The three essential ingredients in great products are great design, great code, and great words.

Hey Product, It’s Time to Embrace UX Writers

Several months ago, I was listening to a product industry speaker present about product best practices and I noticed something interesting. The graphics and talking points used throughout their presentation to talk about successful product teams made zero mention of one of the three critical elements for product success: the words.

It’s been many years since digital experience makers realized that there were not two but three essential elements to product success: great design, great code, and great words. And over the years, UX writers around the world (content designers and content strategists, too) have demonstrated that when UX content is written by professional writers, digital experiences get better.

When companies first advertised for writers who understood how to connect with people inside their heads, writers like me jumped at the opportunity to spend our days solving customer problems with strategically placed words.

What needed to be done was clear: get to know the customer, the brand, the strategy, the voice and tone, the vocabulary, the existing experience, the problems to be solved, the jobs to be done, and then apply the right content at the right time. Totally doable. Except that the product orgs we needed to work with had no blueprint for how and when to make room for us. Almost everywhere we turned up, we had to begin our jobs by convincing our product partners to let us in. And I mean to really let us in.

The commonality of this experience is proven out by the sheer number of articles and conference presentations written by UX writers willing to share their tips, tools, and tricks — not for actual writing, but for going from product outsiders to product almost-insiders. There is article after article meant to help UX writers find footholds in the artifacts, models, structures, cadences, and resources that aren’t designed to include us.

Once, I had the opportunity to ask one of the most celebrated product gurus in the industry for their advice on growing UX writer presence in a product org, and their response went something like this: there is no need to grow a UX writing presence. UX writers aren’t necessary. You should be teaching product teams how to write great content themselves.

…pausing so that UX writers, content designers, content strategists — and anyone who has ever worked with UX writers, content designers, and content strategists — can unroll their eyes…

I’ve worked with a lot of world-class product teams. Experts in design, engineering, and product management. I’ll paraphrase what almost every single member of those product teams has said to me at some point in our partnerships: they are not great writers. And no combination of guidelines and rulebooks will turn them into great writers while they’re focused on being great designers, engineers, and product owners.

It’s not a company-level problem. It’s a systemic one, born at the very creation of product orgs. The books, gurus, and consulting firms that teach companies how to build and scale product orgs have remained staunchly attached to the idea that a core product team should only include three people: a designer, an engineer, and a product owner.

UX writers most often go completely unmentioned or are represented as a line on a checklist toward the end of the design process along with a design system review and legal review. But as anyone who’s worked closely with a UX writer knows, orgs that follow these models are missing out on the full impact of a writer’s strategy, expertise, and value.

We’ve defined the opportunity and tested the prototype — let’s iterate!

Because of the sheer tenacity of UX writers over the last decade, more and more companies have learned that when UX writers are involved at every stage of creation, side-by-side with the product team, digital experiences do get better. We are as committed to understanding the customer problem and solving it as the product teams themselves, and because of this, many of the world’s leading tech companies now recognize UX writers as essential members of their product teams.

My fervent hope is that the most amplified voices in the product world will start to recognize that the formula for product success has changed and adapt their thinking and make more room for the people responsible for that third piece of the pie: the words. Until they do, here are seven ways you can make UX content a bigger part of the discussion, planning, and decision-making at your company.

1. Get to know the full experience — at least once

Very few people in a product org are familiar with their entire end-to-end digital experience, but UX writers should be one of them. The best way I’ve found to do this is periodically create a copy-only version of the experience and read it like a book. It can be time-intensive, but it’s worth your time.

Leave out all references to design elements and simply capture the words that the user reads. Create links where they exist, but instead of linking out to the web, link to the place in your document where the user experience will continue. This method will put into stark relief both the successes and failures of the existing content and provide tremendous insight into the experience’s voice, tone, and content opportunities.

2. Be a connector of people and teams

Once you have captured and read the end-to-end experience, you will have a unique understanding of where opportunities exist and which product teams should be talking more. When you find content errors, alignment opportunities, or even examples of exceptional UX writing — share what you’ve learned and be the connector of people, teams, and content.

3. Meet new product employees when they’re new

Most UX content writers work closely with designers, but it’s important to build relationships beyond those partnerships. Build relationships with the product managers and product owners. Get on the new hire onboarding schedule and explain what you do and why, and make sure they know how to engage their teams with you.

4. Create demand

Your UX writer presence will grow faster if the product teams are the ones clamoring for more UX writers. To accelerate this, take every opportunity you can to bring even the smallest amount of value to as many teams as possible. If a team asks for help at the very end of a project instead of the beginning, don’t let those opportunities be lost opportunities. Provide your recommendations, but also share the questions and considerations you would’ve had if you’d been brought in sooner. Give them the benefit of your expertise, even if that expertise won’t show up in this iteration of the work.

5. Collect “before & after” examples

Capture work when it comes to you for your input and again after you’ve applied your expertise. Include brief explanations of the logic, best practices, and strategy behind your choices. Build up a library of examples like this so that you can demonstrate how the experience improves because of your expertise.

6. Represent your work

If your company has regular forums for product teams to share out their work to leadership, ask to represent your work in that forum with those teams. No one can speak to the decision-making and nuances of content as well as you can, and it’s infinitely better if leadership sees you as a thoughtful and strategic contributor.

7. Seek allies who can help make change at your company

Find the people responsible for new employee onboarding and make sure UX writers are represented as part of the product development process. Find out who is in the room when decisions are made about standing up new product teams and make sure UX content needs and writers are part of the discussion. Seek out the materials used to reinforce best product practices at your company and work with the content owners to ensure the UX content process as you’ve defined it is represented.

The great news is that the impact UX writers and other UX content creators have on the product world is growing and we are moving in the right direction. When I see those graphics that make no mention of us and our role in making products successful, I remind myself that it’s simply an opportunity — a customer problem to be solved.