master the social side of sharing your work-in-progress.

Find a buddy

Inviting someone to “look over your shoulder” can increase focus and build momentum. Keeping a specific person in mind can give you a greater awareness of writing for an audience and lend purpose to your work.

After all, a sense of community and accountability makes movements like National Novel Writing Month so good at making people productive writers.

When it comes to getting writing done, there’s a lot to be said for positive peer pressure. Let a friend know how your writing project is going. Tell them when you expect to finish and encourage them to ask you about it later.

Stay put

Have you ever had the instinct to copy everything into a private doc where you can “clean it up” when you see that someone else has opened your shared doc?

Yeah? I’ve been there.

Let’s say that you’re typing away in a first draft, feeling pretty good about your progress. Plenty left to do, but things are starting to come together.

Suddenly, your lead’s face appears in the upper-right hand corner of your doc.

Why is she looking at this now? I’m not done!

Mid-sentence, your fingers freeze over the keyboard.

Ugh!!! I never asked him about doing it this way. What if he hates it?

If your flight-or-fight instincts kick in, you may feel an intense desire to hide your vulnerabilities. Instead, try staying present.

Stay calm and type on

It’s great when your teammates show interest in your work. But, when you’re in a state of flow, comments from others can seem like distractions.

It can be hard to process feedback and continue writing at the same time.

If you’re working in a shared doc and feeling overwhelmed by an onslaught of comments, it’s probably fine to ignore them until you’re ready to review them.

Yep. That’s what I said. Ignore feedback…at least for a while.

Try adding a comment at the top of the doc letting everyone know you’ll respond later.

5. Feedback is a gift 🎁

Absorb, evaluate, and prioritize comments and suggestions from your team.

Stay curious. Stay focused.

Ever received feedback that just seemed way off-base? Not every suggestion will be helpful or even relevant, but resist getting defensive and dismissing ideas outright.

Being respectful of a variety of perspectives is part of the creative process for team projects, even when you’re facing deadlines or have a very different opinion.

Remember:

Feedback is a conversation. Ask follow-up questions to be sure you understand. Sometimes, a face-to-face conversation can prevent misunderstandings and add clarity.

Put things in context. Return to your plan or outline and prioritize feedback that helps with the goals of the project. Try applying that feedback and ask people to take another look.

You did good

It’s easy to overlook positive feedback and dwell on negative comments.

If you’re working on something challenging, try keeping encouraging comments open in your doc.

It may sound silly, but glancing at a little praise every now and then can keep up your morale as you refine your writing.

All for one

This first person, plural approach could save time, reveal new ideas, and help you get unstuck.

I think it makes writing things like specs, UX copy, reports, and project plans more fun and rewarding. For me, a more transparent and inclusive process helps things fall into place faster and makes it easier to get buy-in from team members.

Has sharing early ideas ever helped you create better work? Tell us about it in the comments.

Thanks to Andrea Drugay, Fanny Luor, John Saito, Kate Apostolou, Liana Dumitru, Roxy Aliaga, and the Dropbox Writers’ Circle for their feedback.

Want more from the Dropbox Design team? Follow our publication, Twitter, and Dribbble. Want to make magic together? We’re hiring!

How to open up and create better work was originally published in Dropbox Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In many ways, paper offers an experience that is just better than reading digitally. A dusty book jacket, the scratchiness of paper between your fingers as you flip through a novel. The smell of a first edition found in an un-shelved stack at a used bookstore.

Books have a physicality that resonates with most of us. People remember what they’ve read from physical books longer, and find it easier to grasp the the arc of stories.

The thing is, much of what we read these days is on screens, not paper. Words saturate the apps on our phones, tablets, and computers. Websites are teeming with words.

Context and Content

Can you imagine reading a string of a social media posts or the on-boarding flow for a new app printed on paper and bound in a book?

The context is completely different, and so is how we think and feel about the content. When reading on a tablet, laptop, or phone, you’re having a different experience than digging into a dog-eared paperback borrowed from a friend.

Digital contexts inspire a specialized kind of reading with its own kind of magic.

Product designers, writers, and content strategists can design better digital reading experiences if we understand more about what happens when people read in these contexts.

Yes, people read.

Studies show that people used to have a harder time reading on screens. As technology has improved and content on the internet has expanded, so have our ability and willingness to consume words on screens.

Human brains are getting better at parsing information in digital contexts. We’re reading longer blocks of text on our phones than ever before.

Yet when we read online, most of us toggle instinctively between skimming and scanning. Sure, we can hack our minds to switch to a different pace and style of reading, but these are our “go-to” modes for reading words on screens:

When you skim, you are a gatherer.

You survey the landscape of the text. You roam the hills and valleys of words as you gather information in the most efficient way you know how.

When you scan, you are a hunter.

You’re on a mission, and you know precisely what you’re looking for. You focus on your mission, ignoring pretty much everything else.

Let’s take a closer look at these 2 reading modes and how we can design for them.

Skimming mode: “What’s in it for me?”

Chances are, you read the title of this post, skimmed the first paragraph, and scrolled down to check out the headings. A small percentage of you decided that reading every word may be worth your time and effort (Aww, thanks!), but most people don’t get to the end of articles and blog posts.

Online, we are generally goal-oriented readers, or “information foragers,” especially when it comes to nonfiction, instructional, and transactional content. Our eyes tend to lightly skate over the words in things like modals, confirmation dialogs, popovers, and menus.

It doesn’t take long to decide to leave an app, dismiss a dialog, or close a window. In mere seconds, we evaluate relevance to our needs and interests.

Skimming is most people’s default method of absorbing content online. Through eye-tracking studies, the Nielsen Norman Group has documented that people tend to skim in a few stacked lines across the screen up top, and then our eyes drop down the left side of the screen in what looks like an F pattern.

On phones, we tend to fix our gaze on the image or words in the top third of mobile screens, then, drop the gaze to the bottom of the screen or up to the very top to take action.

Even when you read a complete sentence, your reflex is to skim. Your eyes leap back and forth across a line of text every second in movements called saccades. How far your eyes leap varies depending on your reading level and how well you know the content, but the intent is the same.

Jason Santa Maria explains how, saccades help our eyes register a lot of information in a short span in his article, “How we Read” in A List Apart.

During these leaps, or saccades, our brains are searching for places to pause. Brief pauses between jumps are called fixations. This is when we process how individual words or letters relate to the other items on the screen.

Whenever we read, our instinct is to conserve mental energy. This is especially true when we read on screens where short attention spans, multi-tasking, and frequent interruptions are par for the course.

Design for skimming

Skimming is a handy technique and saves time, but people overlook nuances in meaning when they skim.

This is a problem if you want users to understand new features, upgrade options, terms of service, and the like.

Designers and writers can try a few things to support people’s instinct to skim.

• Front-load content. In this example, Slack puts the main message in the boldest and largest type and offers more details for people who want them.

• Display progress bars and status indicators.
• Sync images with the tone and message of your copy. The illustration in this email from Simple Bank enhances the feeling of security and ease conveyed by the copy. The message is clear in a single glance.

• Offer choices and menu options that are clearly distinct from one another. Spotify’s web app list numerous options with unique and specific labels. You could skim this and get the gist of what you can do here without thinking too much.

• Use descriptive links and Call to Action labels. The text on the button in this Squarespace email is both informative and concise.

• Display like elements and copy together. Structure makes skimming more effective.

Scanning mode: “My mind is made up.”

In scanning mode, you already know what you’re looking for–the familiar or something relevant to what you want to get done.

You are on the hunt, and a screen with a block of text is like a maze that you want to escape as fast as you can. For example, it probably wouldn’t take you long to scan the next paragraph and locate the word “encounter.” Try it now. See? Told ya.

Do you remember learning to read?

You were actually training your brain to connect the shape and sequence of specific letters with meaning. Now, when you encounter written text, a big part of what your brain is doing is scanning for familiar shapes. Everything else recedes into the background.

Not all psychologists agree, but according to the oldest theory on how we recognize words, our brains process words as shapes. Since the most distinctive part of letters is their top half, we can usually still make out words even when the lower halves of the letters are covered.

Depending on our goals when we scan, our vision narrows to words that represent what we want to accomplish. For example, “Move” or “Sign up.” Scanning is probably part of the reason we are less open to learning while reading screens than we are when reading paper.

Design for scanning

• Use sentence case whenever you can because words are easier to identify in this style.
• Avoid all capital letters since most of us are used to reading a mixture of upper and lowercase letters.
• Use a limited vocabulary so people become familiar with what you call things.
• Use conversational language. Avoid jargon readers aren’t familiar with. Readability scoring tools can help. For example, the return flow on Amazon’s website features language that is common, conversational, and direct, which helps decrease the potential for confusion.

Why any of this matters

A study by Nielsen Norman Group found that people tend to fixate on text before graphics. After loading a webpage, just 22% of those studied paused on a graphic element first, compared to 78% who paused to consider text in a headline, summary, or caption first.

Word choice, sequencing, and strategic placement of the text we use in apps and websites are powerful design tools, like photography, illustrations, graphics, and layout. Designing for skimming and scanning modes can help create better reading experiences, establish brands, convert users to subscribers, and decrease customer support tickets.

Hey there! Are you one of the small percentage of readers who made it to the end of this post? Nice! You deserve a reward. Oh, and here are a few resources that may be helpful:

• 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People
• On Web Typography
• The Science of Word Recognition
• Microcopy: The Complete Guide
• Norman Nielsen Group Reports
• How to design websites that mirror how our eyes work
• The Reading Brain in the Digital Age
• Designing with Eye Tracking in Mind

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Angela Gorden is a UX writer and content strategist who loves lists, G2 Pilot pens, and dot-grid paper.

Are you skimming or scanning right now? was originally published in Evernote Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.