Five ways to be a better UX writer

Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash

If you’re working in a design or UX team, you’ll be absorbing new knowledge every day about design and usability. This is crucial to becoming a good UX writer, and I was lucky enough to learn so much from design colleagues when I first moved into the role.

🔍 Related: What is UX writing?

But there are other things you need to do outside your day to day team collaboration to elevate your skills even further. I wanted to share some of the things I found helped me become better at designing and writing content.

1. Talk to other teams

Outside your immediate product team is a whole world of information to strengthen your content – you just have to ask.

Your colleagues in call centres can tell you why customers call them, which is often because there’s missing or confusing information on your website. Your data and analytics team can help you look at the numbers in a way that can really help you start measuring content.

Your marketing colleagues can share the latest campaigns and proposition messaging, including emails that get sent to customers. This helps you make sure you’re using consistent content and terminology onsite (and that they’re providing the right online links or login instructions).

Another team to become friendly with is your legal and compliance team. Try pair-writing with them to make sure any legal wording you have to use onsite is clear, human and helpful. I ran a digital writing workshop with a legal team I once worked with so I could educate them on the importance of simple, concise copy for digital UI. They found it really enlightening and were much more receptive to us amending legal copy once they understood the reasons behind it.

2. Attend research

It goes without saying that the person creating the content should be at usability testing. But what I mean here by research is discovery research.

UX writers need to listen to users or stakeholders first-hand. They need to note down the vocabulary they use, make notes on their content pain points, and understand the context that their content will be used in.

These insights are hard to gain by reading a research report, and often a researcher or designer carrying out the discovery phase won’t be thinking from a content perspective.

Make the case to be part of the discovery work… not only will it save time in the long run, but you can also volunteer your content skills to help craft test scripts, map information, and even help shape the research report afterwards. You’ll get the context and insights, and researchers will get helpful support and assistance.

3. Join a community

Meetups are a great way to make friends with other content specialists, learn more and share your frustrations. But if there aren’t any meetups close to you, there are plenty of online communities to join. These are great for bouncing ideas off other experts, finding out about events, or getting help when you’re stuck on a piece of microcopy. The UX-Content one is a fantastic source of help and advice.

Content Twitter is also a very supportive place to be, and there are Instagram accounts you can follow like @Contentcollective_btn who share inspirational content and UX examples.

🔍 Related: Some of the best Twitter chats around for content folk

4. Steal with pride

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

If you’re stuck on a problem, look at how other brands have solved it. But don’t just lift and drop, that’s bad form and you’ll learn nothing.

Think about their approach and whether that approach could work for you. Is there a framework you could create to help you? Keep screengrabs of great UI copy to inspire your team (I used to call this the ‘Awesome file’). By paying attention when you use apps, read emails, or buy things online, you’ll soon start to spot some gems.

5. Start a portfolio

Having interviewed a fair few content designers and UX writers it’s amazing how few of them have a portfolio of their work.

Think more like a designer — what work do you want to be known for?

When you work on something, work with the mindset ‘I want to be proud enough of this work to put it in my portfolio’. And take screenshots of all your live work. By doing this you’ll focus much more on creating something that’s as delightful as it is functional, and something that looks great when you apply for your next role.

Some of these things might seem obvious, but when we’re busy it’s easy to forget about the things that go beyond the content we’re creating right now. The difference between good and great is often having a broader perspective than the task in hand, or the ‘non-writing’ stuff.

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If you liked this article, why not check out Rachel’s book ‘Why you need a content team and how to build one’ - out now on Amazon.