Basics of UX Writing

Getting Started

UX writing is designing content for the user interface of a digital product. Good UX writing makes the product much more usable and enhances user engagement. UX writing is all about creating content that helps users achieve their goals and improves their experience with the product. 

How to?

Here are some tips on how to do good UX writing:

1. Know your target audience: Understand your user’s needs, preferences, and language to create content that resonates with them.

2. Collaborate: Work with designers, design engineers, and product managers to understand the problem and explore how content can help to find a solution.

3. Explore: Ideate and try out different variations of the content in order to have the most impactful content.

4. Prototype: Work with designers on building prototypes of the solution with updated content.

5. Test your content: Test your content with real users to make sure that it is easy to understand and effective in helping users achieve their goals. Create content-specific tasks for researchers to test with users. Take notes on how users react to the language presented.

6. Iterate: Revise the text with both qualitative and quantitative feedback.

7. Deploy: Work with developers to ensure that the copy still works well even if technical constraints force design changes.

 

Types of UX writing:

Depending on the needs of the company, team, and end-user, a UX writer will create different types of content. Here are some of the most common types:

1. Microcopy: These are the small content pieces that appear throughout the interface like button labels, error messages, and tooltips. Microcopy should be clear, concise, and informative. 

2. Onboarding: Onboarding UX writing helps users to get started with a new product or feature. It is informative and engaging and guides users through the key features and benefits of the product.

3. Navigation: Navigation UX writing is writing content for labels and descriptions that guide users through the product interface. This type of writing should be clear and concise, making it easy for users to find what they need.

4. Error messages: These are informative messages that help users to understand what went wrong and how to fix it. They are written in simple language avoiding any technical jargon.

5. Help content: Help content provides users with information and guidance on how to use a product or feature. It is written in simple and easy-to-understand language, with clear headings and step-by-step instructions.

6. Calls to action: Calls to action (CTAs) are buttons or links that encourage users to take specific actions. CTAs are written in clear, concise, and convincing language to encourage users to take the desired action.

7. Persona-based content: This content is written for specific user personas like a particular age group or demographic. This type of writing helps to create a more personalized user experience, making the product more engaging and relevant to the users.

 

UX Writing can be done effectively by following these tips:

1. Be clear, concise, and useful

2. Remember the context

3. Stay positive

4. Sound like a human

5. Be consistent

6. Add surprise and humor

7. Fight dark patterns: A dark pattern is when a design pushes the user to act not in her own interest but in that of the company.

Do’s & Don'ts

 

 

Suggested Tools 

• Grammarly

• Hemingway App 

• Readable 

• GoogleDocs

• Notepad

References 

• UX Writing: Study Guide from NN Group

• 16 Rules of Effective UX Writing from UX Collective 

• An ultimate guide to Writing a great UX Copy from Testing Time

• UX Writing – What It Is, Guidelines, and Best Practices from Infragistics

• 10 Key Ingredients of Top-Notch UX Writing: Pro Tips and Examples from CareerFoundry

Other Related Best Practices

• How to create a Content strategy?

• Prototyping Basics