UX Writing – It’s a Big Design “Thing” Now

UX design has traditionally been focused on designers who can provide a great user experience on websites – easy and rapid loads, navigation, and streamlined processes for accessing products and services, adding to shopping carts, and making payments. Little focus has been placed on writing skills of those designers until now.

But businesses have come to realize that UX design and writing are intimately connected. There is a lot of copywriting that must go on pages that UX designers craft and designers who have this skill are far more in demand. Take a look at any job boards, and you will find such postings with high figure salaries.

Just why has writing become so important for UX designers to master? Granted, it is an emerging field but an increasingly important one as businesses strive to connect with users. Here are five reasons why UX design writing is so important to business goals.

Users need to know what to do. And only visuals and graphics do not always give them the detail they need. All user-facing touchpoints must be clear, and the right words can help to accomplish this. Think of product descriptions, for example. They can be unclear and/or boring, or they can be engaging and provide users with exactly the information they need to make purchasing decisions. Word choice and tone are important elements of product descriptions.

CTA’s are other areas of design that call for the right words if they are to be effective and move users to act. Companies want UX designers to do the research, collect the data, and gain good insights into their audiences. And they want those designers to use that data to craft the right verbiage to get the results they want.

2. Guiding Users through Navigation

Words are also important, as businesses want users to move through their sites and navigate to what they need to see. A navigational copy is often called “microcopy”- words or short phrases that will effectively guide users. Still, the words used are important, to provide the right prompts or hints. And they need to be encouraging and even congratulatory when users worry that the button they pressed may not have been right.

If you access the AT&T website, for example, and begin to navigate through, you are given options for that navigation. If you click on one, you will immediately be given a verbal response that says, “We are working on it…it will just take a minute.” This encourages users and tells them that things are actually happening.

3. Words Must Project a Brand’s Voice

UX designers have always incorporated text into their work. But being mindful of a brand’s voice and having the skills to project that voice, through tone, cadence, and even flowery or another figurative language.

Consider the difference between websites that offer sports equipment and those that offer luxury jewelry. These are widely disparate brands whose tones of voice and use of vocabulary will be very different.

Web designers who can use these differences and nuances in the text they create will provide business owners with a consistent brand “voice.” And the value that they can provide is immeasurable if they are good at what they do.

4. Evolving Voices Require Evolving Text

Target audiences do change over time; so do the products and services a business may be offering. There is an ongoing need for design writers to stay up to date, to communicate with business owners, and to alter their writing to meet the demands of these newer “voices.”

This means researching what competitors are doing. How are they communicating with their audiences? And how can this company do it even better? UX designers must take initiative here.

One designer, who began as a copywriter for WOWGrade.com, an online writing service, and moved into design, put it this way: “My background in copywriting for a wide variety of companies was one of the things that put me at the top of candidacy for design positions. That experience let me develop skills in research of audience demographics and to refine brand voices for that audience. All UX designers need to develop writing skills for the career positions that are in demand now.”**

5. Designers Must Write for Changing Technology

Just a few years ago, no one thought much of chatbots. But here they are – computer programs that hold conversations like humans. In fact, today about 40% of millennials state that they interact with a bot of some sort on a daily basis.

Bots continue to become more common on websites. And the UX designers who create the language of these bots must be creative in both language and tone. Bots need to be conversational in tone, must be simple in their language, and must engage users, as well as be helpful in resolving consumer issues and questions. While bots are powered by AI and machine learning, the language style, tone, and vocabulary must still be designed.

A List of Tips for UX Design Writers

*1. Identify the company voice in three words – Bold? Inspirational? Entertaining? Serious? *

2. Identify the characteristics and behaviors of the target audience – age, gender, lifestyle, sense of humor, emotional needs, impulsive or considered, risk-taking or hesitant

3. Listen to how current customers communicate with the company and with one another. Are they formal, casual, respectful, irreverent, etc.?

4. What types of connections or relationships does the target audience want with brands they patronize? UX design writers should use this information to include stories in their content that promote these types of connections.

It may seem that UX designers are moving into areas of content marketing, and indeed they are. Even though their writing may be more focused on microscopy, they must understand that every word published by a brand constitutes marketing of some sort. The brand must have a consistent presentation voice that engages and appeals to its target audience, and design writers are a part of ensuring that consistency.