Can writing make me a better designer?
Well… Designing can make you a better designer.
But writing can definitely help 🙃
Writing is good for everyone. Whether you are a professional writer, a designer, a design leader, a product manager, a developer, an entrepreneur. We at the UX Collective have been writing about design and UX for at least 12 years. While we cannot say writing has improved our design skills, it has improved adjacent skills that all ladder up and contribute to making us better designers.
Writing can help one more clearly articulate ideas, tell stories, communicate, and influence others. Isn’t that what product design is all about? As product designers, we often find ourselves working on things that have little to do with moving pixels on design software, and more to do with how we communicate our product and feature ideas.
Writing helps you communicate your design decisions more clearly
Working on an article forces you to line up your ideas cohesively and coherently. We sometimes overlook the importance of having a beginning, middle, and end to ideas we put out in the world — whether written or verbal.
“Because users were having a hard time realizing they could sign up for updates, we’ve decided to move the signup button higher on the page and make it more visually prominent in comparison to other components. With that, we expect to see an increase in signups from people visiting this particular page, which gets 11% of all the traffic we see on our website.”
See what we just did?
Because ____, we did ____, so that ____.
A writer goes through a similar exercise when they are publishing an argument in the form of an article or story. They create frameworks; they structure their thoughts in a logical way that other people can more naturally interpret; they give order to the chaos that is the creative process.
Writing is about framing problems in different ways
When you are writing an article, you have to force yourself to explain your thinking in a way that resonates not with yourself and with people who think alike, but with your broader readership.
Putting yourself in other people’s shoes can be a powerful mechanism to sell your designs through. It all comes down to exercising your empathy and shifting the way you frame ideas to something that resonates with other people.
As designers, we go through that process several times throughout any given project. We have to approve our designs with people who are not designers; people whose KPIs are not “usability”, “beauty” or “clarity”, but much more business- or technical-oriented metrics. These stakeholders have a different background, share a different vocabulary, and tend to frame their thinking in different ways. If you want your designs to see the light of day, you’ll eventually have to speak their language.
Writing helps you find your unique point of view
If you’re a good writer, you are indeed reading a lot about a topic before you decide to write about it. In the process of researching that topic, you read opinions from a lot of different people (specialists who have written about that topic before). You agree with some of them. You disagree with others.
At the end of that process, you start to formulate your unique point of view about that original idea. You have to. Otherwise, if you’re just replicating other people’s thoughts, why writing a new article in the first place?
If you’re just replicating other people’s ideas, why writing a new article in the first place?
That’s quite similar in product design. As designers, we research references, benchmark how other companies have solved the same problem, look at best practices, and successful design patterns — but ultimately, the solution we create is unique and precisely tailored to that unique brief.
Writing strengthens your argumentation skills
Even if you are not writing about design, developing your writing skills will also strengthen your argumentation abilities for when you are not writing.
If you’re trying to convince people of the premise of your article, you have to work pretty hard. You have to find the right arguments. You have to find existing research that proves your point. You rely on other specialists, on metrics, on the wisdom that comes from other people. You learn to prioritize arguments that are stronger than others. You carefully choose the words that will be most effective to get your point across.
Gradually, your brain starts to incorporate some of those practices, which then become second nature to you. You begin to apply those same techniques when you’re not writing, whether you are voicing over your design decisions in a design review, building a keynote to introduce a new idea to your team, or simply writing an important email that will help you in your day-to-day work.
Writing forces you to be more thorough
If you’re doing an excellent job as a writer, you are doing a lot of research. Even when you find information, metrics, and stats that can help you build your argument, you are fact-checking everything. You are researching different sources. You are proofreading everything you write. You are taking the time to think about which images you will use. You are spending more time than you’d like to admit writing and re-writing your article’s title, so it’s compelling, honest, and unique.
All that thoroughness does not go unnoticed. Over time, once you’ve written several articles, you start to pay more attention to details not only when you’re writing articles, but in other aspects of your life.
Writing makes you tell more engaging stories on your designs
Designing a page is telling a story. When you design a page, you are essentially telling a story to your audience. Forget modules, column grids, iconography, colors for a second, and think about the core of what you are trying to communicate. That, right there, is a story.
Writing articles will not only get stronger at shaping stories and letting that inform the structure of the pages you design, but it will also make you better at writing copy for your designs (some people call this UX writing). Over time, you learn what works and what doesn’t in terms of copywriting — which combinations of words are more powerful than others, how to write with different tones of voice, etc. In fact, (and this is for all designers who are working in a country who speaks a language that’s not your native one) writing is a powerful way to increase your fluency in another language as well.
Writing helps you be more clear with your team
No matter if you are sending an email, responding to a JIRA ticket, writing thorough design documentation, or directly responding to a Slack message — clarity always wins.
We have all gotten frustrated at least once when we received that email from our manager with a request that wasn’t 100% clear, haven’t we?
Writing with clarity and coherence becomes even more important when you grow in your design career and become a leader. A clear communicator has more chances of rallying people to achieve a common goal, with a shared understanding of the steps they need to take to get there.
Writing, like any other skill, is a matter of practicing
Isn’t that what they say, that you have to practice something for at least 10,000 hours to become a specialist?
But the hours themselves aren’t enough: you need a routine, you need to build cadence, you need focus — and a tiny bit of obsession.
The only way to get better at it is… to simply start writing.
