UX Writing: Make Your Product Speak Effectively

We get confused when we engage with digital products. The products are hard to understand, that’s not because we’re not as informed but rather, it’s because a new discipline of writing called “UX Writing” helps make clear and useful texts so we don’t get lost in the web and app interface. In this introduction, you will find an introduction to the history, main principles, and best practices of writing professionally that enhances the user experience.

The first sin of a bad interface design is wordiness and clumsiness. Imagine opening a website whose navigation labels are presented as a poem. Kinda creative, sorta annoying. This clumsy creativity stands in the user’s way of achieving a certain task on a website or mobile app. The shift towards plain and easy-to-understand text on interfaces made major companies like Facebook and Airbnb reconsider their copy and make it all about helping users do whatever they want to do.

Twitter, with its 140-character limit, was the first to make users write concise text. It was a turning point when users couldn’t use redundant words and learned how to express ideas with the fewest words possible– and therefore got used to “short messages”. — WHAT an age to live in!

Internet vocabulary 101: How the Digital World Is Changing Our Language. — How to adapt.

There is a necessity to write concisely on the Web. These new words have been added to the English vocabulary due to their everyday usage via social media platforms. New meanings and cases where people can use new words are what the word is about. We don’t actually follow someone on the street, but we can see what they’re up to on our feed.

Why caused these changes? I see three reasons: companies needed to (1) name actions, (2) make them catchy and easy to say, and (3) focus on users.

Now, imagine you had to say subscribe to my Twitter account instead of the standard follow me on Twitter. I bet you’d be exhausted after saying it to your 30th follower. It may sound funny to you, but for companies like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, it was a real obstacle. For users, it’s just a word. For companies, it’s a negative user experience.

To create positive experiences, the Big Social Four focused on what their users would find appealing and learnable. Those of you who have read Don Norman’s study on bad doors now see User Experience design more like a set of logical interactions among interface elements, rather than words contained within those elements.

What you may forget is that UX isn’t only about design. It’s about everything that contributes to a positive user experience, including words.

It’s all about the user’s emotions

Using words and images to bring people to a product is fine. Using the same words to retain them is not.

A user browsing a website isn’t a robot who performs manual actions. They are a real person who experiences emotions with each tap, click, scroll, and swipe. The right microcopy demonstrates care and understanding about the user’s feelings at every step of their user flow.

Here’s how Upwork shows care for their users.

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Upwork helps novice freelancers succeed when creating an account.

What if I learn something new? Upwork focuses on freelancers’ fears, concerns, and doubts. The box explains that freelancers can change the skills they’ve entered whenever they feel like it. The purpose of this form is to set up an account. Without this bit of text, you might get confused about whether you’re creating an account once and for all, or an account you can edit in the future. This is UX writing.

Microcopy is the New Design

The job of a copywriter is fairly simple, — Just write but, the job of a user experience writer is more complex — specific tasks. Copywriting’s goal is to make people learn about the product and then contact it. UX writers make sure their first contact isn’t their last.

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UX writers create positive experiences from the moment a user comes to a website or opens an app, and mends the pain points in their user flow — using words. Together with designers, UX writers create products as we see them.

Why did UX writing appear?

Over the past five years, I’ve seen so many copywriting job titles that I can hardly remember half of them. But I didn’t see the UX Writer title until late 2016. So I thought ‘What is that, and why am I only seeing it now for the first time?

And then it struck me why: because we have finally come to a point where we can no longer tolerate interfaces like this:

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Writing texts on such notifications used to be the job of whoever could write best in the office. Now that UX writing has entered the arena, users are seeing a more clear, more concise, and more memorable copy.

So what do UX writers actually do?

• Work with designers and developers, starting at an early stage of production
• Research the target market so they can speak the users’ language
• Put forward hypotheses and do A/B testing
• Work with marketing and copywriting teams to create and follow the company’s style guide
• Write great copy

The result of a UX writer’s work is a microcopy. It’s that little piece of text in an interface that helps users do stuff. Microcopy can include:

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and so much more. It’s impossible to define all types of microcopy because they are unique to each website. Here’s an example of a great microcopy by Pixar that deals with a page everybody has bumped into:

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The 404 page is the worst that can happen to a user when browsing your website. When a user wants to go to a page that he later discovers doesn’t exist, he has a bad experience. Luckily, the right words can save the day. See how Pixar saves the situation by turning a frustrating experience into a funny one? That’s a concrete example of smart UX writing.

Your first steps as a UX writer

To become a UX writer, you must know the basics of (a) UX design and usability, (b) wireframing, and © interfaces. It’s also great to learn the essentials of behavioral psychology and decision-making.

Why learn design if you’re going to write?

Because your writing is a part of the design process. Unless you know stuff about usability, you won’t be able to create a journey that isn’t confusing to users. Unless you can use prototyping software like Sketch, you won’t be able to work alongside designers.

Remember, UX writers focus on users’ emotions, and their primary job is to make sure everything in an interface is clear, and informative, and doesn’t make users google How to…? questions. It requires great empathy and knowledge about user behavior.

Apart from that, the best UX writers have a good command of the language. If your major was English and you like to use all sorts of fancy words and idioms, you’ll have to revise your approach. Good UX writers always bear in mind that their users may not be proficient in English, so the language they use must be simple.

Writing great copy typically involves plenty of research and testing. To understand how your users may behave on your website or app, you must answer the following questions:

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That being said… knowing this article is a long read — not wanting you the reader to be exhausted and tired I have stopped here to tell you — Thanks, for reading this far. I truly appreciate your passion for UX — You read 50% and you did great! Go ahead, you deserve a break — come back to read the rest of this article by Clicking HERE.