Strategic Writing for UX 9789352138579 PDF

Praise for Strategic Writing for UX “Along with design and research, content is a critical pillar of user experience design for today’s apps, websites, and games. In Strategic Writing for UX, Torrey Podmajersky expertly demonstrates how to incorporate content into your overall product strategy f...

Praise for Strategic Writing for UX “Along with design and research, content is a critical pillar of user experience design for today’s apps, websites, and games. In Strategic Writing for UX, Torrey Podmajersky expertly demonstrates how to incorporate content into your overall product strategy from the get-go. Everyone from students to seasoned professionals will gain valuable insights from this book.” MONETA HO KUSHNER, PRODUCT DESIGN MANAGER “Great UX copy is one of the easiest and fastest ways to improve your product, and Strategic Writing for UX will help you get there. If you’re building a product that contains any text at all, you should keep this book on your desk as a reference.” LAURA KLEIN, PRINCIPAL, USERS KNOW “Strategic Writing for UX is long overdue, and is jam-packed with actionable tips and strategies. This is a must-read for everyone who gets to write for, design, or otherwise influence a user’s digital experience.” JENNIFER HOFER, UX CONTENT STRATEGIST Strategic Writing for UX Drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention with Every Word Torrey Podmajersky Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo SHROFF PUBLISHERS & DISTRIBUTORS PVT. LTD. Mumbai Bangalore Kolkata New Delhi Strategic Writing for UX by Torrey Podmajersky Copyright © 2019 Torrey Podmajersky. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-492-04939-5 Originally printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (safari.oreilly.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or [email protected]. Acquisitions Editor: Jess Haberman Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery Development Editor: Angela Rufino Interior Designer: Ron Bilodeau and Production Editor: Kristen Brown Monica Kamsvaag Copyeditor: Octal Publishing Services, Inc. Illustrator: Jose Marzan and Proofreader: Rachel Monaghan Rebecca Demarest Indexer: Lucie Haskins Compositor: Kristen Brown Printing History: June 2019: First Edition. Revision History for the First Edition: 2019-05-31 First release See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=0636920235583for release details. First Indian Reprint: July 2019 ISBN: 978-93-5213-857-9 The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Strategic Writing for UX and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. 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Ltd., Mumbai.  [ contents ] Preface.................................................. ix Chapter 1 Why: Meet the Goals of People and the Organization... 1 Align the Goals of the People and the Organization.... 2 Choose Content to Meet the Goals...................... 4 Identify Purposes, Opportunities, and Constraints... 11 Imagine and Test Solutions............................ 12 Summary: Words Make Experiences Work............ 14 Chapter 2 Voice: They Recognize You............................ 15 Three Example Experiences........................... 16 Creating a Voice Chart................................. 18 Using the Voice Chart as a Decision-Making and Iteration Tool...................................... 31 Summary: Lift Every Voice............................ 35 Chapter 3 Conversation for Content-First Design................. 37 Face-to-Face, Full-Body Design........................ 38 Transforming the Conversation into an Experience... 42 Summary: Now You’re Having the Right Conversation. 45 Chapter 4 Apply UX Text Patterns................................ 47 Titles................................................... 48 Buttons, Links, and Other Commands................ 53 Descriptions........................................... 58 Empty States........................................... 62 Labels.................................................. 65 Controls............................................... 69 Text Input Fields....................................... 73 v  Transitional Text....................................... 76 Confirmation Messages............................... 80 Notifications........................................... 83 Errors.................................................. 87 Summary: Use Patterns as a Place to Start............ 91 Chapter 5 Edit, Because They Didn’t Go There to Read.......... 93 Editing in Four Phases................................ 94 Purposeful............................................. 95 Concise................................................ 97 Conversational......................................... 99 Clear.................................................. 101 Summary: Use UX Text to Help People Move Forward............................................... 102 Chapter 6 Measuring UX Content Effectiveness................ 103 Direct Measurement of UX Content.................. 104 Researching UX Content............................. 110 UX Content Heuristics............................... 113 Summary: If You Like It, Put a Value on It........... 134 Chapter 7 Tools of the UX Writing Trade........................ 137 Write for the Context................................. 137 Managing Content Review........................... 142 Publishing the Text................................... 145 Tracking the Content Work to Be Done.............. 146 Summary: The Tools Are a Means to an End......... 148 Chapter 8 A 30/60/90-Day Plan.................................. 149 The First 30 Days, AKA Phase 1: What and Who..... 149 30–60 Days, AKA Phase 2: Fires and Foundations... 156 60–90 Days, AKA Phase 3: Rapid Growth............ 160 Summary: To Fix the Words, Build Strong Foundations.......................................... 162 vi | CONTENTS Chapter 9 What to Do First...................................... 163 Decide What Is Urgent and What Is Important...... 163 Ground the Content in Empathy..................... 165 Introducing UX Content to the Team................ 166 Summary: Use UX Content to Meet Your Goals..... 167 Index.................................................. 169 CONTENTS | vii [ Preface ] UX writing is the process of creating the words in user experiences (UX): the titles, buttons, labels, instructions, descriptions, notifications, warnings, and controls that people see. It’s also the setup information, first-run experience, and how-to content that gives people confidence to take the next step. When an organization depends on individual humans performing spe- cific behaviors like buying tickets for events, playing a game, or riding public transit, words are ubiquitous and effective. Words can be seen on screens, signs, posters, and articles, as well as heard from devices and videos. The text can be minimal, but is very valuable. But what do those words do, how do we choose them, and how do we know when they work? This book provides strategies to use UX writing to help meet people’s goals while advancing our organizations toward converting, engaging, supporting, and reattracting those people. We structure our voice throughout the content so that the brand is recog- nizable to its audience. We apply common UX text patterns to ease and democratize the task of writing, and we measure how effective the UX content is. Who Should Read This Book If you need to write UX content on top of your usual job, you might be a marketing professional, technical writer, UX designer, product owner, or a software engineer. This book equips you with knowledge about what goals the UX content can accomplish, frameworks for writing it, and methods to measure it. ix If you are or will be a UX writer, or if you’re a manager or leader who wants to support a UX writer on your team, this book also gives you methods to demonstrate the value of UX writing and the impact it makes. In this book, you’ll find processes and tools to do the work of writing and the work of partnering with design, business, legal, engi- neering, product, and other stakeholders sanely, creatively, and scalably. How This Book Is Organized Chapter 1 explains why UX content matters and how it integrates with the software development life cycle. Chapter 2 provides a framework for the voice of the experience to align the UX content with the product principles. Chapter 3 describes a process of content-first design for UX text, rooted in conversation. Chapter 4 provides 11 patterns for UX text and demonstrates how they work in the three different voices of the example experiences. Chapter 5 presents a four-phase process of editing UX text to be pur- poseful, concise, conversational, and clear. Chapter 6 outlines three methods to measure the effect and quality of UX content: direct measurement, UX research, and heuristic analysis. Chapter 7 recommends tools and processes for UX writing, including drafting text, managing content review, and tracking the work. Chapter 8 shares my 30-60-90-day plan to ramp up and be successful as the first UX content professional in a team. Chapter 9 concludes with advice about prioritizing UX writing work to be done. Examples throughout this book come from three fictional organiza- tions and experiences: The Sturgeon Club app, for members of a social club ’appee, a social game in which players compete by uploading images TAPP, an app for people who use a regional transit system x | Preface For clarity, I’ve narrowed down the terms for the most important ideas in this book: Experience is the app, software, or other designed interaction the organization is creating for which the UX writer is creating UX content. Organization is the civic body, public institution, private company, or other entity that makes or commissions the experience. Team is the group of humans a UX writer collaborates with. People are the humans who use the experiences. Specific terms for people depend on the experience: people who use The Sturgeon Club are members, people who use ’appee are players, and people who use TAPP are riders. UX writer is the generic title I use for the team member who has the responsibility for the UX content. Other titles used in the industry include UX content strategist, content designer, content developer, and copywriter. UX content is the output of the UX writer’s work that directly helps people to use the experience. UX text is the subset of UX content that are the words used by interfaces. Other industry names for UX text include microcopy, editorial, UI text, and strings. Why I Wrote This Book UX content has been my professional focus for the past nine years. I started as a UX writer in Xbox in 2010, creating experiences for the mil- lions of people playing on the Xbox 360 console, Xbox Live, and Xbox One. Then, I worked on the Microsoft account, and was the first UX writer for Microsoft Family and Microsoft Education. I was the first UX writer and content strategist for the OfferUp.com marketplace, which helps millions of Americans buy and sell in their communities. As I finish this book, I am the first UX content strategist for two teams at Google. I love making experiences that help people. For me, that includes mak- ing experiences that help people become UX writers. I want more col- leagues, more UX writers who are developing even better methods to create great experiences. We UX writers haven’t had a common set of frameworks, tools, or methods that address the unique challenges Preface  | xi of UX content. The organizations and managers who want to hire us might know they have a “word problem,” but they have a hard time fig- uring out who to hire, how to support us, and what impact to expect. This book was conceived when I realized that we can’t have a com- munity or discipline of UX writing until we hold some basic ideas in common. We need to share expectations for what UX content can do, best practices for making the content do what it can, and methods to measure its effect. I wrote this book to share my frameworks, tools, and methods for creating UX content, and to share my encouragement and enthusiasm for using UX content to help people and organizations meet their goals. Acknowledgments Thank you to my teams at Xbox, Windows, Microsoft Education, OfferUp, and Google. Everything I know about UX writing, I learned while working with you wonderful people. Thanks especially to those who pushed me to create better text, to find better solutions, to delight our customers and exceed the expectations of the business. I love work- ing on challenging problems with you. Thank you, Michelle Larez Mooney, for teaching me how to write UX. You were on my first interview loop to become a UX writer, and you taught me the craft. You showed me by example how to partner effec- tively with engineering, product, and localization teams. Even more, you demonstrated how to engage so deeply and so effectively that the value of the work was undeniable. Thank you, Elly Searle, for having the idea and drive to make the first UX Writing course. You talked me into it and then went out and made it real by talking to Larry Asher at the School of Visual Concepts. I’ve learned so much from you about articulating what I can offer and ask- ing for what I need. It has been a joy to teach with you and to benefit from your insights, enthusiasm, and dedication. Thank you, Michaela Hutfles, for your coaching, mentorship, and friendship. My career in UX would be neither possible nor joyful with- out your reflection, advice, and encouragement. Thank you, Nathan Crowder, Jeremy Zimmerman, Dawn Vogel, Sarah Grant, and the rest of our Type ’n’ Gripe. I am a writer because we have written together every week for more than 12 years. Together we started xii | Preface pitching our fiction stories to top markets, instead of “easy” markets, regardless of rejection. I wouldn’t have pitched this book without that practice, nor had the discipline to see it through. Thank you, Jess Haberman and Angela Rufino and the rest of the astonishing team at O’Reilly, for believing in this book, suggesting paths forward, and supporting the entire process. Thank you also to my early readers and technical reviewers who helped to make this book more readable and more helpful. And finally, thank you, Dietrich Podmajersky, my amazing partner. Your confidence that what I do matters more than housework, your support while I overcommit my time and energy, your patience for my inability to figure out when it’s time to go to bed, and more all add up to make the thousands of ways you made this book possible. I love you. Preface  | xiii  Why: Meet the Goals of People and the Organization If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design. —RALF SPETH, CEO OF JAGUAR LAND ROVER “We need to hire someone to fix the words!” I have heard this phrase from multiple people on teams I’ve worked on and UX leaders I’ve talked with. In each case, the person can point to the places in the expe- rience where the words are “broken.” These people have recognized that fixing the words would help their organization or the people who use their experiences advance in some important way. In each case I’ve seen, there is enough “fixing” to keep a person busy for years, but fixing the words will never be enough. Consider this met- aphor: an experience with broken words is a house with broken walls. Fix the words as you would repair the walls. If there’s only one broken wall, and it was built robustly, and the hole doesn’t affect the electrical, plumbing, or architectural support the building needs, we can fix it cheaply. When an experience is built with consistent terminology, voice, information architecture, and ways to find, maintain, internationalize, and update its content, all we would need to do is fix the words. When those things haven’t been considered, and the breaks go through electrical, plumbing, or supporting timbers, then words can’t fix the hole by themselves. We will need a strategic approach to fix the underlying experience. We’ll need to apply some engineering—in this case, UX writing—to fix the walls and support the building. As an added benefit: fixing those walls will make the whole building stronger. 1 The strategic purpose of UX content is to meet two sets of goals: the goals of the organization responsible for the experience, and the goals of the people using the experience. Align the Goals of the People and the Organization Let’s consider the goals of our first fictional example organization: the TAPP Transit System. The TAPP Transit System is a regional transit system in a city. TAPP, like any transit system, is under constant pres- sure to reduce costs and demonstrate its effectiveness. It also needs to bring in money through fares and taxes to maintain the vehicle fleet and pay its personnel. TAPP cares about getting people to ride a bus for the first time, but that’s not enough. TAPP needs to build a relationship with its popula- tion so that they choose to ride again and choose to support the tran- sit system through their political choices. The transit system needs to establish a virtuous cycle of engaging and reengaging its riders. The cycle starts when the organization attracts people to it (Figure 1-1). Then, it needs to convert those people. But because this is an experience and not just a sale, we need to onboard people into the experience, to set them up for success in it. Then, people can be engaged in the experience. FIGURE 1-1 The organization’s view of the experience virtuous cycle. Starting at the top, the organization attracts people to the experience, converts them, onboards them, and then engages them into the experience. To complete the virtuous cycle, we must transform engaged people into fans who attract others to the experience and who are reattracted themselves. 2 | STRATEGIC WRITING FOR UX The virtuous part of the cycle comes next. The organization reaps tre- mendous benefit if it can transform people using the experience into fans. When someone is a fan of the experience, they not only prefer to use it themselves, but they recommend it to other people, helping the organization attract new people. This transformation can happen because the experience is excellent, it’s useful to them, and, like any good brand, it reflects back to the person what they want to believe about themselves. The transformation can even happen when the experience breaks. Whatever the cause of the break (natural disaster, bad bus driver, etc.), the organization can either lose the person or support them. By sup- porting the people in the experience, it can retain and engage those people further. When an organization plans for potential breaks and fixes them ahead of time, it not only can continue to engage the person, it can use the break as a moment to transform a person who is merely engaged into a fan. The local people TAPP wants to attract just want to get to work, to school, to the doctor, to the grocery store. Riding the bus might be their best option, but they need to be aware of it and trust it. They are likely unaware of the transit system’s organizational goals. They proba- bly aren’t considering the variety of needs other riders might have, nor the larger goals the transit system might have. They’re probably wor- ried about all the ways their ride could go wrong: incorrect fare, miss- ing a transfer, full bus, and more. We need to understand the cycle from the point of view of the people who will use the experience, to meet them where they are (Figure 1-2). Their first task is to investigate and verify what they know about the system. They aren’t expecting to be attracted into the system, and they aren’t thinking about becoming part of the transit system’s virtuous cycle. They just want to know their options. 1. Why: Meet the Goals of People and the Organization  | 3 FIGURE 1-2 In the virtuous cycle, the organization and the person using the experience have different perspectives. While the organization attracts, converts, onboards, engages, supports, and transforms, the person investigates, verifies, commits to, sets up, uses, fixes, prefers, and champions the experience. By realizing this dif- ference in perspective and focus, the organization can more effectively address what the person is there for. Where TAPP is trying to attract the person, the person is investigating and verifying that they’ll get where they want to go, on time. Where TAPP is concerned with converting, the person is deciding or commit- ting to the experience. Where TAPP wants to onboard and engage the person, the person expects to get on the bus, pay, ride, and arrive at their destination. The frequent TAPP rider tends to influence their communities to ride the bus. Through their behavior, they make riding the bus seem easy. Whether they think of themselves as champions of public transit or not, these people help attract more riders into the TAPP transit system. Choose Content to Meet the Goals Throughout the virtuous cycle, content helps the organization and the people using the experience meet their goals. What kind of content will help varies according to where the people are in the cycle. At the beginning of the cycle, marketing content helps TAPP attract people to become riders. People interact with this content to investigate and verify that the experience will be right for them. This content is the 4 | STRATEGIC WRITING FOR UX traditional marketing of advertisements and press releases; the social media content of tweets, blogs, and posts; and more. It is the articles written in journals, the reviews and product ratings that are promoted on websites, and the product pages in app stores (Figure 1-3). FIGURE 1-3 For a person investigating whether an experience will work for them, traditional marketing content is appropriate, including ads, product pages, and more. These pieces of content meet the organizational goal of attracting people. After a person knows about the experience, they can check whether it will work for them. To make the decision to download the TAPP app and ride the bus (or for other experiences, to buy or download the soft- ware), the person might use endorsements, reviews, product ratings, and other types of content (Figure 1-4). All of this content helps to get people to the point of commitment. 1. Why: Meet the Goals of People and the Organization  | 5 FIGURE 1-4 For a person investigating whether an experience will work for them, traditional marketing content is appropriate, including ads, product pages, and more. These pieces of content meet the organizational goal of attracting people. After a person makes the commitment, marketing is over for that per- son. But the experience still needs to be installed, and the person needs to know how to take their first action (Figure 1-5). This is where UX con- tent begins. FIGURE 1-5 Onboarding helps people set up the experience. Different experiences might need different kinds of content, from simple first-run experiences to complete get-started guides and how-to information. 6 | STRATEGIC WRITING FOR UX Consumer software like the TAPP app can require very little setup: perhaps turning on Location permission, or signing in to buy bus fare. We can write UX text in the first-run experience for our TAPP app so that the first time the person uses the experience, they are able to start meeting their own goals right away. For software that is being used at work, there’s probably more setup required. As a complication, the person who makes the decision to buy software for work is often not the person setting up the software. At a large enough business, an IT pro might need to establish permissions, implement special configurations, or enter data to make the experience work for that business. The organization that made the software can provide UX content for this setup crew, and different UX content for the people who will use the experience day to day. After the experience is set up, the core UX text takes over. These words are the topic of most of this book. They are the titles, buttons, and descriptions, or voiced comments and instructions from audible experiences that make up half or more of the interactions a person can have with an experience. If the experience has intrinsic content, like a game, finance, or map- ping app, there is special content the person is there for: the game nar- rative, financial information, and maps. TAPP needs to provide route and timing information as well as bus fare and pass information. To use the experience successfully, people need this content, too (Figure 1-6). 1. Why: Meet the Goals of People and the Organization  | 7 FIGURE 1-6 When people are using the experience, they interact with words in titles, buttons, descriptions, and other UX text, plus alerts and other game or consumable content. How-to content still has a role, whether it’s articles in a help center or built in to the UX context. Sometimes, people want a little confidence boost to take their next step. The job of how-to content is to give people that confidence and instruction when they want it. Sometimes, using the experience doesn’t go smoothly. Maybe the TAPP rider has forgotten to update their credit card expiration date, or maybe a bus has been unexpectedly rerouted for an emergency. The organization can use alerts and error messages to inform the per- son and help them get to their goals (Figure 1-7). The person might seek troubleshooting content, which the organization might provide in a chatbot, or a help center, or on YouTube, or in scripts for support center personnel. 8 | STRATEGIC WRITING FOR UX FIGURE 1-7 When there’s a break in the experience, the organization can provide error messages, alerts, and troubleshooting content. Supporting people through a broken experience can make those peo- ple into fans of the experience, but there are other ways, too. Giving people badges for different kinds of engagement, and allowing them to get ratings in the experience, means that they have something in this experience that’s unique to them that they’d lose if they went to a dif- ferent experience. Experiences can also create communities. There are many examples of this: game enthusiasts who join forums to discuss the game, or people who sell on the same online selling platform, or teachers who use a par- ticular classroom management system. Enthusiasts of the experience join forums to share tips and tricks and to be recognized as experts. Organizations can boost the attractiveness of their experience as well as their brand by providing forums, training, and conferences to give the fans of the experience avenues to attract new people (Figure 1-8). Considered together, the experiences an organization makes will com- prise a huge amount of content (Figure 1-9). That content is a common thread throughout the organization’s relationship with the people who buy, set up, use, and hopefully become champions for the experience. 1. Why: Meet the Goals of People and the Organization  | 9 FIGURE 1-8 To give people more reasons to prefer this experience and this organization, the experience can include intrinsic value that isn’t available outside of the experience and create communities around the use of the experience to help attract more people into it. FIGURE 1-9 Examples of content that organizations use to make people aware of their experiences, bring people in, engage them, and reattract them. When the content is designed as a system, the organization benefits. 10 | STRATEGIC WRITING FOR UX Today, very few organizations plan their content throughout the cycle. Without the marketing content that attracts and converts people into using the experience, the organization will fail. But, without content for onboarding, engaging, and supporting, the experience will fail to engage and transform those people into champions. UX writing is how we create that content. Identify Purposes, Opportunities, and Constraints Writing begins where all design and engineering starts: identifying the purposes, opportunities, and constraints for the experience. Before the writing can begin, the writer needs to identify the goals of the per- son who will use the experience as well as the goals of the organization making the experience. To learn the goals for an experience, the writer needs to collaborate with the people who understand and define those goals—the product owner, designer, marketer, researcher, engineer (not an exhaustive list)—and people who will use the experience. From the beginning of ideation and development, the writer needs to participate in the same meetings, discovering and defining the experience in collaboration with their team. The primary purpose of the text is to meet the goals of the organization and people using the experience, but the text also has a role in protect- ing both groups. For example, the people using the experience should correctly understand how their data is used and protected. Similarly, the organization needs to have its time, money, and energy protected from liability. From the beginning, the UX writer needs to know the business con- straints, including resources available for localization and the timelines to coordinate engineering and UX content with content for market- ing, sales, and support. We also need to know what languages the peo- ple using the experience are fluent in, on which devices, and in what contexts. As the experience develops, we need to know technical, dis- play, and design constraints (like maximum URL lengths and text box sizes), which text needs to be coded before hardware is shipped, and which text can be updated from live services. 1. Why: Meet the Goals of People and the Organization  | 11 Writing for UX, just like design and coding for UX, is a design and engineering process. It is an iterative process of creation, measure- ment, and iteration (Figure 1-10). FIGURE 1-10 Writing for UX is an iterative process of creation, measurement, and iteration. To bring people into the experience, the words need to ground the conversation in what the people who will use it already understand. With the team, the UX writer might conduct foundational, exploratory research about the context for the organization and the person who will use the experience. In this initial research, the UX writer can listen for sensitive topics that the experience will need to handle with care, including words that have hurtful or offensive connotations. If the experience involves money, health, privacy, or children, it’s likely that complex legal or regulatory constraints apply, too. These constraints are essential to understand before designing the voice for the experience. Now that we know where we want to go, and the tools and limitations we have, we can start the most wildly creative part: imagining how to get there. Imagine and Test Solutions For writers, the most creative part of the design and engineering pro- cess can be as immersive as play-acting the conversation between the person and the experience, or as straightforward as adapting text that worked in the past for a new situation. But whether blue-sky or mun- dane, the job is to imagine several distinctly different solutions. By finding many possible solutions, the team can choose the best one to move forward with. 12 | STRATEGIC WRITING FOR UX This imagining and testing isn’t a solo activity: it’s much more difficult to come up with the best breadth of possibilities if you have only your- self to draw from. Even though the UX writer is responsible for mar- shaling the best ideas for UX content, they are not the only person with great ideas about words. The very best working groups include team members who are familiar with the technical, legal, or financial oppor- tunities and limits, and people who will use the experience. Those peo- ple can be experts and novices, enthusiasts or skeptics, fans of the orga- nization, and exclusion experts1 who are likely to be prevented from using the experience if they aren’t included from the beginning. This working group might participate in formal design activities like a design sprint, brainstorm, or the conversational design exercise that we look at in Chapter 3. They also collaborate informally, in real time and asynchronously. The UX writer participates, bringing their special talent identifying the words and phrases that bring the group together. The writer helps the team discover the different terms they use, drives understanding of the ideas by clarifying words and definitions, and helps articulate the emerging solutions in ways that the entire group understands. After solutions are imagined, they need to be tested. Understanding what is working and isn’t working about the various solutions is vital if the group is going to choose the best solution. From the ongoing research, UX writers learn the words people already use and the phrases that resonate with them. UX writers and UX researchers can collabo- rate to design questions that elicit the words people would prefer to use. UX designers need to develop the end-to-end flows, especially for the most common possibilities. The UX writer refines the words by part- nering closely with the designers. To ensure the interactions, visual design, and text in the designs work together, we need to draft all of the UX text in the designs. Then, we need to share our best options using tools that the entire team can access. 1 In Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design (MIT Press, 2018), Kat Holmes defines exclusion experts as “people who experience the greatest mismatch when using your solution, or who might be the most negatively affected.” 1. Why: Meet the Goals of People and the Organization  | 13 Writing UX text is iterative, starting with less-than-perfect words, then replacing those words with slightly better words, and repeating until you find the best words. This is the way to make the text purposeful and protective, but also concise, conversational, and recognizable as coming from the organization’s brand. Finally, the team gets ready to launch the experience, feature, or update. Because UX writers can be the single person responsible for stringing words together across all of the screens, they’re often one of the very few team members with a broad yet detailed view of the whole experi- ence. The writer can be a big help to their support, marketing, PR, and sales partners, because writers have exact and detailed knowledge of what buttons people need to press and precisely what each error mes- sage means. Summary: Words Make Experiences Work In this book, I give concrete examples, tools, and advice for the UX writer. But the process isn’t always as clear as I’ve outlined in this chap- ter. For example, sometimes experiences are developed without clear goals in mind. Sometimes, the UX writer is also the designer, or prod- uct owner, or frontend engineer, or marketer. Sometimes, the team (or individual) doesn’t make several options, but pursues a single vision. Most teams don’t know that there’s more that they can do with the words, nor do they know what to do with a writer. Even if your design and engineering processes aren’t ideal, I want to encourage you to consider your options for creating great, strategic UX content. If your organization or team wants to plunge forward without understanding their purpose, OK—but you can identify purposes your- self (voice, Chapter 2). You can imagine brand new text yourself (con- versational design, Chapter 3). You can test those options with guerrilla UX research tactics or heuristics, and estimate the impact the final text could make (measurement, Chapter 6). You can advocate for text that is conversational, concise, and purposeful (editing, Chapter 5) and write it faster by taking advantage of text patterns (text patterns, Chapter 4). You can even use the organization’s experience success metrics and relate those measurements to the text (measurement, Chapter 6). And if you’re just getting started with UX writing for your team, you can socialize the possibilities (30/60/90-day plan, Chapter 8).