As the role and discipline of content strategy have been defined largely, new lanes of roles have emerged in the designing field. One of the most important and fastest-growing of those is the function of UX writers.
Now an integral part of design teams at companies like Google, Facebook, Booking.com, and more, user experience writers create any text you see or hear in a user interface. Anywhere you see a user and computer come together to get something done, that’s where UX writing plays a role.
What is UX writing?
A user experience (UX) writer creates copy for apps, websites, and other digital products that help users navigate the product. A UX writer might find the words for menus, definitions, buttons, labels, chatbots, and error messages, or the instructions to guide first-time users through a product—the small pieces of writing which is collectively called “microcopy.” An effective UX writer will create a microcopy that is intuitive to users, in keeping with the product’s brand voice, and easily understood by most anybody, including people of different abilities, ages, gender identities, and back grounds. You can think of UX writing as a subset of UX design, just like user interface (UI) designers are a subset that focuses on the graphical portions of UX design. UX writers focus ocsn the written bits—and there’s plenty of overlap with UX design.
More than just writing microcopy
Some assume that the role of a UX writer is to create clever error messages like the one pictured below.
However it is not that way. Even though creating fun or funny (but still useful) messages is often part of the job, it’s a much less significant aspect than you might think.
UX writers are essentially product designers who are part of the product design team and help create the website, app, or feature from the outset. They’re part of the team that decides which features to add to the digital product. Some would say the UX writer is the most creative position on the team as they use that creativity to find solutions to problems the end-user would potentially face.
Their main mission is to make digital interfaces easy to use.
For instance, when tasked with writing an error message, the UX writer needs to turn into a robotic message like this one.
Conclusion
As an ending note, we can say that beyond writing microcopy and improving the user experience, the UX writer is also tasked with helping create the brand voice for the company or product. They may even create a style guide that offers guidance on how to use this brand voice across all of the organization’s content.
