The Go-To Guide for UX Writers and Content Strategists
What I learned from some classic copywriting and UX content design books and articles
Over the past year, I’ve been working with startups, as you may know, I usually wear many hats, while collaborating with designers, researchers, engineers and marketing professionals. My background is journalism and editing, and I also have work experience in social media management, visual storytelling, and content marketing. Thus, writing and communication are my core skills.
Since early this year, I’ve been working on a mobile product as a side project, which is targeted at UX designers, and I started learning more about user experience design while designing the product, and UX writing caught my eyes: UX writing is a marriage of two disciplines, user-centered design and traditional persuasive copywriting.
UX writing is more about guiding users to achieve their goals, helping them to solve their problems, motivating the right behaviors, and its success lies in the micro-moments.
After I talking to industry professionals from companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Expedia, they thought I already have some skills as required for a Content Strategist/UX Writer, so I read some books and articles they recommended as listed below to learn more about it, and lately I decided to dive into UX writing and content strategy to build my career.
- Copywriting, 2nd Edition, by Mark Shaw
- Letting go of the words, by Janice Redish
- On writing well, by William Zinsser
- Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug
- Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman
- Content Strategy for the Web, by Kristina Halvorson
- The Definitive Guide to Copywriting, by Neil Patel and Joseph Putnam.
- Tiny content strategy framework, by Nicole Fenton
- Strategic Writing for UX: Drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention with Every Word, by Torrey Podmajersky
- Microcopy: The Complete Guide, by Kinneret Yifrah
- The Content Strategy Toolkit, by Meghan Casey
Here’s my summary of what I learned from reading, hope it can help you, I would appreciate hearing your thoughts!
📋Understand the product you’re selling
Every product has a unique personality and it is your job to find it.
— — JOE SUGARMAN
Let’s start with a product description:
- How would you describe the product?
- What’s unique/special about this product?
- What big benefit does it provide?
- What pain does it alleviate?
- What features are included, and what are the benefits of each?
Features are the technical aspects of the product, and the benefits are the way those features help customers accomplish something they want to accomplish.
- Specific results
For examples, “Helped XXX increase signups by 25% after researching their customers.”
👋🏻Develop the brand tone-of-voice
Not all businesses have their brand tone-of-voice, however, the role of a brand’s language is to communicate its core principles and messages clearly and consistently, so that every time customers have contact with the brand they receive the same impression of what the brand is all about. It’s about long-term relationship management.
Your brand expression has to be ahead of its time. This means thinking ahead about the market, the customer, and how things will evolve. This may sound kinda overwhelming, no worries, here’s a list of 36 Great Brand Guidelines Examples with downloadable links!
🙌🏼Understand who you’re selling it to
Complete your customer research:
- Who currently buys your product?
- Who would you like to buy your product?
- What does a typical customer look like?
- What do customers love about your product?
Steps:
1. List groups of customers/site visitors/users
2. List major characteristics for each group:
key quotes, experience, expertise(what do they know about the subject matter?), emotions, values, technology, social and cultural environments, the context of use, demographics
3. Create personas
4. Write scenarios: which tell you the conversations people want to start
At this point, you should have a good idea of:
- How to describe your product or service in a simple yet understandable way
- The main features and benefits of your product/service
- The big benefit, i.e. the main selling point(s) of your product/service
- Who your customers are and what matters to them
Let’s move on to copywriting.
✍🏼Writing well=having successful conversations
Frankly speaking, as a content creator, you want to make users stay longer to finish reading the content, however, in the digital world, people are browsing instead of reading through, so you have to make people “grab and go” when that’s what they want to do, by focusing on your key audience/visitors/users and their key tasks. 🤳🏻
Create a profile of your target audience
When it comes to a specific copy, you will have to think of your targeted audience, by understanding what they’re like and what their situation is, and decide on a style of language that they will relate to.
For example: “predominantly male, aged 18 to 35, single, with a reasonable disposable income — they love our products, but they are not aware of the full range we offer.”
Details of the strategic messages that must be communicated
For example: “our range of men’s toiletries performs better than most premium brands, yet they don’t have a premium price tag.”
6 tips for writing attention-grabbing copy that sells
- Convey a benefit.
Sell the benefits, not the features. Don’t tell your customers what something does; tell them how or why it will improve. Use words that are in your customers’ vocabulary while highlighting a benefit that actually matters to them.
Your goal should be able to write a headline like this that goes beyond a simple description or a surface-level benefit. The ultimate goal of copywriting is to connect with customers at an emotional level.
2. Create a sense of urgency.
For example, “Labor Day Sale: Get up to 50% off this weekend only!”
3. Create a sense of community.
For example, “Join 365+ businesses that are using XXX to optimize their database.”
4. Create a sense of exclusivity.
For example, “Sign up today to become one out of only 100 people to get free, one-on-one, personal training.”
5. Make a compelling offer
Potential deal sweeteners include bonus materials, free shipping, free installation, and much, much more.
6. Provide a guarantee
For example, “1 year limited warranty”,“ Return within 90 days for a full refund.”
Always be in the context of how you can help your target audience accomplish their goals by having a conversation with them
- Anticipate and answer your target audience’s questions
- Write conversationally
“I” for your target audience in the question, for them to ask
“you” for your target audience in the answer, for talking to them
“we” for the organization
- Use keywords your target audience are looking for: can also be good for SEO
- Put the action in the verb
- Gender-neutral writing
use you
use the plural
use “a,” “an,” or “the” instead of a pronoun.
📝Edit
📝Check
📝Rewrite.
🔎Test and optimize
Metrics: open rate, click rate, orders, etc.
Subject line:
- After sending them to 20% of your list, you’ll know which one is most likely to perform better across the final 80%.
- Use Mailchimp A/B testing
Design and layout:
- Use Google URL builder, Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, or Google Analytics Content Experiments.
Podcast recommendations:
- The Content Strategy Podcast
- Content Rookie
- Writers in Tech
- Content Strategy Insights
Useful websites:
Google’s UX writing guide.
MailChimp’s Voice and Tone guide.
Check out many more style guides on styleguides.io.
Copywriting
I’ve been collecting some good microcopy on Pinterest: Good job, Microcopy! Let me know if you want to collaborate with me to make this board even better!
SEO: http://searchengineland.com/
UX
- Nielsen Norman Group: the NNG publishes frequently about trends in UX, best practices, and research. It’s a must-have for the bookmark bar.
- UX Booth weekly email
- Invision design digest
- UX design weekly email
- Designer News
- A/B testing: https://www.behave.org/
- Accessibility: Web Accessibility Initiative, https://www.w3.org/WAI/
- Usability: https://www.usability.gov/
- User Experience Professionals Association: http://uxpa.org/
- Daily UX Writing, UX Copywriting “How-to” Guides: https://dailyuxwriting.com/how-to/basics
- UX Writers Collective (They offer online courses and certificates)
- UX Writing Hub (They offer online courses and certificates)
Matt Jones once gave a talk at Interaction15 about his experience running BERG and directing interaction design at Google’s Creative Lab. He said:
“[Writers] are the fastest designers in the world. They’re amazing at boiling down incredibly abstract concepts into tiny packets of cognition, or language.”
As a writer, we should be proud and also be cautious, because words shape our ideas, how we see the world, and how we relate to one another.
