[Episode 98] UX Writing Like a Pro with Yael Ben-David on Mozzarella: A Product Management Podcast

12 min readMar 17, 2020

I had a lot of fun being interviewed on the Hebrew-language Mozzarella product podcast! Seeing as only 1% of people in the world speak Hebrew, I wrote up a translated transcript. (I also threw in some links…because in writing, I can.) Enjoy!

Tell us a little about yourself.

I moved to Israel from the States in 2007. Before I moved to Israel, I did a BA in journalism at NYU. After I moved to Israel I switched tracks and did a masters and PhD in neurobiology at the Hebrew University. After all of that I realized I didn’t want to be a journalist or a scientist but I combined those experiences into what I’m doing now: I’m a UX writer for complex products. I took my skills in working with complex concepts in neurobiology and communicating them, and writing and telling a story and connecting to users from journalism, to do what I do today.

Tell us a little about Fundbox.

Fundbox offers a solution for cash flow challenges faced by small and medium-sized businesses in the US. For now at least, the products are available only in the US and only in English. We have two products, I work on both of them. One offers a revolving line of credit and the other is a payments platform. The latter solves the net terms problem: businesses who need to buy now but pay later, we’ll pay on their behalf and they’ll pay us back when their net terms end. At the same time the supplier gets paid right away. It solves a lot of pain for both sides.

Learn more about Fundbox on our website.

Tell us about UX writing. It’s new?

UX writing is indeed a relatively new field and a very important discipline. In Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the world it’s already less novel, the value has been recognized and it’s being invested in. Here in Israel there’s a strong, robust community of UX writers. There’s a strong community led by Kinneret Yifrach, a very active and professional community and it’s growing. I actually gave a talk at the last meetup, their biggest meetup to date. There were more than 150 attendees. Actually the venue could only fit 150 people so they had to close the doors.

See the talk for yourself.

150 UX writers?

A lot of UX writers, but also a lot of product managers and designers and other stakeholders and a lot of people who want to break into UX writing but aren’t sure how — that’s a whole topic unto itself.

What do you do as a UX writer?

More than 50% of an average day I spend writing new features. As I mentioned, at Fundbox we have two big products and for each one we’re adding new features all the time. We work in agile sprints and every sprint we add a number of features.

But there’s a lot to write beyond that. UX writing isn’t just microcopy. Microcopy is a hot buzzword, it’s a sexy term, that means the small bits of copy in a digital interface, like the 1 or 2 words on a button, for example. So it’s easy to wonder what we do all day when we write so little. You need to remember that: there are a lot of new features to write at the same time; but also, the shorter copy is, the harder it is to write, generally speaking. In order to find that one and only one perfect word for a given button, takes a lot of work — a lot of time, research, iterations. But we’re not just only writing microcopy, we’re also writing longer texts. The best example is probably emails. Any email that is triggered by in-product behavior, transactional emails, we write those, too. For example a Fundbox user might draw funds. They’ll get an email with their repayment plan, all of the terms of the transaction, for their records. I write that.

And you need to make all of that financial info accessible!

Right, and for me that’s the fun :) I see myself almost as a translator, translating these complex concepts into something the customer can understand. Because this is to all of our benefits. I’m not just doing the users a favor; I want to give the users a good experience because without users, there’s no product. I need them to understand what’s going on in the product in order to build a relationship, for the long term, with mutual trust, so that we can grow together.

It’s one of the amazing things about working at a company like Fundbox, I really feel like I’m helping to realize that American dream of small businesses really becoming successful. So it’s really important to speak at eye level, with respect. At the same time, I can’t oversimplify. I don’t want to sound patronizing or parenting, That will have the opposite effect. It’s a tough line to straddle, simplifying enough but without oversimplifying, losing both your user’s respect and the real value you’re supposed to be communicating.

Do you write guidelines at the beginning on how to do that?

Yes… but not at the beginning. Guidelines are always written too late, never at the beginning because startups just getting started can’t afford — or think they can’t afford — to prioritize it. That strategic, big picture thinking about what’s our brand? What’s our voice? If our product was a person, what would they be like? What impression would he or she make at first glance in a bar? On a first date?

At Fundbox I had the opportunity of a UX writer’s lifetime, to write the voice and the whole product from scratch. From designing the voice to writing every single string in the products from scratch, hundreds of emails and more, all the way through to working super closely with the developers to implement it.

The context was that we did a massive rebrand: new logo, colors, design, everything, including voice and tone. From my perspective, we didn’t roll out a new voice, we rolled out our first voice. We simply didn’t have any voice before. I worked very closely with our marketing writers. They’re based in San Francisco but they flew over. We collaborated on our new voice and tone guidelines and a style guide. The style guide is a whole other level of resolution, down to when we hyphenate, capitalize, etc. It sounds nit-picky but you really need it with a large and growing product, it’s the only way to keep your voice scalable and consistent, as you hire new team members, etc.

Tell us about your workflow with product managers.

Usually, PMs are the ones initiating a new project or feature. Something great at Fundbox is that before PMs finalize their roadmaps for the next Q, they come to the UX team and ask if there are any items we’d like to get in. So we do have that opportunity to initiate projects as well.

But generally, it’s the PM coming to me with a copy task. They come with a brief, and there are few things that are really important that the PM includes in the brief in order for us to do our jobs as best as possible. I say “us” because I work extremely closely with the designers, we sit in the same room and in my opinion that’s how it should be in every company. Otherwise you end up with a really inefficient and awkward situation where you sort of slip out of agile and into waterfall where the designers build a wire, or even worse, a beautiful final design, and pass it on to Copy to dump content into. And it really shouldn’t work like that. When you sit together in the same room it works much better. I can turn around and say, “Listen, I know you gave me this big space to write here, but I don’t have that much content. There just isn’t that much to say.” I can write as much as you want me to just to fill the space but that won’t serve us or our users. So it’s not worth it. And of course it goes the other way, too, that I don’t have enough space to get in valuable messaging. But when we collaborate closely we’re able to optimize these things.

So the PM comes to the designers and writers together, which is really important. We both need to be there right at the beginning.

They need to, first of all, define the problem. What are we trying to solve for?
And what are the goals.
How will we measure success?
Something else I look to the PM for more than any other stakeholder are the business considerations. I always look at things from the user’s perspective and that can make me miss things that are really important for the success of the company. At the end of the day, we’re a product, we’re a company, we want to be profitable.
PMs also usually start to think about existing flows that might be impacted by a new feature, that we need to take into consideration.
And to define scope. This is one of the most critical things a PM brings and if you ask later about challenges working with PMs we can cover this more in depth. There is ongoing tension between PMs and UX, including writers, on scope. As long as we remember that we all have the same goal, that we want to create the best product we can and do the best we can by our users, we’ll be fine. But there is that almost conflict of interest where UX wants to build the most comprehensive solution while the PM wants to be mindful of the dev bandwidth that each solution will take. Scope can be a sensitive topic!

After the brief, UX proposes a solution. We iterate. Pass to Compliance and then develop. And of course we have our eye on the product all the time, following up on features after they’re released, looking for production bugs and room for optimization.

What happens in companies with no UX writer? What should they be doing?

Every company that doesn’t have a UX writer handles it differently.

Some will go to the marketing writers because they are writers. I’ve merited to work throughout my career with excellent marketing writers, but it is simply a different profession, a different skillset and expertise. It’s different. So the copy will come out in perfect English, or whatever language they’re writing in. But it won’t necessarily be optimal for the product’s need.

Often the PM will write the copy as he’s writing the PRD because if he doesn’t, who will?

And worst case scenario, developers write copy. With all due respect to developers — and they truly deserve all the respect in the world, they’re nothing short of magicians in my eyes — they’re not writers. You might see this in errors for example, where as they’re coding they find an error state that no one had anticipated and so on the fly they write the error copy and it comes out really not user friendly.

I do have some tips for PMs in companies without a UX writer. The first one is to get a writer! I give a talk about the ROI of microcopy and how hiring one will absolutely pay for itself. Maybe I’ll convince you at another opportunity when we have more time. But that is definitely the best place to start.

Like the “$300 million button”?

Exactly. There is no shortage of stories like that. Google did it, when you search for a hotel, it was the exact same thing: they changed two words, showing empathy, meeting the user where they are, and realizing that “Book a room” was too committal. Changing it to “Check availability” increased engagement 17%.

I’ve actually done this, too! At Fundbox. I changed a word — it’s exactly the same situation where users were not ready to commit and didn’t realize that we weren’t asking them to commit. When they went to draw funds from their credit line, the button said “Draw Funds”. But obviously before you draw funds you need to review the terms, the weekly fees, the duration of the repayment plan, etc. So when they clicked the button it opened a pane with all of that information and only after they reviewed it and confirmed, were the funds sent. But the button said “Draw Funds” so they thought that that was it, press it and funds are on the way without knowing any of the details. We changed it to “Review and Draw” and it upped conversion. I’m very proud of this specific example.

Seems really important especially in legal communications.

Absolutely. There are two approaches when it comes to legal stuff like terms of use and the like. One is the one Pinterest takes, which I love, where after every paragraph or two they have a plain English summary in a more friendly typeface. The other approach I’ve seen Typeform takes, where after you click on terms of use or privacy policy or anything else, they ask if you want the legalese or plain English version. It’s something I really want to do at Fundbox because as a financial product, it’s really important that all sides understand exactly what we’re talking about. For now I’m leaning toward the Pinterest approach over the Typeform approach.

What about the future? What’s next for UX writing? What’s hot?

Wow, there are so many things I could talk about! One is accessibility. The whole web just isn’t accessible to a lot of people. It might be easy to trivialize that and question what percentage of people are really affected but first of all, forget percentages — it’s the right thing to do. To make everything technology has to offer, accessible to everyone.

Second, these are potential users. These people also have money, they can buy whatever you’re selling. You’re leaving money on the table if you don’t make your product accessible. And it’s a lot of people. If you expand the definition of people for whom the internet isn’t accessible from people who use screen readers, to include people with low literacy or who are in a rush or distracted, the numbers are huge. You have to write for them, too.

And that’s going beyond accessibility, that’s readability. Sarah Richards of Content Design London started an amazing, global collaboration called the Readability Guidelines where evidence-based guidelines are being collected for how to write copy in a way that makes the product more accessible for everyone. When you solve a problem for someone with a limitation, you are making the product more usable for everyone. One population may have felt the pain more acutely but the improvement will benefit everyone. Creating this global style guide of evidence-based best practices is really important because until now, best practices came from trends and intuition and were subjective by and large. As someone who spent a decade as a research scientist, I really connect to this project and this approach to writing copy.

What about voice interfaces?

That’s a super interesting area. Erika Hall, who wrote Conversational Design, the first time I ever heard her was on a podcast — it blew my mind — where she talked about divorcing the copy from the device. What does that mean? All day I write words that will end up on screens. So are we talking about voice interfaces? But it’s not just that. We live in a world where it doesn’t matter whether you’re using a screen or a voice interface or anything else, the device doesn’t matter and will matter even less in the future. The user experience has to be fluid across everything. If I start listening to an audio book in the car from my phone, and then switch to my Kindle when I get home, I expect to pick up where I left off. The technology needs to serve me no matter where I am or what I’m doing.

The next level of that is this shift we’re seeing now from virtual assistants to virtual companions. Intuition Robotics is doing this here in Israel. They’re doing something really amazing — it’s really the next generation.

Like robots that seem like people?

Not quite, because I don’t think that’s what people really want.

Have you heard the talk of giving emotions to Alexa? Changing her tone in different contexts?

Sounds creepy. It also sounds like a bad idea, dangerous for the writers, because there is so much cultural context you can’t generalize. As an American woman, I’m likely to interpret those tones differently than you as an Israeli man, or anyone else. There’s just so much you can’t account for, seems like it wouldn’t be a worthwhile endeavor.

Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me!

Follow me on Twitter! @YaelBenDavid