What is UX writing? — A beginner’s perspective
A quick read on user experience and the art of UX writing.
When it comes to writing, we’re more familiar with forms like creative writing; copywriting; technical writing; and the likes, but UX writing still seems to be hiding somewhere in the shadows.
What in the UX ?!
For beginners, UX is simply a shortcode for user experience.
According to the International Organization for Standardization, user experience is “ User’s perceptions and responses that result from the use and/or anticipated use of a system, product or service.”
That is, as a UX Designer or UX Writer, your focus is on creating a smooth and pleasant experience for the users of a product rather than simply designing a product to fulfill business objectives with little or no consideration as to how the product design affects the end-users.
Here, the business goal is to get people to donate via the website but any potential customer who sees this form is most likely to give up on the process. Why? Because it seems like a lot of hard work to register!
Good UX is empathetic.
Now while UX designers are responsible for ensuring the visual design and overall user journey flow are well structured to enable users to have the best possible experience, UX writers do the same — but with words.
What is UX writing?
“ UX writing is the practice of designing the words people see when they interact with software. It’s about designing the conversation between a product and its user” - Lisa Sanchez
Think of those words you read on a product’s homepage, its navigation buttons, error messages, notifications, and other lines of text within the product. Now think of the words used by Chatbots, Google Assistant, iPhone’s Siri, and Amazon Alexa. The crafting of these words (often referred to as microcopy) which you read and hear all fall under UX writing.
Exciting right?
However, user experience writing goes beyond ‘writing texts’. It involves understanding who the users are, the context in which they use the product, the problems they could encounter, and providing solutions to these while still bearing in mind the business objectives and goals.
UX Writers give utmost priority to the users of a product. They are the users’ advocate in the design process.
In crafting the microcopy, user research and usability testing are conducted to ensure that the chosen texts are the best available options to make users have a seamless experience while using the product.
Below are some examples of bad vs good UX writing:
- The ambiguous microcopy
Never sacrifice clarity for brevity. Using ‘cancel’ and ‘ok’ as two different options is confusing. How does one know which option would actually cancel the order?
2. The technical jargon microcopy
Like in everyday life, talking without communicating is noisemaking. Bad microcopy uses jargon that ordinary users may not understand. This leaves users frustrated because they can’t understand what the problem is or how to get past it.
3. The unhelpful microcopy
‘Nope. Try again.’ may be short and straight to the point, but it’s not helpful and can even come across as unfriendly. There is a login error but the microcopy doesn’t specify where the problem lies (is it a wrong username or a wrong password?) neither does it specify how to resolve the problem.
For comparison, take a look at the Login page from Mailchimp
Here, the microcopy clearly shows the problem lies with the password. It also provides a solution by offering to ‘recover your password’. This microcopy is short, friendly, clear, and helpful.
At the bottom of the page, we can also see that the possibility of users forgetting either their username or password was already anticipated by the UX Writer and solutions were provided for it. That’s good UX writing.
Microcopy should always be:
- Easy to understand
- Concise
- Helpful
- Human
As you progress, there are other attributes you can give your microcopy, such as humor, but these four serve as the foundation of good UX writing.
User experience writing is the art of humanizing a software via its words, to effectively communicate with users in a helpful manner that guides their use of the product.
Getting started as a UX Writer
Because UX writing is still relatively new, there are few online courses available and it’s unlikely you’d find it being offered in Universities. However, there are sufficient resources available on the internet for anyone interested in learning UX writing.
So if you love writing for a living, and you are dedicated enough to build the required skills, you can become a UX Writer regardless of your professional background. It doesn’t discriminate.
With more companies now realizing the importance of UX writing, there is a slow but steady rise in the demand for UX Writers. So if there ever was a better time to get in, it is now.
