What is UX Writing?

Read this article to learn what UX writing is, explore its methodology and fundamental principles, and learn how to enter the UX writing industry.

What Is UX Writing?

UX writing, or user experience writing, is crafting copy for user-facing touchpoints, including the user interface (UI). It is the practice of writing UI text that appears throughout the interface of digital products (websites, desktop, and mobile apps), such as error messages, notifications, etc.

UX writing is about designing the conversation between a digital product and its users by informing, guiding, and helping them take action.

The growing complexity of websites and applications increases the need for clear guidance. Plus, as these products are a part of our lives today, users seek out those that provide the smoothest experience. UX writing offers guidance that changes how we interact with technology, helping users navigate a product. On the whole, user experience writing is interaction design for text.

Types of UX Content

The type of UX content differs depending on the digital product, but in general, the most common types of content a UX writer creates are as follows:

• Buttons
• Call-to-actions (CTAs)
• First-time use or onboarding text
• Instruction text
• Error messages
• Confirmation messages
• Contextual help and tooltips
• Menu labels
• Form field labels and lists
• Security notes
• Controls
• Chatbots conversation scenarios
• In-product marketing, like pop-up ads
• Legal notices and disclaimers

Learn the complete fundamentals and crucial UX writing skills through our UX writing certification course:

How Does UX Writing Differ From Other Types of Writing?

UX writing is specialized due to its context and the environment in which UX writers create content. Since it exists in the context of software, UX writing has unique constraints. It has to be concise writing. This type helps businesses and users meet their objectives and works with visual and interaction design to build an experience greater than the sum of its parts.

UX writing must be accessible to users with varied abilities to ensure everyone has a great experience, whether they navigate the product themselves. It has to be inclusive in order to connect with potential users. It should always be translatable so everyone gets it across linguistic and geographical boundaries.

UX Writing Methodology

UX writing is comprehensive and robust and involves UX writers collaborating with researchers, interface designers, programmers, stakeholders, product managers, and customers. In a utopia, many UX writers conduct user research tasks. In general, the design process for UX writers will be something like the following:

Describing the Issue

When UX writers work with designers, programmers, stakeholders, and product managers, they help define the scope of issues. These issues can range from getting new users to boosting engagement. The UX writer’s role in all these discussions is to suggest ways UX writing might solve that problem or decide if UX writing is the right choice.

Forming Ideas

UX writers and designers work to find solutions to whatever design issue the company faces. This indicates that UX writers sketch out the problem while forming hierarchies to help other team members understand the effective ways to place the copy in the interaction design.

Prototyping

When getting feedback from everyone involved in the project, the UX writer will help designers build a great prototype of the selected solution.

Researching

UX writers have an important role in research. When working alongside UX designers and researchers, UX writers should create copy-specific tasks for UX researchers to offer to customers and take note of the study and how users react to the language used in the prototype.

Iterating

While working with researchers, UX writers apply all types of feedback to their copy, making it worthwhile. The UX writers also work with the optimization manager to build ideas and frameworks for future A/B testing to iterate on a greater level and obtain quick quantitative feedback.

Deploying

At the time of design deployment, UX writers may have to work with engineers and programmers to modify text if technical constraints force the user experience design.

UX Writing Principles

Now that you know user experience writing, it is time to focus on basic UX writing guidelines. Producing a copy of the UI design is a creative activity by a UX writer. Standard writing conventions help UX writers create a powerful conversational interface and improve user experience. Though providing universal rules to write compelling UI text is impractical, giving some general rules to follow is possible.

Following are some of the best practices to help UX writers with the conversation flow between your product and users:

Keep the Content Clear, Concise, and Useful

Those who have heard anything about UX writing earlier might have encountered the rule: keep it clear, concise, and useful. When creating UX copy, keep it clear. A UX writer’s text should be accessible to users with different abilities to provide a pleasant experience. We write for all reading levels and replace the technical terms with familiar, understandable words for clarity.

The copy must be concise, which means effective communication. To make a concise copy, you can turn commands into questions. It is better to remove wrong words or anything that might be unnecessary for the users.

Also, effective UX writing needs attention to the context and potential users. The UX text should be useful and teach users—it should help them get where they want to go. These three principles form a triad, and it is challenging for UX writers to find the optimum balance between them.

Maintain Consistency

It is important to ensure the UX copy is consistent. Good UX content maintains the same brand personality throughout every touchpoint. Your user might have the product with minor differences in tone depending on the situation. Therefore, every part of your digital product should make users feel that the same person prepares the copy, though different people are responsible. Avoid replacing a word with its synonym in another part of the user interface, like labeling a button Download on one screen and Save File on another.

Get the Brand Voice and Tone Right

Good UX writing helps build trust, for which the copy should embody the organization’s voice. Using your company’s voice can help you put over your brand’s personality. When the personality is established, you need to understand how to react and interact. That is where the tone comes in.

With tone, we can create clarity and context for the users. When the situation calls for it, UX copy can use different tones of voice. The type of tone you use will depend on the brand voice, the action executed in the product, the result of the user’s actions, and the desired outcome you want to achieve.

Your tone can also be humorous, but you must be careful when incorporating it in UI. Similar to every other component of UI, writers should design humor also. People read the text in your interface multiple times, and what might seem amusing at first can become irritating over time – many times when the users fail to achieve what they set out to do. Also, humor in one culture is often different in other cultures.

Write Copy in an F-pattern

Consider the order in which you arrange the copy on an interface. The patterns your users read in are important; most users read in an F-pattern. After reading the first two lines, they start skipping down the page while catching the first few words of each sentence. So, it is important to keep your text concise and frontloaded, giving importance to titles and starting your sentences with important words.

Use Progressive Disclosure

It might be useful to provide additional information for the users. However, presenting additional information upfront can be overwhelming. So, show details as needed and use progressive disclosure to display further information, like adding a Read More link to read the full content.

A good UX writer knows how to break up information into different parts, first showing what is relevant to the user. Dividing information into bite-sized chunks and making sure users know how to use major features of the product can set them up to explore other features later. Progressive disclosure is a promising approach for the mobile interface where a UX designer has limited screen space.

Learn When to Use Numerals or Words

Use numerals in place of words like “2 days ago” instead of “two days ago” for numbers as they facilitate readability and are easier to scan. It also saves screen space and increases the readability of your text.

Conversely, it is better to use words regarding dates wherever possible. That means using “today”, instead of writing a date unless it was a while ago. It feels like a natural conversation and demands a bit of cognitive load on the part of users. However, you should note that using words for days can be inaccurate or confusing if you cannot consider the current locale.

What Do UX Writers Do?

Many industries have digital products on offer, and job descriptions differ from one company to another. For example, those working in a small firm or startup may have multiple roles. UX writing may be a content-related, complex, or challenging task in their fundamental job description. Your work will be smooth-running in a large enterprise, focusing on UX writing for single or multiple products. However, there are certain things all user experience writers have in common:

• Writing microcopy depends on UX research and testing outcomes instead of relying on their judgment.
• Working with UX designers and programmers to understand the complete user journey in the provided flow or part.
• Using content to provide solutions to user problems and meet business objectives.

The UX writer’s job is different from that of a technical writer (who focuses on clarity instead of an entire user experience), content marketing writer (who creates marketing and support copy that attracts leads, converts them into potential customers, and helps to keep them), or content strategist (who plans content strategy instead of writing copy).

How to Become a UX Writer

Entering the UX writing process and becoming a UX writer requires proper skills, a presentable portfolio, and some experience. Here is a comprehensive look at what that means:

1. Consider the Important Skills

Following are some significant skills you might need to have as a UX writer:

Writing Skills

UX writing is about something other than just knowing grammar, spelling, and tones. Good UX writing has to be concise and clear to give users the least friction possible while interacting with the product. Some practice with UX-specific writing will help boost your credentials for the position you expect to get.

UX Research and Testing

The right UX writing is research-based and open to testing and user feedback. Insights from people give you new tasks to complete and user challenges to solve. Several leading companies have separate UX research departments. It is non-essential for a UX writer to conduct research or develop statistics in such cases.

However, it is important to be familiar with common research techniques to know what to do with the material. A/B testing, user testing, and card sorting are some of the research methods used by UX writers to ensure that a product works as intended.

Design Thinking

A UX writer belongs to the design department, which means you will partake in standups, workshops, etc. If you like polishing your content to perfection in a quiet space, it is better to send it to your client and brace yourself for something different. Design thinking is a repetitive action where frequent feedback is common.

Get opinions related to your work before finalizing it. Remember that your best critics are the readers of your copy, not the UX writers.

Design Tools

Though using visual design toolkits is non-essential for every UX writer, familiarity with some standard tools will not harm them. Learn how to navigate programs like Sketch and Figma. These tools may have free trial periods that will enable you to acquaint yourself with them and create material you can use in a portfolio. They are ideal choices for a UX writer to start with absolute basics. There may be some brilliant people who are excellent at producing content and designing, but in most cases, this is unneeded.

2. Create a Portfolio

Having a portfolio is integral to applying for UX writing positions. In general, it means creating a simple website to display your previous work and show what you are capable of. Website builders, such as Adobe Portfolio, Weebly, and Wix, are some of the best portfolio creation options.

3. Get Experience

While browsing writing jobs, you may notice that hiring managers ask for previous work experience with UX writing. There are many ways to build up your UX writing resume. Starting from technical writing or UX design can provide many opportunities to practice UX writing.

Also, a UX writing course can introduce you to its basics and run through concepts like usability testing. You may also get to create your copy to display in the portfolio. In addition, you can try creating mock websites or applications to put your skills into practice.

Final Thoughts on UX Writing

UX writing is in demand, particularly from large companies, which have a lot of content to manage across different products. It serves as the writing force behind user interfaces and products. Working with designers and managers, the UX writer’s role shines in forming consistency in language, voice, and tone throughout the product. Considering the current progress, UX writing will become important over the coming years and could change the design market and our thinking about design.

FAQs

Here are the most frequently asked questions about UX writing.

 What is the role of experienced UX writers in a content strategy team?

Experienced UX writers play a crucial role in a content strategy team by ensuring that all written content is user-centered and aligns with a product’s overall design and branding. Their primary focus is to create clear, concise, and engaging text that enhances the user experience. By collaborating closely with designers, researchers, and developers, UX writers help craft content that guides users through an intuitive and enjoyable interaction with the product. Their expertise helps maintain consistency across various touchpoints, ensuring that the language and tone are in harmony with the design and functionality of the product.

How does UX writing contribute to effective content design?

UX writing is integral to effective content design because it shapes how users interact with and understand a product. Content designers rely on UX writers to create microcopy—such as buttons, error messages, and onboarding instructions—that is clear and informative and aligned with the user’s needs and expectations. By conducting user research, UX writers gain insights into user behavior and preferences, allowing them to craft content that resonates with the target audience. This collaboration between UX writers and a content designer ensures that every piece of text contributes to a cohesive and intuitive user experience.

What factors influence the UX writer salary for professionals in the field?

The salary of UX writers can vary based on several factors, including their level of experience, the industry they work in, and the location of their jobs. Experienced UX writers with a proven track record and advanced skills command higher salaries than those newer to the field. Additionally, the complexity of the projects they handle and the size of the company they work for can also impact their compensation. Working in high-demand industries or major tech hubs can increase salaries, reflecting the value experienced UX writers bring to a content strategy team.

How do UX writers focus their efforts during the design and development process?

During the design and development process, UX writers focus on creating content that enhances usability and guides users through their interactions with a product. They begin by collaborating with content strategists to understand the project’s goals and user needs. Conducting user research is a key part of this process, as it provides valuable insights into how users perceive and interact with content. UX writers then use this information to develop clear, actionable text that aligns with the product’s design and functionality inside the UX writing hub.

If you are new to UX writing and are looking to break-in, we recommend taking our UX Writing Certification Course, where you will learn the fundamentals of being a UX writer, how to dominate UX writer interviews, and how to stand out as a UX writing candidate.