An Introduction to UX Writing
Here at SEEK, we’re working to understand how we can best include UX Writing as a core discipline within our broader UX practice, so our products can say the right thing to job seekers and hirers. As a UXer at SEEK with a love of words, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on setting up a UX Writing practice, in three parts. Part 1, below, provides an introduction to UX Writing — what it is and why it’s important. Part 2 shares tips for how to raise awareness about UX Writing within a business, and in Part 3 I offer suggestions on how to translate that awareness into a practice.
What’s UX Writing?
Imagine you’re watching a movie. It’s got beautiful cinematography and is edited to perfection. It looks and feels amazing. But, something’s missing. The dialogue isn’t flowing and you’re struggling to follow how anyone is feeling about what’s happening. Elements of this film are great, but it just can’t really be a great piece of cinema without a script to match.
The same goes for our digital products, meaning our websites, apps, or even conversational bots — any of the interfaces that we interact with online. They can look good, function smoothly and feel largely intuitive to use, but if the instructions are unclear, or the messaging isn’t informative, then it’s not a polished product. The visual interface, the user flow and the written content all have to work together to create a seamless overall experience. This is where UX Writing comes into the equation.
UX Writing basically refers to the words that you’ll see on digital products and interfaces. These words can take the shape of shorter microcopy, such as button labels or form fields; or they can be in longer form, such as onboarding instructions and error messages. These individual words and sentences are often overlooked in the design and delivery process, but they’re crucial to creating a rounded product.
One of my favourite things about UX Writing is that it enables us to let our users feel like they’re engaging with other people, instead of just an interface. It allows us to put personality behind a brand, or to put empathy into an instruction. People use SEEK for a range of tasks, like looking for a job, or exploring further education, to find volunteering opportunities or to connect with the perfect candidate to fill a role. At any point someone interacting with SEEK might be celebrating, feeling worried, or feeling full of hope. Through careful and considered visual, interaction and content design, we can do the right thing at the right time for our users, whether it’s giving them a high five or showing them support.
UX Writing is increasingly gaining recognition as a crucial discipline for UX teams to include. I’m seeing more and more roles for UX Writers being advertised, amongst UX Designers and Researchers. But, if your team doesn’t yet have a UX Writer or the capacity to hire one yet, it doesn’t mean that the product content should be left by the wayside.
As UX designers, many of us dabble in user research, service design, information architecture, interaction design…we span many skills. UX Writing is another skill that many of us can develop as a core capability under the UX umbrella.
UX Writing without UX Writers
In an ideal world, every business would have a UX Writing team or a product content strategist to oversee content, provide direction and bring it all together.
In real life, however, content on a product can be written by a broad range of people within a business. Yes, it could potentially be written by UX Writers or content strategists. Or, as I’ve found more commonly in my experience, it’s written by a mix of designers, developers, product managers, the legal team, the marketing team, the senior leadership team…everyone’s a copywriter!
Whilst it’s great that everyone wants to get involved, I’ve found that this can cause a few problems, mostly around inconsistency of tone, voice and language. Everyone you know probably speaks in a slightly different way, which can come across in your product’s content. This can cause confusion for users and contribute to a poor experience. In some cases, such as with unclear onboarding content, misleading instructions, or conflicting messaging across different parts of a site or app, poor UX Writing can impact uptake and usage of products and features.
We can also have the complete opposite situation to everybody wanting to get involved, which is when nobody cares enough to get involved. Lorem ipsum or placeholder text sits quietly in designs until just before release, where whoever is left to build the final product makes something up and it’s never revisited. In the tech world, even UX design can sometimes feel like a nice to have. In this case, UX Writing can feel like a very very very nice to have.
So, what then can be done within a business to reconcile these issues and make UX Writing an official “thing” within the team?
I’ve found it effective to tackle this in two ways. The first way is to focus on raising awareness about UX Writing — letting people know what it is and why it’s important. The second is to try and translate that awareness into a UX Writing practice — teaching the team how to do it, who should be doing it and when.
In Part 2, I’ll be talking about How to Raise Awareness About UX Writing. In this post, I provide some simple steps to help you spread the word about UX Writing to your team and the wider business. Then, in Part 3, I’ll help you take that awareness further into a practical implementation.
After all, we can’t make a great film without the script to match!
