UX writing: why is it so important?
User Experience writing is more than content design. It’s content strategy for products.
“As a writer who stumbled into UX one day many years ago, I was understandably excited; finally, organizations are realizing that copywriting shouldn’t only land on the marketing team’s desk” — UX Booth
I’ve been spending the past few months curious about this emerging role of UX writer because I always liked to write and, as a UX Designer, I was wondering how I could do copywriting for products that could really impact user experience. I only discovered a few years ago that UX writing is an actual “thing” and many companies around the world are actually hiring UX writers to work on their teams.
After doing some research on the topic I came across different definitions, articles, courses and job descriptions for UX writers. Even though they present different points here and there, the vast majority share important common principles and best practices in the field. I will share some of them with you in this article, so you can start applying the principles of good UX writing as soon as you finish reading this article ⚡.
We can start by saying that UX writing only exists because we no longer tolerate interfaces like this:
or this:
This is why the necessity of thinking about the communication between user and interface became a very important field over the past decades (or at least since online platforms became more popular). UX writing was born to make users’ lives easier. Or, as Laurah Mwirichia puts it:
“[UX writing] It’s the lubrication, so to speak, between the user and the machine. Without any UX writing, the process can be counter-intuitive, and confusing. With terrible writing, the process is convoluted, messy and worst of all… frustrating”.
The primary aim of UX writing is to settle communication between users and a digital product, helping them achieve their goals with language. It’s designing for content, aka writing for the interface, aka writing to promote user experience. UX writing is all about content strategy for products.
Nevertheless, UX writing is much more than copywriting. UX writing is product-oriented, focusing on helping users navigate the interface, whereas copywriting is sales-oriented, and is focused on attracting new customers. While UX writers are part of the design process (and work on design/product teams), copywriters take care of the outcome of that same process, selling the product to attract customers.
Although many UX writers also write microcopy, we can’t say the opposite is true, because microcopy writers might not be looking at the whole experience. For this reason, UX writing has become a dedicated job in many companies. Their main responsibility is to bridge the gap between content strategy and design.
“It’s not the job of the UX writer to know all the right words. It’s the UX writer’s job to bring the customer’s perspective” — Shawn Roe
UX writing best practices:
As you can see, user experience design is inherently connected to language and communication. However, writing is still something that most designers struggle with. For this reason, common conventions were established to help us create powerful conversational UI and improve the overall user experience — especially if you still don’t know how to best convey your words and guide users seamlessly throughout your product. So here are some best practices and do’s and dont’s for UX writing:
First, be clear:
“For clarity we remove the technical terms and put the action in the context of the user.”
Often, the words used are software problems and not people problems. Pay attention to verbs. A verb is an action word, it tends to be the most powerful part of your sentence. In a perfect world, it would always relate to some action on the part of the user.
Also, be concise:
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
Being concise doesn’t only mean keeping it short, it means something closer to being efficient. When we are writing concisely, we look at our message and make sure every word on the screen has a distinct job.
And, of course, be useful:
“Give ’em what they want: If you understand people’s motivations, you can align yourself with them and help them get what they want.”
A call to action (CTA) guides people to their next step. You want your text to help people get where they want to go. For this reason the call to action needs to resonate with what people want to do.
These 3 main principles form the so-called “Triad”: Clear, Concise, Useful. The great challenge for the UX writer is to find the best balance between them all, even if you have to sacrifice one of them from time to time.
But wait, there is more! Here are other UX writing principles that I think are relevant 👇
Avoid long blocks of text
Users don’t read UI text — they scan it.
Avoid double negatives
Double negatives increase cognitive load — they make users spend extra time decoding the message.
Begin with the objective and most important words
When a sentence describes an objective and the action needed to achieve it, start the sentence with the objective.
❌ “To see item’s properties, tap on it”
✅ “Tap on item to see its properties”
Or frontload the most important words into the beginning of any communication with the user:
Use specific verbs whenever possible
Specific verbs are more meaningful to users than generic ones.
Make the copy consistent
Inconsistency creates confusion. One typical example of inconsistency is replacing a word with a synonym in a different part of the UI.
Avoid jargon
For clarity, you need to remove the technical terms and use familiar, understandable words and phrases instead.
Write in the present tense
Avoid using the future tense to describe the action.
Write in the active voice
The passive voice makes readers yawn. Compare this sentence in both voices:
Use numerals
Use numerals in place of words for numbers — they are easier to scan.
❌ “You have two missed calls”
✅ “You have 2 missed calls”
Be preventive, don’t scare your users off
Sometimes, descriptions of actions are inaccurate, especially when there is payment involved. Make sure your users have enough confidence to navigate your website before committing to any action or transaction.
Keep it conversational
We don’t want to deal with interfaces that sound like robots.
For example, Tumblr is human-oriented by using witty language to inform users that their username is already taken. They realized that it’s a frustrating experience when someone has already used your unique username, so they address this by giving a compliment. Instead of the offensive This username is taken — which means You’re not creative enough — they chose to give users a tap on the back: It’s a good one, but it’s taken.
These are just a few examples of UX writing best practices that I picked for you (and myself) to start thinking about the importance of the role of a UX writer (or the role of a UX Designer that writes 🤓). It is always important to remember that unlike creative copywriting, which is concerned with acquiring new customers through sales-based communication, UX writing deals with current users that have already tried the product.
👉 Remember: the voice and tone of your brand are really important for UX writing! This is another great topic to explore, so I will probably do it in another article. But, for now, just keep in mind that you should follow the guidelines of your brand’s voice and tone (if you have them formalized)— meaning, your words should be infused with your brand personality. You guarantee not only consistency in communication but also a familiar environment for your users, minimising possible misunderstandings.
“UX writer’s main job is to make sure every step of the user flow is focused on the user’s need”.
Anastasiia Marushevska also affirms that the UX writer’s task is to guide users through your product and be invisible at the same time, while establishing a powerful conversation tone with your users that will definitely improve their overall experience. And one good way of checking the impact of your changes is to A/B test the words on the screen.
“When trying to find the right words for your product never underestimate the power of A/B testing”
Guy Ligertwood wrote an article on the importance of A/B testing to help you choose the right words on your website. One good example is to see how Google ran an A/B test on the start screen on Android Pay. They changed the button from ‘add card’ to ‘get started’ and it resulted in a 12% increase in click throughs.
With AB Tasty you can do this easily thanks to our WYSIWYG editor. It is the perfect approach to put into action all these best practices and validate the impact of good UX writing on your website.
But, remember: although A/B testing can give you an overall yes-or-no result on what works better and what doesn’t, it doesn’t provide feedback on why certain types of text works or not. More complex texts need a deeper understanding of how users interact with content, so you will probably need to use other methods for more qualitative insights. For more information on this topic, I recommend this article:
Please feel free to share your thoughts and thanks a lot for reading until the end! ❤️
