When everyone’s giving you tasks and they’re all urgent, where do you begin?
As UX writers, we get a lot of asks. There are far fewer of us than designers, product managers, and a slew of other stakeholders who need copy from us. That means we’re getting lots of requests at the same time, while the people asking don’t necessarily have an understanding…
Nuggets of wisdom I took away from the keynotes (not comprehensive summaries)
Meredith Arthur: Collaborating with overthinkers
- When you need to give uncomfortable pushback, to a superior for example, try posing it as a question. Not, “I don’t think we should do that because it will decrease our ability to hit our goal,” but rather, “Will doing that decrease our ability to hit our goal?” …
Inclusivity is a big topic in the global conversation amongst UX writers/content designers these days, and rightfully so! Inclusivity is a big topic; in this article I’m going to focus on writing for gender inclusivity.
Many languages around the world are gendered. In order to write grammatically, one must speak…
Collaboration is king
Controversial opinion warning: forget “content first”.
In my opinion, content first is an overcorrection to the waterfall process of lorem ipsum. Designers used to bring containers to writers to fill and that’s not cool. Sometimes writers would be forced to create content to fill an oversized container when it was…
Where can a UX writer go from here?
I’ll never forget the first time I heard “UX”. I had apparently been doing UX writing as 50% of my job (the other 50% was marketing copywriting). …
200 rockets were fired at us last night and they’ve continued through the morning. All public bomb shelters have been opened and prepped and schools are running drills and confirming that all processes are in place. …
I’ve had the privilege of speaking to UX writing communities around the world. One of the most interesting and exciting parts for me is learning about the different communities’ unique challenges. Lately though, it’s the similarities that made me stop and think. …
All microcopy is UXW, not all UXW is microcopy
I love UX writing. All of it. Not just the microcopy.
“Microcopy” is a hot buzzword, and for good reason. UI copy has not gotten enough attention in the past and it’s certainly overdue for some serious recognition, thought, and community to leverage for developing best practices and solving common…
Providing just the right amount of information in your microcopy
You’re writing a new screen and you have so much you can say. You can manage expectations for the flow; you can deep dive into value props; you can take the space to build rapport and really express your voice; and so much more. So how do you decide how…
I’m often asked, “We don’t have a UX writer — what should we do?” The answer is simple: Hire one! But when that’s not possible, what can the stakeholders do who end up writing the product copy? Sometimes that’s product owners or designers or developers. It can also be marketers…
