Want to work in UX? Pay attention in English class.
By: Kris Paries
Tags: User Experience, Creative Career, Writing, UX, Design

Want to work in UX? Pay attention in English class.

With special guest Andy Welfle, Adobe Senior Content Strategist Lead

Building the Perfect Designer

There seems to be a bit of an arms race to standardize the skill sets that are required by employers when it comes to UX-ers, digital product designers, UI designers, or whatever you want to call “us”. I’m acutely aware of this arms race specifically, because I’m in it. Over the past few years we (Adobe and myself) have been working with the University of Utah on developing curriculum for their Digital Product Design program. The core question driving most of our decisions has been a simple one:

What do we want the designers that we hire in the future to look like?

Some of the answers to that question have been pretty straight forward. We need Adobe designers to have a strong understanding of design thinking principles. We need Adobe designers to have a process for discovering problems. We need them to be able to work through those problems with that process to deliver designs that improve the user’s experience. We need those designs to be visually compelling and thoroughly tested using best practices. We need those designers to be able to pitch those ideas through presentations to cross-functional stakeholders.

There’s a lot we need from our designers.

Being that this has been a topic that has been so top of mind for me, I’m constantly looking at parts of my day-to-day process and trying to incorporate the skills needed to complete those things into the curriculum we’re developing. And that’s when I had the “aha” moment a few days ago. There was one aspect of my job responsibilities that touches every single step of the process that we hadn’t accounted for: writing.

Sharpen Your Pencils

Want to set up user testing? You’re going to need to write an email. Are you defining a persona? You better write that thing up. What’s the user’s journey that you’re shooting for? You’re probably going to need to write a narrative. Need to sell some stakeholders on a design? You’re definitely going to be writing up a presentation.

However, if writing isn’t one of our strong suits, it can leave us in a bit of a quandary. So I pinged a colleague of mine, Andy Welfle, who is Senior Content Strategist Lead here at Adobe on the design team. He also happens to be a super awesome guy willing to bestow some of his writing knowledge on us. I asked him a few questions about writing in the UX world and he had some incredibly valuable insights not only just in terms of writing, but specifically for writing in a UX context.

Andy Welfle

As a UX content writer, what similarities have you observed between writing and digital product design?

It’s obvious when it’s pointed out, but a lot of times, designers don’t think about words being part of the user experience. At best, they blend seamlessly with the visuals and the UI, and at worst, they’re jarringly noticeable.

UX content strategy has a lot of parallels with UX design. In fact, when designers ask me what I do, I tell them that I write using design thinking. Instead of traditional copywriting which is usually very linear and finite (and often comes much later in the software development process), UX writing happens at or near the same time UX design does. We iterate alongside designers, and think about the system of language as they think about the visual system.

Here are a few similarities I see in our disciplines: