Explaining UX writing. How I learned over five months that my…
By: Bettina Hindes
Tags: UX Design, Writing, Ux Writing, UX, Resources

Explaining UX writing

How I learned that my writing skills are in high demand for digital content.

UX Writing is more than just card sorting

What is UX Writing?

If I had a dollar for every time someone said, “What?” when I told them I was taking a course in UX writing and they gave me that look, well, I’d have a good chunk of change by now.

For the past five months, I have been participating in the UX Writing Hub’s online course founded by tech entrepreneur Yuval Keshtcher. This course teaches the fine art of micro-copy for apps and websites and shows by example and through practical exercises what the industry will eventually come to call UX writing.

This job is still called many other things like “content designer” or “technical writer,” or more recently “content strategist,” but generally the task itself can be called UX writing. The final word is not yet out on whether the title “UX Writer” will prevail, but for the sake of this article and the fact that I just finished a course on UX writing, I’ll keep using the phrase.

Once I began learning myself and then explaining to my confused friends and family what I was up to, they got it. In fact, as users of digital products, they — and most everyone alive today — already know good and bad UX writing when they see it. We recognize cute and helpful text and appreciate it, like this e-commerce communications page:

Examples of microcopy

Breaking up is hard to do. Or not, with Grovemade

Or these extensive pop-up blue tooltips for Patreon’s convoluted new benefits, tax, and payments system:

Patreon…you need a special certification just to collect donations as an impoverished artist.

Not just like copywriting

But there’s more than just genuine, clear and even clever writing involved. You know when you keep clicking on a button or text box in an app or on a website thinking you are supposed to do something and only to discover that the words on the button don’t match the action in the flow of the task?

This is a common bad user experience. It’s not a given that how a developer or designer creates a product that will match how end users will actually use it. It turns out there’s a lot of work that goes into creating all that good writing and those great user experiences. User research, design, style and tone guide, and testing. Writing is just one part of the larger job description of a UX writer.

Don’t assume your user is just like you!

My 73-year-old mother uses Mailchimp and was quite familiar with their famous style guide (also featured in the course as best-practices). What she didn’t know how to use well was her outdated Android phone, and as I showed her how to click around in the settings, I felt just as clueless. As a long-time iOS user, functions I assumed would be located in one section were in another altogether, and it took a while to ‘unthink’ my way from iOS into an Android mindset.

This is another example of what one designer or product creator might think of as given, is not self-evident at all for the end-user.

My mother doesn’t have a lifetime of “click” or “swipe” experiences to draw on. In many digital products, sometimes there might only be a tiny shaded area indicating that swiping left or right might reveals new content, but if you’re not thinking of that as an option — like my mom — then you’re left wondering why it just “doesn’t work.”

Why your business should care about UX writing in your product

The above types of frustrating experiences lead to high abandonment rates. If people are annoyed by your product, they won’t waste time with it or give it a second chance these days. I know myself how many times I’ve downloaded an app, only to delete it without even getting through the on-boarding process because of some overly complicated, cumbersome, or even patronizing wording or process.

Or maybe I begin the process of buying something online and just as I get to the checkout the many steps push me over my patience threshold, either the price changes due to added costs, or the payment doesn’t go smoothly—and I quit.

UX writing as part of UI

So, it’s not just the way a site flows, and how the user journey moves from one step to the next where UX writers can apply their skills, but also which words guide the user through the flow. The tone and implications of even one word can have a high impact on the success of a business. To find out which words are best, UX writers can conduct user research, and A/B testing on copy to see whether certain words lead to improved performance and a better user experience. This is especially obvious in error pages.

Error Pages

Sometimes pages don’t work. That’s just part of digital life. But what does the user experience when they get to an error page? In the screenshot below, Metlife apologizes in a self-deprecating way and gives us immediate steps to continue on our journey. This makes us feel relieved. It’s not our fault! And we can give them a break because they are admitting their error and vulnerability. And we are empowered to stay engaged in the process by trying again.

Metlife’s Error Page

Writing still matters in the digital era

There are countless ways where UX writing can affect the success of a digital product. About as many ways as there are digital products—which by this point is about 5 million apps and 1.5 billion (yes, billion!) websites. There will be work for UX writers for the next thousand years at this rate. Assuming the robots haven’t taken over by then.

Microcopy text can appear in so many places, from the basic landing page to the entire checkout process or internal user flows for B2B or B2C SaaS products. Writers have a role to play, and thankfully, the industry is waking up to the importance of the role of UX writer.

Resources:

If you are looking to get into UX Writing, I recommend checking out the UX Writing Hub and the Facebook group also run by Yuval for Microcopy, and the UX Collective, the community of writers, designers, and many other related roles is an inspiring and fun community of people.