6 Insights from My First 2 Years in Full-Time UX Writing
The year is 2022. The month is April. After spending the last six months freelancing on short projects, I was about to start my first full-time UX writer role. I’d been preparing for this moment for a long time. I had completed UX writing practices, read a gazillion articles, and took a course on UX writing — I even wrote a course myself — and it all led to this. To be well prepared for life as a UX writer.
TL;DR
- 1: Microcopy is micro
- 2: Show, don’t tell
- 3: Documentation is key
- 4: Understand your users and colleagues
- 5: Don’t assume everyone reads what you write
- 6: Guides, guides, and more guides
Fairy tales and many wails
Reading about user experience writing to get a foot in the door is obviously the best place to start, but it is the wrong knowledge level to remain on if you want to do more than survive when you get that job. When I began obsessing over user experience and how to design rewarding relationships between a product and its users, I had over 50 articles in my bookmarks. I exaggerate, only 51. And it got to a point where I could not find new insights on what newbies needed to learn to succeed on the job. So I felt I was ready.
What I’d learned in summary:
- As a UX writer, I do more than just write words. There’s a whole process behind it even though I’m not exactly sure what it is, but it involves a lot of thinking.
- As a UX writer, I must keep users in mind at every point in time because I am their advocate.
- As a UX writer, I will not have a seat at the table, so I must bring mine and be ready to fight.
- As a UX writer, I should live by the three C’s: Clear, Concise, and Consistent copy. Of course, the copy should also be useful.
I’ll end it here, but you get the drift.
Some argue that starting your career in a large organization is better than a small one due to structure, in-house training, or mentorship. Personally, I think that when you’re searching for your first UX writing job, you should not discount small firms since they provide a lot of great opportunities for flexibility and leadership experience that can be valuable in the long run. Both job types are valuable and cater to different aspects of your career growth.
My full-time role was in a small company, and I joined them when they were about to undergo a total rebrand, so I was tossed into the deep end from the get-go. As a user experience writer, you’d be working with people from different fields and areas of expertise. Depending on the company, this could be a UX team, a one-person expert within the company, or an independent contractor. In my case, I was the sole UX writer, working with two designers and an independent developer. While being the only UX writer in your first job may seem daunting, it provides you with the platform to fail, learn, and expand your skillset with measurable impact.
Coming in fresh, I realized a few things:
#1: Microcopy is micro
Changing the microcopy of fictional or real products is fine for practice, but I discovered that it makes up less than 5% of your actual work as a UXer. Furthermore, AI is being used more and more to generate copy as writing tools proliferate the workspace. Luckily for you, you’re not a writer; you’re a user experience writer.
#2: Show, don’t tell
A saying goes, ‘No one turns on a lamp then hides it under the bed; instead, it is kept in the open so everyone in the room can see.’ In the same vein, you shouldn’t sweat doing all the background work, and yet no one knows exactly what you do besides ‘fixing copy,’ or the processes you go through to get the final results.
One time, I was giving a run-down of a client’s project to my boss. In clarifying a few things, I shared my FigJam screen for easier visualization, and the next thing I heard was, ‘Woah!’ You do this? What’s this? Zoom out, zoom in; all this is to create copy??’ We don’t charge our clients nearly enough!
It was a user flow.
I’ll be honest. It felt good to have someone appreciate those little intricate steps that go into crafting an experience from a content standpoint. I spent the entire meeting there giving impromptu teaching on UX writing while showing and running through my processes from the start.
At the end of the meeting, I realized that even though I’d spent the last couple of months explaining what I did on every project, they still didn’t quite get the significance of the value I brought until they were shown. It’s even more intriguing because I was hired as a UX writer, but they didn’t know what it was really about; they only knew they needed someone to make their content work. The onus is on you to show it. It might mean running a team workshop on UX writing, showing YOUR processes on a project, or styling your documents and sharing them alongside the deliverable. It’s up to you really, as long as you show it.
Before that day, I was often wrongly referred to as a copywriter. It stopped that day.
#3: Documentation is key
My feeling of elation lasted till the end of the call when I was asked to compile and share more documents so there would be more visibility into my work to make business reviews accordingly. Yikes.
If there’s one thing I wish I knew when transitioning into this field, it’s the importance of documentation. It applies to both the purpose of communicating your value and keeping track of your actual work.
Since you’d be collaborating with different people all the time, having a source of truth for all changes, feedback, and new developments in line with a project is a lifesaver. It will save you a lot of back-and-forth, not to mention the mini panic attacks from last-minute changes to design.
#4: Understand your users and colleagues
You may have often heard that you should learn the basic terminology of the people you’re working with to have smooth conversations with minimal or no misinterpretations. That’s good, but I think it should be taken a step further — have it at the back of your mind that their priorities are different from yours, and their approaches to work are also different. Be sure to avoid making assumptions at any point during collaborations. Just as we try not to make assumptions about our users, extend the same to your colleagues.
A revealing moment for me was when we needed to update the sentence format on some parts of the live website, and I was working in partnership with the developer. After highlighting about 12 places in a sheet, I thought, ‘Why not just notify him that the change should be applied to all XYZ screens rather than listing them out one after the other and manually rewriting it in sentence case? So I did. To be fair, it was my first time working with someone outside the UX scope, and it seemed like a faster way to handle it.
Did it work?
It was faster, all right, but the changes stopped exactly where I stopped the documentation. I later found out that my instructions were skipped over, with him preferring to work with the exact content I dropped. Also, the visuals I added as cute extras to my explanations, which I didn’t think were important, turned out to be what he prioritized.
#5: Don’t assume everyone reads what you write
Interpersonal skills are the bread and butter of a UX writer. It’s no surprise then that it is talked about quite often. Building and maintaining connections is essential, especially with stakeholders and coworkers, if you intend to gather the necessary information needed for your work.
Say you finally completed that style guide, shared the document with everyone, and probably even had a sync meeting or two to go over the brand changes, but it’s not getting implemented. As a rookie UX writer, what would you do?
Here’s what I did and failed at.
I reviewed every new piece of content, highlighted the areas of concern, rewrote the content, then shared it alongside the style guide. But once it got unsustainable to keep correcting every piece of content published across the different channels, I refrained from providing the corrected version, instead encouraging them to ‘check our style guide’ and make the appropriate changes.
While this approach worked for some, it didn’t for others. I had to modify my way of getting team members to implement the style guide. Did I get it right at first? No way! It took several attempts to figure out how to communicate the same piece of information to different people (pretty lucky it was a small team, huh).
#6: Guides, guides, and more guides
A content style guide is a living document. Despite many articles saying this, for some reason, I understood it to mean that you could create it first, tailor your writing to fit it, and then make changes along the way in a structured fashion.
My reality was that both the style guide and the writing evolved together. A funny thing I also discovered about guides is that you need one for practically everything. Want to get internal feedback on your copy? Create a guide. Want to train new writers on the style guide? Create a guide. Want to liven up your stand-ups? Create a guide (just kidding,… or not).
In the same way that directions help you get from point A to point B, guidelines help align your different collaborators to achieve a goal in the most efficient way possible.
There are many more realities that I can write about, but if there’s anything you should take away from this article, it is the importance of documenting your work and developing your people skills. They will help you become a better user advocate, communicate your value as a UX writer, and the latter adds a bonus of helping you build your portfolio.
This article is based on my experiences and is not the constitution for user experience writers :). Want to transition to user experience writing? Check out the UX Writers Learn publication here on Medium.
