March 2018 | Exceptional content, awesome experience
If you want an abridged master class in writing for user experience, watch this video. Take notes. Read them. Watch it again. It’s essential learning for any UX writer.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Writing well isn’t so hard! I write all the time.” If you’re a good writer yourself, do you really need to hire writers to design the writing experience in your product? A writer is just another person to hire, another person who has to iterate on the design, engage in meetings and sprints, another person to hold up launch. You can slap some copy in there, and everyone will know what you’re trying to say. Right? Or maybe you'll find that when you hire an awesome UX writer, your conversions will jump by double digits. Because that's what good writing can do for you.
As someone who designs the content experience for consumer-facing products, I can tell you that a writer is an essential member of your product team. Take the humble, ubiquitous error message. Have you encountered an error message that made no sense? An error message should reflect the tone of the error experience, be helpful, and leave you feeling like the world isn’t about to end. But I’ve encountered countless error messages that a. tell me nothing, b. share something “helpful” in technical jargon, or c. make me feel like my device might implode if I select the close button. Writing a useful, warm error message? Not a piece of cake. But we writers iterate on that message, write it dozens of times, contemplate the purpose of the message, uncover what the user really needs to take away, and emerge with a masterpiece. And how do you know it’s a masterpiece? It’s so good, you barely notice it’s there. That’s the magic of UX writing.
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CONTENT STRATEGY HOW-TO FROM GOOGLE I/O
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ALL YOUR EATING QUESTIONS, ANSWERED
Eat this. Don’t eat that. Stay away from this. Just kidding, it’s good for you! Drinking a little bit of this is slightly good for your heart but really bad for your breasts. (The research behind a lot of the chocolate-and-wine-are-health-foods studies are paid by, you guessed it, the chocolate and wine industries.)
I’m a big fan of Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” mantra. But if you want to delve a little (okay, a lot) deeper without reading several Pollan books, dive into Mark Bittman’s treatise on what to eat, when, and why.
And from my personal experience: Reframe the conversation from “this is healthy/not healthy” to “this is nutritious/not nutritious.” Don’t demonize food; just be wise (and have some fun too).
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LOOK TO THE TREES
Your eyes will thank you, I promise. I spend much of my day holed up in my interior office, no daylight (just beautiful fluorescents, which I keep as dim as I can without causing that low-level fluorescent light aural buzz), eyes approximately 15 inches and 20 inches, respectively, from my two monitors. I wear blue-light filtering glasses because I’m smart (paranoid) like that, and I keep Night Shift on all day and night long (which warms my screen color from its native blue light to a more pleasant orange territory), but despite my efforts, I’ve noticed over the years that trees in the distance are a touch fuzzier than they used to be. Our long-distance vision shouldn’t, evolutionarily speaking, be getting worse, but screens are reducing our ability to translate the dimensions of our world into 3D images in our brains. Our depth perception is impacted. So go look at some trees. In fact, go look at trees in the distance several times a day. Your eyes will thank you, and so will your (metaphorical and literal) heart.
You can (and should) apply design thinking to just about anything in your life. Not sure what design thinking is? Here’s the short version: Before you create something new or make a big decision, reflect on the idea, mock it up, and do a quick test run. In design thinking language, that translates to: empathize, then design, then ideate, then prototype, then test, (then repeat these steps if tests went poorly), then implement. More simply: understand, then explore, then make.
Okay, that’s idea number one out of the way. You may be wondering about idea number two, the chatbot. A chatbot is a product that runs on artificial intelligence combined with human inputs. Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft), and Alexa (Amazon) are all tricked-out, well-known versions of mega chatbots. If you’re designing your own chatbot, you might be thinking of creating something on a smaller scale (or maybe not. Go big!). For example, airlines create chatbots that you can trade text messages with to get answers about your upcoming reservations. Chatbots are fun! Friendly! And can go horribly awry! Design think before you implement. And then hire a writer to help with your chatbot dialog. Your users will thank you.
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CHATBOTS NEED DESIGN THINKING TOO
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I'M A THINKER, AND MCSWEENEYS KNOWS IT
Nailing it, as usual, McSweeneys. Here are some of my fave websites and corresponding glimpses into my soul:
Goodreads.com: You’ve canceled a minor surgery to finish a Carlos Fuentes novel.
Maybe not surgery, but I've certainly lost track of time, space, location, food in the oven, food on the stove, other people in the house, and all my worries whilst engrossed.
MotherJones.com: You’ve read the entire label of a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle.
It's true. I have.
Forbes.com: You have achieved climax while converting an IRA into a Roth-IRA.
I love me some post-tax saving.
Medium.com: You keep a running list of think piece ideas in Evernote.
Notepad and pen by my bed - check.
Ridiculous number of Apple Notes logged? - check.
NPR.org: You’ve quoted David Foster Wallace while making love.
Mostly I just love NPR.
Etsy.com: You’ve gotten into a fist fight over a throw pillow.
The Etsy rabbit hole may be my worst rabbit hole. (It usually results in more tabs open than my browser can expose at a glance.)