So, you want to be a UX Writer. Have you tried working within your own company?
Over the last couple of years, there’s been a surge in people with the following titles:
UX Writer, Content Strategist, UX Copywriter, and Content Designer. While not every single one of these is like the other, they are often used interchangeably for a new role emerging in the high-tech industry.
First, let’s define the role. A UX Writer is someone who writes the words in a product and typically sits on the UI/UX team within a company. The goal of a UX Writer is to create a better experience for the user by choosing words that are clear and useful within the product.
Before there was a defined role of a UX Writer, the words within the product were typically written as an afterthought by an engineer, product manager or a designer. But because the words help make up the experience for an end-user, a need emerged for someone that had the skills to pick the appropriate words for the product, work with designers and think strategically about the content.
Finding a UX role within your company
Many companies may not yet realize that they need to fill this role. It is your job to educate them about the value you can bring by paying attention to the words in the product and making useful suggestions on how to change them. If you are looking to test the waters, there’s a chance that the very company you work for might need you to step in and help. I myself took this route when finding my way into a career in UX.
I worked on the Marketing team before joining the UI/UX team at RingCentral. I grew familiar with the way the company writes and sells itself. One day I realized that there were inconsistencies in the product. And discrepancies between how the product team was writing and the marketing team was writing. Who’s writing the content in the product? I asked myself and then started in my investigation.
Take the initiative and arrange meetings with people in different departments. For bigger companies, it can be hard to figure out where each role lives and who performs what function. The more you network within your company, the quicker you’ll figure out where there might be a gap that you can fill.
It turned out that I was not the first to notice the inconsistencies within our product, but there wasn’t a single source of truth for everyone to follow, so they kept happening. I started searching the internet and books to try to figure out what steps and suggestions other people had, and that’s when I stumbled upon the UX Writer role. I wrote up a Tone and Voice guide, made content rules for the teams and began to familiarize myself with the language of designers and product managers.
Perhaps that’s the same approach you can take to investigate the product at your company to see if there is a need for a UX Writer.
- Find out who is writing the product copy now for your company
- Arrange meetings or coffee dates with members of different teams to figure out where there might be a writing gap
- See if you can spot any inconsistencies and suggest improvements to that person or the executive that runs the product department
- Figure out if you can be the liaison between different departments that write customer-facing content so that the two sound the same
- Take classes, read books, and educate yourself on UX Writing and how to communicate with designers
When looking for new career path within your company there might not be a path laid out or a job description outlined. Try to look for the value you can provide for your company and pave the way for the role that you want to be in. Keep searching for opportunities to where your skill set can be utilized and you never know, you might bump into an emerging role that your company didn’t even know they needed.
