By Sheila O’Hara (opens in new tab)
User experience (UX) writing seems so simple and straight forward. And then you see a customer use the product.
Anti-drug pencils from the Bureau for At-Risk Youth of Plainview, 1998.
You realize that you didn’t anticipate a scenario, and the words you used are confusing, or worse misleading, in the context.
If you’re a designer or writer, you know what I’m talking about. We’ve all had that moment.
The reason UX writing might appear to be simple is that most of what you see and experience is on the surface – the words on the website or app interface. But there’s a lot going on under the surface.
Photo credit: Unknown
Taking a closer look
UX writers (also called content designers) approach their work by combining expertise in user experience with content strategy, writing and editorial skills, and knowledge about content workflow, process, and organization.
Let’s take a quick look at each of the content specialty areas as they inform what you’ll need in your framework.
Content strategy: UX writers think about the strategic approach to delivering content for a product experience, considering the goals of the business and customer along with the implications of the design for content engineering and operations, often with a view to scaling the experience.
For example, a chatbot’s content strategy will be different than a web page’s content strategy or an insights dashboard content strategy. In every aspect from voice and tone, to how content is sourced, structured, managed, and delivered, to how it is measured, there is a strategy behind it. It’s the UX writer’s job to consider all these factors when designing the experience.
Writing and editorial skills: UX writers help customers make meaning of the user interface by using familiar, everyday language, ensuring sufficient context, and managing the cognitive load and pace of the experience through the amount and sequence of information shown to the user at each step.
Framework components that guide writing include UX content patterns, voice principles for the product, tone variations for different audiences and situations, and terminology that is used consistently to provide a clear, readable, and predictable user interface.
Content workflow and process considers how you’ll plan, produce, deliver, and analyze your content. Activities that inform the strategy include things like content audits, workflow and governance models, content ecosystem maps, and quality assurance guidelines and process.
When writers think about how the content should be structured based on where and how it will be rendered, they bridge the gap between content design and product development. Content engineering activities that inform strategy include things like content modeling and taxonomy and metadata and schema definition.
Building a framework to guide UX writing
First, do your research
Research is your most important tool for informing your framework and evaluating it over time.
If you learn how your customers think about what they’re trying to do and reflect that in how you structure the content and the language you use, you make it easier for them to understand and use your product. In a previous blog post, I delved into research that underscores the importance of language in supporting user success. You can read about it here (opens in new tab).
As a first step, do some research to check your assumptions about the language your customers are using, their context, and their mental model about the tasks they’re trying to accomplish. User research is key to this understanding as well as competitive research and external and internal search query analysis. A great resource for tips on research that informs UX writing is Content Design (opens in new tab) by Sarah Richards.
Next, build your framework
Once you’re grounded in the customer’s context, language, and mental model, you can develop a UX writing framework for the product you’re designing. These frameworks are flexible and tend to morph over time, so don’t let perfect be the enemy of good – just get something written to share with your stakeholders for their feedback.
- Write a mission statement that establishes the intent for your UX content strategy
- Draft your voice principles and compare them with your overall brand and product principles. Do they align and support each other?
- Identify your style guideline source or develop your own to help ensure that your application of language is consistent and predictable
- Partner with design to identify UX patterns and develop content guidelines for them.
- For example, if you have a chatbot interface, you might think about how many conversational turns (back and forth between the bot and user) you will you have in a conversation. How many lines of text per chat bubble? Will you include emojis and if so which ones? Defining this ahead of time and testing it with your customers helps the team anticipate and adjust design patterns.
- Establish your editorial processes and the tools you’ll use to ensure quality and get input from the right people at each step of the way. Think about who needs to sign off on the content before it goes live and make sure you have an agreement on turnaround times for reviews.
- Work with your development team to make sure you’re structuring the content and delivering it in the most scalable, efficient way. Ideally, use a tool or process that allows writers to edit and publish UX content rather than sourcing content in resource files that writers can’t access.
These tools help you create an intentional, predictable, customer-centered user experience.
Finally, review your framework with stakeholders – writers and managers on your team, product, design, development, marketing, and research partners. If you are in a heavily regulated industry, be sure to get input from legal and compliance partners on your editorial process and guidelines.
Evaluate how well your framework is applied
Once you have a framework to use, evaluate your UX content against a heuristic checklist that measures how well you implemented your guidelines.
- Heuristics are general rules or mental shortcuts that help you decide, pass judgment, or solve a problem quickly. Your heuristics reflect the characteristics of UX writing that you’ve identified as important to customer success and documented in your UX framework guidelines. The book Strategic Writing for UX (opens in new tab) by Torrey Podmajersky provides a useful example of a UX writing heuristics scorecard.
Use content critiques. Content critiques or “crits” are a forum for bringing work-in-progress to a group of your peers to think through UX problems together. During these critiques, you can receive feedback, and use other people’s knowledge to make your writing better. The heuristics checklist is a great tool to use in content critiques to focus feedback.
For content critiques to be effective, here are a few tips:
- Make it a safe space with room for all voices
- Use a heuristics checklist to keep the feedback focused (the writer should establish the context and focus for the feedback)
- Let the writer who is presenting the work drive the conversation
- Categorize feedback as critical or optional
Whether you are doing UX writing full time or as part of your job, you’re contributing to a big investment in creating ease of use and satisfaction for your customers. Hopefully, the approach I’ve shared here will help you develop your own toolkit for UX writing projects.
How does your team use UX frameworks in creating user experiences? If you don’t, are you interested in trying it after reading this article? Let us know! Tweet us @MicrosoftRI (opens in new tab) or like us on Facebook (opens in new tab) and join the conversation.
Sheila O’Hara leads a team of passionate, dedicated, customer-centric UX writers who design content experiences that empower Microsoft 365 admins with clear, coherent, and helpful information when and where they need it—to remove barriers and help them get their jobs done. Her work as a content designer has spanned consumer and commercial products in a wide range of industries, including non-profit and government, productivity software, small business tools, and financial apps. The common thread winding through these experiences is the importance of language in supporting comprehension, building confidence, and inspiring loyalty and trust.