“The first draft of anything is shit.” -Hemingway
“They want to know about your process”. Applying for UX jobs requires a certain amount of self-reflection in analyzing this routine. In a collaborative industry, the question of process comes down to how people think. How they solve problems from different angles and how they will collaborate to achieve a common goal.
I believe creative process is directly correlated with how people write. It sounds cliché because writing is in itself a creative process. But before it is creative, writing is based in communication. It reflects how we view the world and ultimately how we view our response. Good writing forces clear thinking and the best writing forces clarity with acute brevity.
Of course, creative process is unique and personal. I have talked to people who say their writing process comes like something out of a dream. It just happens when they have thought about something enough. Others told me about a day filled with looking out of idyllic windows, sipping tea, surrounded by minimalism and design only to have their entire days worth of thoughts come to them in a five minute time span.
To be perfectly literal, my process starts with a rush of thoughts and ideas. I spend the day working to make sense of something and then translate the meaning in more tangible ways. For me it involves a lot of reiteration. With every revision, I am able to navigate new ways of communicating. But it takes each reiteration in order to see what direction is the best fit for my audience and my message.
As a content strategist and writer with deep roots in user center design, my process is cross platform. It is a process of generative and evaluative research. Repetition applies to writing, strategy and wireframing. Its addictive simply because there are moments when I know my writing has captured a truth, a resonance or a sentiment that can be shared. It bakes in the human element of what we do and what we work for. In a sense it creates a community with a single sentence or an engineered experience.
Objectively, good writing and good user experience need to capture the personal and the universal while also being concise. For me, writing is intrinsically a UX process. The writer must anticipate what their reader will understand, what they will need from the piece and above all what will keep them engaged.
