What’s UX writing? I mean, really!
Everyone talks about it. Write about it. What does UX writing really look like, in real life?
Torrey Podmajersky is a UX Writer who worked at Xbox and today, Google. A few days ago, O’Reilly launched Torrey’s book Strategic Writing for UX . 243 pages in which Torrey helps us understand the field and handle our first projects with success. Interview.
What is UX Writing?
UX writing is about choosing the words in user experience, which means: the titles, the descriptions, the buttons, the form fields, the error messages. All of the places where people could see words, and have those words help them understand the experience, build confidence in the experience and most importantly, do what they were there to do. The better we choose those words, the more people will enjoy those experiences, recognize the brand behind those experiences and be satisfied by them. Recently, I have been hearing a lot of confusion where people think it’s talking about the experience and documenting it. That is also a very important thing to be doing. We can’t build these experiences when we can’t talk about them. So, the UX writing also known as content design, sometimes known as UX copywriting or UX content strategy, all of those are about the words for the experience, for the user to use.
OK. Can you tell me how you came to UX writing?
Yes. I came to UX writing because I was a high school teacher. I taught physical science and chemistry for nine years. Then I left teaching and went into communications. I was an internal communications person at Microsoft, doing everything from emails for the Vice President to newsletters and setting up all-hands meetings for a division. And, as we were going through a reorganization, my boss was very supportive and also very encouraging and said, “why are you using this skill behind the scenes? Make products. Find something to work on to make our product better”.
I’d love to know what was different from what you used to write?
It’s easier to say what is the same. It is writing for a purpose. We are not writing to make a beautiful thing or, entice or engage like a piece of fiction might be. It’s not about creating beautiful characters and worlds and things like that. It’s about generating ideas, meeting purposes, moving the people along, and motivating people’s actions. Also distinct from straight-up marketing and advertising writing, which is trying to bring people into the funnel, getting people to a purchase point, to a conversion point: taking them from wanting a product to buying a product. I very rarely do that kind of writing, which is its own specialty. I’m doing the, “Oh, you wanted to sign in”, “you want to do this, take this action in this app. Let me take you through that process”. That was a big change for me to make when I was getting started in UX writing. How could I take my skills and my background and make a product? What would that apply to?
At this time, when you don’t know what UX writing is, but have this skill. How do you get started?
The hiring manager at Xbox for technical writing, Pete Kelly, who ran the writing team, explained how it would work. The problem he needed to solve was to enable teenagers on Christmas morning to be able to open their Xbox box and set it up correctly without waking up their parents. He wanted that kind of magical moment where these kids would have to understand pretty abstract technical concepts and fall in love with this new world of gaming. We were writing the user interface for the console, not for the individual games. The console is the part that they need to run the games, but it’s also the barrier between them and their games. So if we can get them through that and build a sense of delight and accomplishment, fast and seamlessly, we’ve done our job. We’ve gotten them to playing their game and loving that brand. Everybody’s happy.
You have been in the UX writing community from the beginning. We may say part of its history. What do you keep in mind?
The history is still very much being written. It is still very early days. This book is the very first from a major publisher about UX writing, which blows my mind. That’s crazy. Especially because the history of UX writing is long. We’ve been using words in user interfaces since computers went from punch cards to screens. As soon as we started having screens that were human-readable, we’ve been using words on them. How have we gone this long without thinking about those words in a systematic way and, in a strategic way, to meet our goals? You’ve been on the subway. You’ve been in the metro; there are signs that tell you where to go. That is UX writing. So the history of it is both ancient and so modern as to be just barely getting onto its feet.
It used to be done by designers, they were not called UX, but just designers…
Right. In many companies, designers have been responsible for all of those words. Usually, that’s the part of the design that everybody contributes to, in long meetings where in general, by the end, either the right words have been miraculously suggested and then agreed upon by the group, or everybody still hates the words, but the person with the most authority has said, that’s it. That’s what we’re going with moving forward. Finding those words can be extremely hard. At Microsoft, many places around the company were not like Xbox. They had technical writers consulting on the words. If the designers or the product owners were very stuck, they would call these word people and get them in to say, “oh, what should we call this thing?” And then they would usually get formal, very technical words that were explanatory if you already knew the domain. So that was one way those words happened and still happen. There are some teams where there’s a UX team and then not part of that UX team, but separate, there is a content team that the UX team works within some way, sometimes right at the end to sort of fix the words before they go to engineering. And then in what is my preferred way of working. Some teams are UX or product teams that have designers, graphic or interaction or motion designers and content designers. All have a piece and are working together to solve the problems with all of their skills.
You have been in the business since 2010, what has changed?
I think that much like design has had more of its value recognized as absolutely critical to having success with your product and with your user experience, people are starting to realize that having content also part of that conversation makes an enormous difference. So companies I’ve been working at, have generally had English as their common language, in house. But I have teammates whose first, second, and third languages are not English, but we wouldn’t want not to hire them just because they’re not going to write native English in the way that is expected from that interface. By bringing their expertise, I can work with my team from India and China and France and Ukraine, any number of places, and say, great, here’s what we need them to do in English for this American audience. We need this. Then let me work with my internationalization team to make sure that it is correctly, not only translated, but configured to be appropriate for all of these other languages.
And if the definition in French was not the same as the wording in English, could they change it to make it more relevant?
Oh, absolutely. And I think it’s necessary to adjust the language because people tend not to realize how much of our language depends on idiom. Direct translation can come up with something super nonsensical.
What would be your advice for structuring the discipline?
Oh, that’s a big question. My advice is to keep thinking of ourselves as UXers, like people who are focused on creating exceptional experiences for people who want to use these experiences. They have goals that they want to meet; just like the organizations have goals they want to reach. If we keep focused on that instead of the fractured focus: “I work on words” or “I work on the icons or the interactions” or whatever it is. If we are working together, respecting each other’s different skills, and saying: “Oh, thank heavens you’re here,” we are solving this hard problem. This is a smart way to avoid answering structure questions. Because different teams should be organized in different ways, right? We have large companies with very hierarchical organizations. These teams need to be able to form and coalesce around a problem, to solve it. In a hierarchical structure, they are maybe having content separate from UX or separate from the product or engineering. Perhaps that makes sense.
How can we identify if a company is ready to work with UX writers? How do you measure a company’s maturity?
I think this is an extremely hard problem to solve. The places where I feel most confident that content can make a difference is where there is a UX problem to solve. I think that that’s independent of content problems because frankly, there is no UX problem that is without content. We use words between humans; it seems! Even with pictures, those pictures tend to need explanations.
So if a company is looking for designers, if the overall attitude is, it’s not pretty. It’s not satisfying in this pretty way. We don’t sound right. That is a very different problem than: “my users don’t understand what to do” or “my people don’t recognize my app in the marketplace.”
I think that there are real business problems and real business metrics that UX can make a difference with. And whether that is content or interaction or graphic design or motion design or sound design, we as UXers should keep our eyes on what are the things we can change about engagement, about retention, about recognizability, about easing, onboarding, and usability.
If a company isn’t looking at those metrics, that’s a problem. If they’re saying, “oh, we need it to be pretty.” There are times for prettiness, and that is very valuable. But that is a great time to hire a branding agency who will give you a set of “pretty” options and they are experts in that. Then they don’t have to maintain a team that gets very upset over time because they’re just asked to maintain prettiness without fixing problems of usability, engagement, retention, and onboarding.
Those are the kinds of issues that, in my experience, UX is beautiful at solving. A company is reaching some maturity level where UX is appropriate when it says, we have these fundamental problems in our business model, and to solve those problems we need the humans who give us money and who use our product to behave in different ways. So when we need people to change their behavior, you have a UX problem that UX can solve, and you have a UX writing problem too. That’s when we can help!
How do you sell UX writing? It can be internally, or to a client. What would your advice be?
My advice: always bring it back to the goals, and say, “What do you want to have happened? How do you want the people to behave when they see this? How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to understand? Do you think the text is getting you there now? Do you think that people are behaving at the rate you want them to do? Sometimes the content could make a difference. If it’s internal, I can say, “Oh, I’ve seen what you have here, and I had some ideas of how maybe we could make it meet your goals better.” I try not to go to people and say, “oh, your app is terrible. Look at all these words; they’re wrong” because maybe they wanted people to look at it and feel intimidated and confused. That’s not usually how you want people to feel when you look at an experience. But if that’s the goal, great.
What is the ideal profile to become a UX writer?
I think you have to care about helping people meet their goals and be able to develop the skill of seeing things from their perspective. I came to that from teaching where it’s a very similar skill. People who are willing to consider, how other people see the world and are eager to help, introduce different ways of thinking.
For someone who wants to start. How can an aspirant UX writer create a UX writing portfolio?
I think that there are some great resources online to see other people’s portfolios and what other people are doing. For me, it’s necessary to keep in mind that the portfolio is a snapshot of a moment in time and a sales document. You are saying, “I have these skills, these resources, this point of view which can be valuable for this kind of experience at this moment in time.” Just like the advertising that we see on billboards today. They are different than the advertising we would have seen 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago. The styles evolve, and we need to be aware of what we’re being compared to. So looking at what’s out there now, show a significant data point: What are the decisions that we are making and saying? In your portfolio, show why this is an excellent example, explain what the constraints, and the context, the stakeholders were. Walkthrough what was the problem solved. How was it measured?
One UX writer that I know asked me one question for you about the tools. Because today, we don’t use specific UX writing tools. What do you use, for your UX writing?
I frankly use whatever my designers are using. So far, I have not had a good set of tools that were specific to UX writing that would have all of the features I would want in them. The most significant barrier to success so far has been the difficulty of integrating all these creative people into the same product. If you had seven sculptors working on the same statue, that would also be a problem. So if I have a designer using Google slides, I use Google slides. If I have a designer using Sketch, I use Sketch. If they’re using Figma, I use Figma. But what I always do is I draft my text inside those designs so that we can decide on the text, seeing them in context as the user would see them. If I just put them in a Google doc or a spreadsheet or a comment, we don’t know how that will look, and it will have a very different impression.
Everybody talks about AI and voice assistant. Do you believe it’s the work of UX writer or is someone else doing this part of the technology work?
It is some of the most critical UX writing being done. And it is incredibly complex because people will forgive a lot of written words and a lot of weirdness in written words, but when they hear the same things, the words become offensive or surprising or just unintelligible. Especially for the personal assistants like Siri, Cortana, Alexa, a Google assistant, if it isn’t right on, if it isn’t perfectly designed, then it is weird and creepy, and people turn it off. So you have one chance as a UX designer or content designer, or UX writer to get that right.
So what skills do we need to learn?
The same, in my opinion. All of those core skills of which language to use? How to keep it brief? How to do all of that in the written word? There is also this overlay of the tone of voice, and phrasing things as a question; the different liltingness of words, and the pacing of words and individual phrases. All of that is designed and is not my specialty at all. And there are some fantastic writers out there doing this. I can’t wait for more of their books on it.
What is the future after UX writing? Do you see other trends coming?
I think that we will continue to use words as humans for the foreseeable future to create these interactive experiences. I think we will get a lot better at it and we will know a lot more about it. There are parts of my book, in which I say, here is what I use, and this is not validated by research. So please, if you are doing research, go out and do the research and then share your research because we need better tools. We need better understandings of what works and what doesn’t work. In an ideal world, a much better book than mine will be written in another decade, because we will know so much more and we will have so much more to build on.
To go further:
Read: Strategic Writing for UX by Torrey Podmajersky
