But Wow “Wow,” takes work.

That’s how I open every critique with my writers.

Put simply, UX Content Design and UX Copywriting are not about writing. They are about the least, best words - the fittest of words - needed to give a user confidence in their emotion, action or intention.

“We are not only practitioners of word wizardry,” I tell my teams, “We fiercely undo and delete more words than we will ever write. We are word warriors.”

Always, be it emotional, humorous, instructional, tempting, wayfinding, informational or indicative language, less is more powerful than even a little more.”

Many of the UX writers I’ve managed and coached, like me, started out elsewhere wrangling bigger, more, and/or different words in another form and place: Technical Writing, Marketing, Journalism, Social Media, Blogging, even SEO and SEM.

And that’s what I love. The letting go of form, to embrace feeling. The meeting users with words that understand, comfort, encourage and empower them. The stepping into the ring to find the right ones.

I’ll cave and give a recent example here. A writer that clung to definite and indefinite articles, hard.

Draft: Select the business that your firm is in.

A very literary-involved discussion later, proper sentence structure was out the window and a question was the the way to go.

Final: What does your firm do?

It seems so easy when it’s finished, but it’s hard for anyone who loves writing, loves words. Only the fittest of words make the cut. And it’s sad to see the others go.

But it leads to lots of winning words. Keep scrolling, let’s look at some.

About

AADD

Inclusivity

•CTAs

•Sign in/Log in

•Bento audit – CTAs, icons, CTA, file upload patterns

•Interim UXC go-to solution

•Overlap/gaps

•Separate standards from styles

•Intake form

•Merge?

•Accessibility audit

•Whiteboards

•Pendo onboarding (35+)

•Long-term UXC housing – research

•(Sketch, Axure, Figma) and customer experiences (Billing, CS, Commerce, Account Management, In-App, Onboarding, Marketing/Sales, Trials, Renewals)

•Translation

•Examination of DITA, API, Design System, AEM, other options

•Inclusivity audit

•Product/feature naming audit

•Onvio V&T

•UXC definitions standardization

•Design org efforts

•Cross-team collab efforts

UX design is complex. There’s more to our work than thinking of the customer needs. We have to create designs that developers can feasibly build. Come up with solutions that will provide value to the business beyond looking nice. We also think about how to make them accessible, work across many devices, and the impacts it’ll have on the other parts of our product.

•“Voice modulation & frequency across channels”

•Narratives are the stories that have a chance of sticking; the effect we’re looking for happens inside the audiences head

•Fewer words means more of a story gets read

You have to do things you haven’t done before to get somewhere you’ve never been before.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable

"The tech writing background is a double-edged sword when it comes to UX writing. Obviously there's a wide degree of variance in both fields, but broadly speaking, technical writing - at least if it's focused on documentation - is generally about the "how to." It's detailed, rigorous, and comprehensive. In contrast, my UX writing work is not generally about how to complete a task, it's more broadly about the customer's experience with the product; surfacing the benefits/value to the user, providing clarity and direction to the experience, and helping them solve problems and move forward via your content.

Tech writing arms you with a lot of skills that can be transferable to UX: you need to be able to write well, communicate clearly, place yourself in the role of the user, and create concise and accessible content. But tech writing can also train you into some habits that are counterproductive in UX work: adherence to a rigid set of standards, a desire to describe every possible outcome, an urge to write overly-comprehensive content that tries to cover all the bases at once rather than addressing a specific user problem in a specific scenario, etc.

Put another way: Tech writing can train you to describe trees really well. In UX writing, you need to be able to see the whole forest."

Chesterton's Fence

Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled "The Drift from Domesticity":

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. 1)

1)"Taking a Fence Down". American Chesterton Society. Retrieved 21 June 2014.

●

Shared fridge

Informtion expertise, authority, truswrothiness and truth

Myths:

•Diversity and inclusion are opposing ideas

•Diversity is a problem that needs to be solved

•Its an opportunity

•Homogenous groups are more likely to share biases, gaps in knowledge

Considered
Compelling
Consistent
Contextual
Concise
Correct
Crucial

Evangelize

Examples

•Darwin

•UX Content components patterns guide

•Messaging matrix

•Punctuation/grammar guide

•The Pivot

•B&A Roadshow

•Speaking up/defending content

•You can’t teach context

•60/40

•Can’t teach others to care about words or writing to the extent that they impact users

•You can’t teach context

•If it looks easy that’s because it was hard, and we are doing a good job – it’s our job to make it look easy - professional writers struggle with this work, how can it be taught to others?

UX Content design is 3D, not linear

Othering

Why honoring names is important
Names carry history, reflect identifies, belonging is a fundamental human need

•Vidhika Bansal - “Say my name, say my name”

•When something is underlined in red, its assumed it’s a typo

•Non-native determinism – people attracted to work based on their name? (Terry Boot replaced Peter Foot as Shoe Zone boss)

•DARWIN: lets not ”validate” someone's name and not allow hyphens or whatever – not up to us to decide what makes a valid name

IGET DARWIN / CONTENT BELIEF SYSTEM

Copy - crate intention

UX - Satusfy one

Content Strategy, UX Content Design, Copywriting & Multimedia should:

ž   Include only the most fit of words communicating together at the height of their meaning.

ž   Allow these words to work together in a chorus of storytelling and information sharing to continuously compel, orient and empower users –no matter the product, device or audience.

ž   Quickly connect customers and users to their thing (e.g., a purchase, time-savings, productivity).

ž   Use the right words for the right experiences—and the right experiences for the right words.

ž   Reflect our customer as the hero of our narrative, always supplying ways for them to overcome pain points.

ž   Have guardianship of content evolution, housing and delivery systems to ensure consistent, correct, usable and useful experiences.

ž   Be standardized, stabilized, scalable and sharable, leaving room for focus on organic content needs.

ž   Be evidence-based in the outset and/or the iterative, and always consider: What do we add, amplify, do differently, or discontinue? 

ž   Bubble up from the core of a brand’s ethos in all cases, remaining customer-obsessed and rooted in the connection between company, product and audience at all turns.

About

Select the business that your firm is in.

“Again, there is an extra word here. What is it?” I asked.

A very literary-involved discussion later, articles as related to proper sentence structure were out the window and a question was the the way to go.

What does your firm do?

It seems so easy when it’s finished, but it’s hard for anyone who loves writing. Only the fittest of words make the cut. And it’s hard to see the others go.

But it leads to lots of winning words. Let’s look at some.

dATA DRIVEN: Qualitative is the why, quant is the what

Despite their constant insistence to "show me the numbers," that's not actually how people (especially executive leaders and key stakeholders) make decisions. People make decisions based on emotions. They only use the numbers as a post-hoc rationalization as evidence their emotional decision was the right one to start with.

Chesterton's Fence

Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled "The Drift from Domesticity":

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. 1)

1)"Taking a Fence Down". American Chesterton Society. Retrieved 21 June 2014.

About

The creative cousin of UX Content Design, copywriting is where my love of writing was born. Meant to create intention (whereas UX Content Design largely meets intention where it lives,) well done taglines, slogans, CTAs, copy & catch phrases excite me. “Seven words or less.” Never easy, but always fun!

UX COPY DESIGN: THOMSON REUTERS SYSTEM ERRORS

Oh, errors. Inline, warning, failure, system, and, and, and. My team had team spent six months creating microcopy for a UX Messaging Matrix ( errors, alerts, beginning states and status updates), and then stumbled across the beauty below.

Diving deeper, we found all manners of errant 404 messages within our products. I set my writers to task:

• ,We don’t blame users for anything, ever.

• While we don’t say “we, us or our” as a matter of practice, it’s fine to do so when we are in an apologetic situation.

• Our audience is Auditors and Accountants—see if you can inject just the tiniest amount of humor, that will stand the test of time.

• Give them an out. Think about how to get them where they were going.

Here’s what they started with:

And here’s where they landed after one critique: A sprinkle of cheeky Accountant humor, “error” language removed, brand responsibility taken, productivity-driven outs for the user. Great!

COPY: THOMSON REUTERS RECRUITING

In sourcing for new team members, we were not getting a lot of traction.

• The card being pulled into social posts was brand, not applicant focused

• A youthful glow was needed to attract the up-and-coming, world-class design talent we were targeting

We started here:

About

When content is timeless, aswers users nedds and supports business goals, .ot becomes more usable and less dependents on channels.

Focusing on microcopy minimizes the role of the UX writer

The majority of your job won’t be spent writing this microcopy — it’ll be understanding all the context that gets you there in the first place. And it’s important for new UX writers to understand this, because setting expectations is everything. If you walk into a job thinking your entire role will be creating little moments of delight with funny and quirky copy, then you’re going to be sadly mistaken when you’re sitting in front of an Excel spreadsheet conducting your 20th hour of a messaging audit!

It all started when…

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