A UX writer plays a crucial role in a UX project by crafting clear, concise, and engaging content that enhances the overall user experience.
Their main responsibilities include:
1. Collaborating with stakeholders: UX writers work closely with designers, researchers, product managers, and developers to ensure that content aligns with the project’s goals, user needs, and brand voice.
2. Creating user-centered content: They write microcopy (e.g., button labels, error messages, menu items) and macro copy (e.g., onboarding instructions, help articles) that guide users through the product or service, making it easy to understand and use.
3. Conducting user research: UX writers participate in user research, gathering insights on user behavior, preferences, and pain points to inform content decisions.
4. Establishing content guidelines: They develop and maintain style guides, tone, and voice guidelines, ensuring consistency across all touchpoints.
5. Testing and iterating: UX writers analyze user feedback and performance metrics to refine content, making it more effective and user-friendly.
6. Advocating for users: They act as the user’s voice within the project team, ensuring that content meets user needs and expectations.
What is UX writing?
UX writing is the art of writing copy to aid the user experience. UX writing is a subset of user experience (UX) design. As such, UX writing aims to create copy that guides the user through an interface, helping them navigate the product and complete their desired tasks.
UX writing is crafting all the customer-facing text or copy in digital products. In addition, UX writing helps users understand how to use and interact with software products, including desktop and mobile apps, games, and other multimodal experiences, including voice interactions.
UX writing is the practice of creating text and copy for user interfaces. UX writers plan and write the text that guides users through a digital product, application, or website, also known as microcopy, the small bits of text you see on websites and apps that instruct you what to do, alleviate uncertainty, encourage progress, and provide reassurance that users are moving toward a goal.
UX writing and user personas
UX writers and UX designers both work to develop user personas rather than buyer personas for copywriters. User personas are fictional representations of your ideal user or customer based on market research and your existing business data and customer profiles. This research includes discovering your user persona’s main pain points and the solutions they seek based on their needs.
The user persona is whoever uses the service or product. The representation may not be the buyer nor decide on the purchase. The user persona focuses on details, such as ease of use and the learning curve for a product or service.
The buyer persona is whoever decides to purchase the product or service. They are not necessarily the ones that use the product, but may decide on the ROI for the product or service. Often, your buyer persona won’t be your user persona. For example, your buyer persona could be general managers, department managers, or supervisors that are the decision-makers.
UX writing artifacts
UX writers work with UX designers or IA to establish how the information hierarchy fits within the product hierarchy. The user flows down to sentence structure and how actions and benefits are balanced for clarity. The UX writers align the brand voice to user needs, which results in a platform or experience-appropriate product voice, under which a series of tones is nested for use in different situations.
UX writers determine which parts of the journey, flow, app, or wider customer journey you should change for the voice and tone. For example, they may increase brand voice where it is more appropriate or use very-plain language so the user can complete an urgent, error-prone, or critical task.
UX writers create a content matrix to define the content and IA to document the words they plan to use, mapping specific tasks and journeys to the same UI components or patterns in which they will appear. They also document text-specific guidelines such as font usage and size, plain English or other language comprehension levels, color contrasts, and alt text guides.
Examples of UX writing include:
- Buttons and other interactive items
- Tooltips and instructions
- Menus and navigation
- Forms
- Notifications
- Error messages
- Modals and dialogs
- Onboarding screens
How to work with UX writers in Figma
In this talk, Figma’s UX writing team shares their favorite tips for designers on using Figma to deepen the creative bond with writers and build more intuitive, delightful products together.