In the UX Writing Hub’s training program, we have a module dedicated solely to content style guides. After getting help from our amazing Facebook community members at Microcopy & UX Writing, we’ve collected the top 16 content style guides for you to use on your next content style guide creation journey.

Save it for a rainy day!

🧙‍♂️ Curious about UX writing? Try our free course A Taste of UX Writing

Intuit

When I first heard about Intuit’s style guide, or rather content design system, it completely blew my mind. Intuit is the fintech organization behind finance solutions like TurboTax, Quickbooks, and Mint. They decided to develop a whole system where everyone – content designers, copywriters, marketers, designers, developers – can find not just language advice, but also a library of content patterns that they can use in their work.

I was so curious about their work that I recently invited their Principal Content Designer Stephen Curran to the Writers in Tech podcast (for the second time!). Listen to the episode here to hear how they developed their content design system. We also created a whole blog article on the subject of content design systems. Check it out!

Mailchimp

The holy bible of content style guides. Honestly, people post about it on our Facebook group Microcopy & UX Writing at least once a month.

Monzo

The neobank Monzo has a very distinct, friendly voice and tone. Their style guide is available to the public and it’s an absolute delight to read. Check it out for a tip on how monkeys can help you spot passive sentences. 🐒 In 2020, I had the pleasure of chatting with their lead writer Harry Ashbridge on the Writers in Tech podcast.

Microsoft

The Microsoft Writing Style Guide replaces the Microsoft Manual of Style, a respected source of editorial guidance for the tech community for more than 20 years.

Canada Post Corporation

Discover the writing principles for the ways that Canada post add value to their digital products with concise and meaningful language.

Google

Material Design is one of the most famous design systems out there. Explore their content section and learn how to write content like Google does.

Shopify

Shopify’s ambitious content design system Polaris will help you understand how to think strategically about the language in your products and apps.

Conscious

The Conscious style guide contains the latest observations, opinions, and style advice all in one place. It’s a top resource for everyone who wants to be more mindful about the language they use.

GO-JEK

The mission of the UX writers of Geo-Jek is to allow users to use their app effortlessly — without friction.

UK Government

The single government representative on our list. I am happy a governmental service realized that they too can actually lead when it comes to creating conversational interfaces.

BBC

Highly detailed content style guide created by the UX writers and content creators of the BBC.

Atlassian

The Atlassian writing style is an open source system of their core company values, company mission, design principles, and voice and tone.

Buffer

One method for creating a content style guide is to base it on another guide. In Buffer’s guide, they claim to follow Mailchimp’s style guide with some extra sauce made by Buffer.

Salesforce

To connect with their customers, Salesforce needs to talk in a way that resonates with them. They published their content style guide that shows how to do that.

University of Leeds 

This content style guide was created to help the people of Leeds University write more creatively and effectively in their day-to-day life at the University of Leeds.

Apple

The Apple Style Guide provides editorial guidelines for text in Apple instructional materials, technical documentation, reference information, training programs, and user interfaces. The intent of these guidelines is to help maintain a consistent voice in Apple materials.

Brand Voice and Tone in UX Writing

A key component of UX writing is the “Brand Voice and Tone”. These elements shape the user’s perception of a brand.

Brand Voice is the unique personality of your brand expressed through words. It’s a consistent style of communication that makes your brand identifiable. Your brand voice could be professional, friendly, humorous, or serious, depending on your brand’s identity.

Tone is a subset of your brand’s voice. It adds flavor to your voice based on the audience, situation, and message. For example, a friendly brand voice might adopt an enthusiastic tone in a welcome message and an empathetic tone in a support context.

Defining your brand’s voice and tone is crucial for a consistent user experience.

Here are a few steps:

1. Identify Your Brand’s Personality: If your brand were a person, what personality traits would it have? What language would it use?
2. Consider Your Audience: Who are you speaking to? What tone and language resonate with them?
3. Create Voice and Tone Guidelines: Document your brand’s voice and tone to ensure consistency. Include examples for clarity.
4. Train Your Team: Ensure everyone creating content for your brand understands and applies these guidelines.

As a UX writer, you may end up working in companies or on projects that take different approaches to their content style guide. If you join an organization that is already implementing a content style guide, great! Your job is to follow and optimize it continuously.

If you’re working as a consultant UX writer, or you are the first UX writer of your organization, you may need to build a brand new style guide from scratch.

Return to this list to find your inspiration and get that content style guide up and running!

Keep exploring

Everything you need to know about content design systems (and how they differ from content style guides) (article)

Building a content design system (podcast episode with Stephen Curran at Intuit)

Copy in the age of digital banking (podcast episode with Harry Ashbridge at Monzo bank)

Try our free course A Taste of UX Writing

The post Top 16 Content Style Guides 2024 (and How to Use Them) appeared first on UX WRITING HUB.

Outline macro goals and micro tasks

Ideate how to tackle the project together. As with any project, the finer details were in constant flux. However, Yuval and Anja set the broader timeline: 2 weeks for research, 2 weeks for write-ups, and 2 weeks for syncs and wrapping up. This bigger picture allowed us to evaluate goals, define and allocate micro tasks better, assign priorities, and stay on track. 

While we didn’t use a project tracker tool, we used a Miro board to visualize steps, tasks, and progress.

Define the tools from start to finish

For future UXWA students, we suggest asking these questions at the start of any project: Where will you outline goals and tasks, and how will you track your project? Where will your research be placed and analyzed? Are you going to use a collaborative workspace like Figma, Miro, Whimsical, or a mix for different purposes? How does each team member feel about communication tools? Will you use Zoom, Slack, or another tool?

For our Hibob project, Airtable was heavily used early on because of its usefulness for multiple types of UX research. Also, remember to consider which tools are best for delivering your final work. In our case, Google Workspace was ideal for deliverables such as our final report, presentation slides, and folders containing final mockups. 

Learn more about useful design tools

Set an agenda for meetings

Meetings are hard to come by, yet infinitely better than constant back-and-forths on Slack. But meetings need tightly defined agendas, or Zoom sessions can drag on with no clear outcome. Though, admittedly, we sometimes enjoyed nerding out together about all things content design.

We discussed work completed, challenges, upcoming tasks, who was doing what, and when our next check-in would be. If anything needed to be reviewed for discussion, this was done before the meeting and not during. Add to the agenda before the meeting begins so talking points drive the discussion.

Centralize your resources and documents

A centralized location for documents keeps all references to your research, decisions, progress, and deliverables in one place. The benefit? Mutually accessible documents, links, databases, images, and more.

The Hibob project scaled up quickly and thanks to our project board on Miro, all 9 UX writers, 2 project managers, and the Hibob team were aligned through a visual story that unfolded as we progressed. This was complemented by our storage of documents in Google Workspace, where the final deliverables would eventually live.

Be strategic about what roles you volunteer for

This type of project is a great chance to learn to the max, all the while delivering great outcomes. Is there a task you’ve never done? Volunteer so you can expand your skill set. What experiences can you contribute? Offer to be a backup for another team member in case they need support.

For example, one team member helped with the content audit so she could gain experience doing so for a digital product. On the flip side, because of her early career as an editor, she offered to support—but not lead—the content style guide work. 

Take the initiative to check on everyone’s status and workload regularly

In a word, communicate. This seems trite, but in a group setting, sometimes people may hesitate to say “no” or let others know when they have less time. Regular communication is key for knowing what each person is working on, if the tasks are still manageable for everyone, and how others’ work may affect your own.

Not only that, it can help streamline the work overall. One team member checked in with both the content audit team and the team working on error messages. Because she did this, the content audit team was able to record error messages in an efficient way so that it could be easily accessed by the error message team later in the project.

Make sure everyone references the same style guide

Set foundational style guidelines early, before team members start making copy suggestions.

Early in the project, we put several polarizing style decisions to a vote among writers and stakeholders. Everyone’s votes and rationale helped steer decisions for what eventually became the content style guide, one of the final deliverables. Specifically, our process was streamlined because initial decisions were already in place to use serial commas and sentence case for headings, allowing all 9 writers to have unified microcopy suggestions.

Need style guide inspiration? Check out this content style guide collection.

Use templates to enforce consistency

Try to agree on templates before building out content to avoid having to check for consistency in formatting and structure later. Circling back to previous points, err on the side of overcommunicating with your teammates to make sure everyone is using the most recent version of any file.

Even with multiple team members populating shared documents, we were able to create one voice with unified formatting.

Allocate time to finalize deliverables

For all the effort you put forth in the previous points, the true value of a UX project is in how useful the deliverables are for the stakeholders. Remember: How your team presents the project is as important as the work itself.

Allocate enough time and resources to finish the project with a bang. In final presentations—spoken or written—show the stakeholders what you’ve done, why it’s important, and the benefits. 

In other words, make sure your work is in ship-shape to, well, ship.

Final words

We would like to thank the Hibob team for this opportunity, Anja and Yuval for their project management and guidance, and our other collaborators on this project: Helen Griffith, Sabine Morrow, Gina Schlatter, Parmesh Chopra, and May Vilailuck.

This crucial industry experience made possible by the UX Writing Academy has helped launch us into future opportunities.

Want to discuss your next project? Feel free to reach out via LinkedIn:

Sherry Samtani
Emma McLeod
Claire Macaraeg
Emily Shi Lee

See the presentation

UX Writing Academy mentor Anja Wedberg presented the students’ work at a UX writing conference—check it out!

Case study: Hibob & UX Writing Hub design and writing collaboration

More articles

Creating a UX writing and content design brief
UX research for beginners
The rise of content design

Main image credit: Infographic vector created by vectorjuice – www.freepik.com 🙏

The post 9 helpful tips for collaborating on a UX writing project appeared first on UX WRITING HUB.

In our UX Writing Academy program, students have a chance to join an industry project at a real company. It’s the last step of an intense 6-month course and takes 4–6 weeks.

As you can imagine, we need to prepare full briefs to help the students get going in the best possible way. In August–October 2021, we embarked on our most ambitious project so far. Ten highly motivated students set out to help the Israeli unicorn startup Hibob get going with UX writing.

In this post, we’ll explain the step-by-step process we used to set up the project brief, including how we went about adjusting the goals after initial UX research.

The pros and pitfalls of a good brief

Defining the scope of a UX writing and content design project is a huge challenge for any product team, freelance writer, or agency.

On the one hand, people need clear instructions to feel comfortable in a new project. On the other hand, we don’t know what we don’t know—and a lot of unknown knowledge tends to be revealed once the project kicks off.

In the early stages of a project, we’re bound to uncover information that we didn’t have when we created the brief. This means that we have to keep an agile mindset and be prepared to repurpose and change direction. This is exactly what happened in our project for Hibob.

Step 1: Gather background information

What is obvious to people in a company is not obvious to the rest of the world.

Many people in tech suffer from the curse of knowledge. It’s so easy to take insider knowledge for granted and forget about the perspective of everyone else. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has had product managers throwing out cryptic Jira tasks without enough explanation.

When setting up a brief for a UX writing project, it’s a good idea to include information about the company, the team, and the project. This holds true even if it feels obvious and you think that everyone knows it already.

As Don Miguel Ruiz said in his book The Four Agreements, “Don’t make assumptions.”

What kind of information do we need? Every project is different, but here’s a list of things we find useful in most briefs:

• Introduction to the company and the team, contact details to our main contact person, mission statement/values
• A list of main competitors with links to their public websites
• An overview of the main target group(s) and/or clients
• Links to existing UX research, personas, content style guide (if available)
• Project overview and goals
• Information about research needed and other project tasks
• Preliminary schedule with deadlines and expected deliveries

What’s the most important point in this list? It depends, but one thing is worth more attention than the rest: the project goals.

Step 2: Set project goals

What would make your UX writing project a success? Many companies use something called objective and key results, or OKRs, to define their key goals.

I first read about it in the book Measure What Matters, and it can be great for setting up goals for UX writers as well.

Hibob’s initial idea for this project was that the students would work specifically on a content design system. We came up with this goal statement:

“The ultimate goal of this project is to incorporate content guidelines and components into Hibob’s existing design system. The idea is to have a fully integrated content design system that can be used by designers, writers, and other stakeholders.”

This was the starting point of the project, and it made perfect sense at first.

As we started thinking through all the things the students had to do to get there—research, content audits, user flows and language consistency checks—we realized that we needed more specific goals. 

Ideally, a project will have tangible goals like:

• Increasing the completion rate of this process by 5%
• Creating a content design system wireframe
• Reducing churn by 3%
• Creating a content audit for a specific problematic flow of our interface

Instead of a super-ambitious vision, define smaller goals that you can achieve by the end of the project. There’s no harm in having a vision, but it really helps to break down the work into more manageable chunks.

We identified specific research tasks and eight flows plus messaging tasks (error messages, notifications, and transactional emails) that the students could work on. The research included content audits, conversation mining, competitor research, and interviews.

Step 3: Adjust your goals if needed

What happens when you learn that the brief and the scope of a project need to be adjusted after initial research?

Well, you need to adjust your goals.

In the case of Hibob, we had a few surprises once the students started digging into the flows after their initial research. One of the flows turned out to be considerably bigger than the rest, taking up around 250 (!) rows on our spreadsheet audit. 

To narrow the scope, we created a poll for Hibob’s team to understand which flows were their highest priority. 

The poll revealed that the most complex flow was the most important, closely followed by a couple of other flows. 

So we decided to allocate three students to the big flow, while the rest of the students focused on a smaller flow or other tasks. We ended up with three teams:

• Team 1: Three students who tackled the most complex flow
• Team 2: Three students who tackled smaller flows
• Team 3: Three students who focused on error messages, notifications, and transactional emails, respectively

We also had one person who was tasked with gathering content style guide input from each team.

Making adjustments in the project in this way gave the project much more focus and direction. Once the tasks were clearly defined, we made way more progress.

While we had to abandon the initial vision of a fully integrated content design system, we could deliver a comprehensive research report, a document with content style recommendations and guidelines, and new copy for the revised flows. Not bad for a project of less than two months!

Final words

If you’re currently about to start a UX writing or content design project for a complicated product, don’t forget to write a brief and reflect on the project a bit. 

Be sure to set up a general project overview and define your goals. And once you start, don’t forget you can always adjust if need be. It’s not a bad thing!

More good stuff

9 helpful tips for collaborating on a UX writing project

Getting started with UX research and Airtable

Try our free UX writing course

The post Creating a UX Writing and Content Design Brief appeared first on UX WRITING HUB.

What is a content style guide?

A content style guide is a document or site with guidelines, recommendations and best practices for everyone who creates content for a company, project or product.

The idea is to give all contributors a common reference guide to help them create consistent content that speaks the preferred language of the product and meets the intended business goals.

Check out this article for examples of 16 great content style guides.

What does a content style guide contain?

A content style guide can grow into a pretty hefty document to include things like

• Business, product and project goals
• Target audience analysis and/or personas
• Voice and tone
• Style guidelines with details like date formats, numbers, punctuation, British/American/other English, abbreviations, title or sentence case
• A glossary with preferred and banned terms and phrases
• Accessibility and inclusion: advice about how to create inclusive, accessible content, how to deal with jargon
• SEO guidelines and recommendations for keyword research
• Guidelines for writing for different channels (for example newsletters, SoMe, blogs, editorial web content, microcopy)
• Resources with links for more information

Examples of content style guides

There are tons of top-notch, publicly available content style guides out there. These for example:

• Mailchimp – possibly the most celebrated style guide in the world
• UK government – comprehensive guide that rose to fame after Sarah Winters coined the term content design and set out to transform the user experience on the site
• Apple – Apple’s writing guidelines include an A-Z with style details, useful recommendations for accessible, inclusive writing and handy tips for writing copy that will be localized
  

You can see a full list of inspiring content style guide examples in this separate blog article.

Potential issues with content style guides

As great as content style guides may be, there are still a few potential challenges. 

1. Have you ever tried introducing one to non-writers? I have, with minimal success. Style guides are often created by writers for writers. They don’t always resonate with other stakeholders.
2. If they are created as a stand-alone document, they are not integrated in the company’s design system. This doesn’t help to encourage non-writers to use them.
3. Even though they are full of detailed instructions and advice, they typically lack a components and/or pattern library with reusable content elements. This means that those who do use the style guide don’t necessarily save time.

Also, the term “content style guide” comes from the world of content marketing and copywriting. Adopted by UX writers and content designers, the traditional “tone of voice” swiftly became “voice and tone”. This better reflects copy written for a user journey that goes through different emotional states. Apart from that, they’re pretty similar to what you’ll find in a content marketing style guide.

But if UX writing and content design are really part of design, shouldn’t the style guide also be fully integrated in the design system? Yes please, that makes total sense! And this is exactly why many product teams now focus on developing a content design system, ideally integrated in the company design system.

What is a design system?

Before we dive into content design systems, let’s clarify what a design system is. Here’s the definition provided by Norman Nielsen group: 

“A design system is a complete set of standards intended to manage design at scale using reusable components and patterns.” 

For many of us, the first thing that springs to mind when thinking of design systems is specs for color, typography, spacing and grids. But a design system can be much more systematic and methodical. Brad Frost for example has developed the chemistry-influenced atomic design approach, which is a way to move away from creating simple web pages to actual systems of components.

Atomic design includes five levels or stages:

• Atoms (examples form a web interface would be a form label, input or button)
• Molecules (groups of atoms)
• Organisms (combinations of molecules)
• Templates (wireframes with placeholder content)
• Pages (wireframes with real content)

Perhaps the most obvious advantage of a design system is that both designers and non-designers have access to corporate design elements, making company communication more consistent.

Another benefit of a design system is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every design. Instead you have a library of existing designs that you can reuse for your purpose. This is most definitely a welcome time-saver. And a positive side-effect of having more time is that the team can focus on more pressing tasks.

Far from every company has a design system, and not everyone needs one. Small teams may find other ways to synchronize their work, or use a mini version of a full-blown design system. But a company set on growth would be wise to keep a future design system in mind.

What is a content design system?

If we apply the main points of a design system to content, we get something a bit different than a regular style guide. To qualify as a content design system, it should:

• Be more than a voice and tone, glossary and style recommendations
• Include reusable content elements that can be used by writers and non-writers alike

Ryan Cordell hits the nail on the head in his article about the Deliveroo content design system: 

“When we say Content design system we mean a set of scenario-specific components, backed by research and agreed upon by the team, fully integrated into the design system our Product designers and Engineers use right now. Something that allows them to make solid content decisions without us.” 

So ideally, a content design system is included in the design system – not a separate, lonely document that only writers are familiar with.

Benefits of a content design system

The benefits of a content design system are the same as a regular design system. It aids consistency, saves times and frees up capacity for more complex problem solving. There’s also the added bonus of cementing content as a natural part of the design process 😍

Examples of content design systems

There are plenty of existing design systems that have started to integrate content out there. Here are a few you can check out:

• Lightning (Salesforce)
• Canvas (Hubspot)
• Google Material design
• Polaris (Shopify)

Others fall somewhere right in between a content style guide and a content design system. Like the brilliant Intuit Quickbooks. It has a fab content section, but it’s separated from the design part, and the content pattern section doesn’t include any reusable components, as far as I can see. Still, definitely worth a look!

Content design systems in action

So what does it look like when design systems incorporate content? Let’s check out a few of our faves:

1. Hubspot’s Canvas

Hubspot’s Canvas design system has a wonderful mix of UI components, illustrations, guidelines and copy best practices and examples. Here’s a snapshot of a page about empty states in their pattern library:

The component links in the image go to visual/copy examples like this one:

2. Salesforce’s Lightning

Salesforce’s Lightning design system also provides copy recommendations. As you can see in the examples below, the illustrations themselves often lack copy examples, but they do provide thorough copy guidelines:

Here are the accompanying copy guidelines:

I love how specific these guidelines are, but it would be even better if the illustrations had real, best practice examples of copy.

3. Shopify’s Polaris

Shopify’s stellar design system Polaris has separate sections for content and design, but they also have a components section with info for developers, designers and content designers. Here’s a snapshot of the component library’s content guidelines for banner titles:

Nice 👏👏👏

Potential issues with a content design system

Setting up and maintaining a fully integrated content design system is a mega effort for sure. It needs constant attention to stay relevant and useful. 

Do you need a content design system?

The short answer is that it depends. It may be overkill for smaller businesses. Some companies may be happy with a regular content style guide. Large corporations most definitely have a lot to gain from a content design system, especially one that’s a part of a wider design system.

Tips:

• Start small! Building a style guide or system is a process. It will never be finished and that’s not the point either 🙂
• If it feels like a mammoth task to start from scratch, you don’t have to. Start with an existing style guide or system you like and use that as your base, adapting it as needed.

Need more design system inspiration? You’ll find a few zillion in the Design systems gallery and UXPin’s design system repository Adele.

Keep learning

16 examples of great content style guides (article)

Building a content design system with Stephen Curran at Intuit (podcast episode)

Ditch the voice and tone with Nicole Michaelis at Spotify (podcast episode)

Take a UX writing course

Planning to transition to UX writing or content design? Check out our UX writing courses!

The post Everything you need to know about content design systems (and how they differ from content style guides) appeared first on UX WRITING HUB.

The size and scope of your digital presence

These days, it is definitely becoming more and more important to have a digital presence that resonates with people. And we all need words to guide visitors and customers through the user journey. In the whole wide web, there are no digital interfaces that don’t rely on words, and those words can make or break the user experience. 

The idea of UX writing is to help the users navigate through an interface without friction. The good news for business owners is that even if the intention is to keep your customers happy, it has been shown over and over again that good UX comes with the positive side-effect of increased conversions.

UX writing pays attention to the form and function of the words in general and to microcopy – the small but crucial pieces of text found in CTAs and other buttons, error messages, contact forms – in particular. The nifty thing about focusing on these elements is that they usually move the user forward in the flow. In other words, these are the places where you really want the user to take action.

The state of your content strategy, goals and KPIs

Who should do UX writing for you?

The post UX Writing For Business: Does Your Company Need A UX Writer And How Do You Get Started? appeared first on UX WRITING HUB.

Let’s try to make sense of it all, and look at a few tips for those who want to find a job or hire somebody in the field.

Content strategy: The beehive

So what exactly is content strategy?

There are plenty of good definitions around. One of the most well-known is the one Kristina Halvorson came up with in her book Content Strategy for the web:

“Planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content”.

The output of content strategy is a plan for content production that serves the business goals and appeals to the target audience.

This plan usually aims to:

• Answer questions like what kind of content to produce (blog articles, videos, social media posts, newsletters, online ads, marketing campaigns, etc.)
• Confirm which platforms to use (for example a company website or blog, a newsletter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook)
• Indicate when to share the content on these platforms
• Explain how to create the content through a style guide, tone of voice, user personas and/or competitor research
• Confirm KPIs to measure the success of the content efforts.

We can think of content strategy as a beehive, or the container where everything you need to make the best honey is kept.

The content strategist: The queen bee

But how do content strategists actually spend their days? The short answer is “it depends”. Even if the purpose of content strategy is clear, the work of a content strategist will vary from company to company and from project to project.

This is not so strange after all — every company and project has different business goals and resources, so their content production needs will be different too.

Here are a few examples of tasks a content strategist may be involved in:

• If there are no business goals or KPIs in place, the content strategist will probably start by defining those goals
• Establish what kind of content will best serve the business goals
• Review current content and decide what to keep, what to get rid of and what to create from scratch
• Check web analytics and statistics to find out which content has given the best results so far
• Decide which platforms will be most relevant for sharing the content
• Carry out or manage user research (surveys, interviews, personas, conversation mining)
• Review or create a style guide and tone of voice
• Manage the content production process
• Create content that matches the defined goals
• Arrange and evaluate user testing (A/B tests, surveys, user interviews) to find the best content solution for a given situation

You could say that content strategy has the same purpose everywhere, but the actions needed to get there depend on the situation. In some projects, the content strategist will produce content. In others, strategy and production are two separate roles.

Another confusing thing is that jobs that include the tasks described above are not always called content strategist. No no, no!

The industry has been very creative and has come up with titles like content marketing strategist, content marketing manager, content manager, content delivery manager, marketing specialist, content project manager and so on ad infinitum.

In any case, as the person who is responsible for the framework of content production, the content strategist is the queen bee. Without her, there will be no …

…UX writing: The honey

Whereas content strategy has been an established field for at least 10 years, UX writing has only entered the public consciousness in the last few years.

As such, it is still in the process of being defined and we are all involved in shaping its future, which is pretty exciting.

UX writing is closely connected to microcopy in digital products: Text snippets like error messages, CTAs, and screen instructions.

The purpose is to guide the user through a flow without friction. These bits of texts may seem insignificant, but there are plenty of examples of how muddy microcopy has a disastrous effect on user experience, which in turn will affect conversion rates.

My favorite example comes from Joshua Porter, who happens to be the guy who coined the term microcopy. Check out the first 4 minutes of his presentation on YouTube to see how one extra line of copy increased conversions overnight (and then watch the remaining 26 minutes of the video).

After testing the check-out flow for a product, Joshua realized that many users got stuck on the screen where they entered their credit card details.

Testing revealed that many people entered the shipping address instead of the billing address, which created an error and the users gave up. To solve this issue, he simply added one line of copy that clarified that the user should enter “the billing information associated with their account” — and boom! Problem solved, conversions increased.

Another famous example is how Google managed to boost conversions by changing two words on their booking page. They suspected that “Book now” scared people off as the button appeared in a flow where many users hadn’t made up their mind yet — they were still shopping around and looking for options. So they tested the copy and found an increase of 17% when changing the call to action to “Check availability”.

Have a look at this talk on YouTube to hear Google staff explain this and many other examples of UX writing.

Even if higher conversions may be the ultimate goal for every business owner, UX writing is generally different from marketing copy in that it doesn’t try to sell products.

Microcopy serves the users by ensuring that they don’t get stuck when trying to complete a task online. The most important thing in UX writing is not to be cool and clever but rather clear, concise and useful.

Content strategy first

Traditionally, microcopy has been created either by developers or designers — i.e. people who are trained to create code and make visuals rather than to communicate in writing. The creation of microcopy was often neglected or left to the last minute.

Current best practice suggests that we should include UX writing as early as possible in the content production cycle. This has led to the idea of the “content-first approach”.

Instead of designing a product, app or website, fill it with Lorem ipsum and then hire a writer to “fill in the gaps”, UX writing insists that text is a part of the design process and should be part of the project from the start.

Although I would rather call it “content-strategy-first approach” and then bring in writers and designers at the same time, so that they can really collaborate.

UX writers: The worker bees

The UX writers, then, are the worker bees. They are usually hired to create or improve the microcopy in a product, for example a mobile app or e-commerce site, with the purpose to make sure that the copy is clear, concise and useful. Easy, right? Not really. How can UX writers be sure that the copy they create is going to be effective?

To write professionally, you need sharp writing skills, of course. But just having good writing skills doesn’t automatically make you a UX writer.

To craft messages that resonate with the intended users and meet KPIs, you also need insights into … you guessed it, content strategy.

Without knowledge of the target audience, tone and voice, and business goals, the UX writer has a slim chance to write effectively. In other words, if we want to create top notch honey instead of nasty, factory-produced corn syrup, we need to follow the queen bee.

Sometimes, the role of the UX writer includes creating or revising the content strategy. In other cases, the UX writer will rather collaborate with content strategists. In either case, as a UX writer you will need the insights gathered from content strategy, whether you or someone else has created those insights.

Want to know more about what a UX writer gets up to? Read all about it in our article “What does a UX writer actoully do”.

Still confused?

If a content strategist is the queen bee and the UX writers are the worker bees, why do many of us still tend to see them as the same thing? This is what I think: When we say that UX writing is content strategy, we mean that what a UX writer does is to put content strategy into action.

But at the same time, it’s good to remember that content strategy has been around a lot longer than UX writing, and so the term is used for all sorts of content.

UX writing on the other hand usually refers specifically to microcopy. This is why you can be a content strategist and never have anything to do with UX writing. But it’s highly unlikely that a UX writer would never have anything to do with content strategy.

Tips if you are looking for a job

The overlap between content strategy and UX writing can make it tricky to know which job is right for you. Here are a few things to keep in mind if you are looking around for opportunities:

• Pay attention to the job advert or job description rather than the job title for details.
• If the job advert or description is not clear, be sure to ask the hiring company what their needs are.
• If you don’t find many job adverts for UX writing, try widening your search to include content strategist, content marketing manager, content manager, etc.
• Depending on your background, you may want to complement your skillset. For example, those with a background in product design may want to improve their content strategy or writing skills. Those with a background in copywriting or marketing may want to look into UX, design, or content strategy.
• Last but not least, as UX writing is a fairly new thing, we can all contribute to developing it as a field. Therefore it can be worth applying for UX writing jobs even if you don’t have much experience (most people haven’t)!

Tips if you are looking to hire

• Be specific about your needs rather than the title. Do you have a content strategy in place, and need a UX writer to put it into practice? Or do you need a UX writer who can help you create a content strategy? In any case, be sure to be clear about your expectations in the job advert.
• Whatever you do, don’t hire a UX writer and expect them to perform well without content strategy, whether they will be part of creating that strategy or not.
• Hire early and not as an afterthought. If you are going to produce content to boost your business, be sure to figure out a content strategy before you start pumping out content. Whether your project includes UX writing or not, the earlier a content strategist is part of the process, the better.

Recap

Hopefully this article has shown that even though there is a lot of overlap between content strategy and UX writing, they are not exactly the same thing.

A content strategist is not necessarily a UX writer. A UX writer is not always a content strategist, but needs the insights from content strategy to produce effective microcopy.

Who would have guessed that strategy would become the queen of content?

What next?

• If you are new to the field and want to know more, start with our free UX writing course
• Curious how much UX writers earn? Check out the results from our UX writing salary survey
• Join our Facebook group Microcopy and UX writing

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Or something like that.

Once I understood what a UX writer is, the edges of my world seemed a little sharper. Things snapped into focus a bit more. Yet, despite all this clarity, one thing keeps bothering me. I keep returning to one important question:

Shouldn’t all copywriters understand UX?

The short answer, in my opinion, is yes. Let me explain myself…

UX Writing Isn’t About Writing At All

For the uninitiated among us, UX stands for user experience. UserTesting.com says UX is “the internal experience that a person has as they interact with every aspect of a company’s products and services.”

“…as they interact with every aspect of a company’s products and service.”

Every. Aspect.

I never thought of myself as a UX writer because, I guess, I never knew there needed to be such a distinction. As far as I’m concerned, any copywriter worth his salt needs to account for customer interactions throughout the experience, whether that’s on a website, within an application, or anywhere else. I mean, what the hell are you writing for if not to improve the customer’s experience?

But here’s where I think we can refine things a bit. Copywriting isn’t writing at all; it’s simply a thinking process.

Much like design, it’s the anticipation of a need or the addressing of a fear. It’s a process for predicting and guiding behavior. It’s a map of the conversation a customer is already having with themselves. So, yes, of course copywriting requires an understanding of UX. In fact, it’s imperative.

As copywriters, we strive to give a reader the sense that they’ve come to the right place. That our product or our service can help them become whomever it is they seek to become. Better. Faster. Wiser.

We create emotion. Sometimes it’s delight. Sometimes it’s relief. Sometimes it’s a sense of fun or a jolt of confidence. We show them that despite their fear of trying something new, purchasing something unknown, sticking their neck out, that this is right.

When you’re able to transform common interactions into authentic connection using simple, human language, you begin to establish trust. It’s not immediate, but it does have a compounding effect. Start small and it builds upon itself. 

But a writer can’t get there if he doesn’t understand UX first. And that happens in two different ways:

• By becoming a customer
• By talking to existing customers

Working With a Designer

Most designers want to lead with design. And most copywriters want to lead with copy. Of course, I’m in the second camp. But with one strong caveat: only if that writer understands UX and design in the first place.

It makes zero sense for a copywriter to write a single word if they don’t first understand the customer journey, the ideal customer, what actual paying customers have to say, and all of the touchpoints a customer will encounter along the way to a purchase (and after purchase, for that matter). 

Designers often have this work done. It makes sense for copywriters and designers to work hand in hand, then.

At the beginning of every engagement, I ask for an introduction to the designer who will put it all together. This is critical for a couple of reasons 1) I want to make sure we’re both on the same page. 2) I want to develop a rapport up front to make feedback and changes go better, and 3) I want to be sure I have some influence on design based on my customer research and feedback.

I’ve been in situations where there’s a “middleman” passing information between copywriter and designer, and inevitably, things get lost in translation. It’s best to put the two in direct contact and let them co-lead the redesign process together. This way, they can share information, best practices, and research to garner you the best possible results.

Understanding UX Builds Trust

While growth and revenue drive many business decisions, copy and design should be driven solely by customer experience and the emotions needed to navigate that experience.

Potential customers don’t care about your growth goals or how awesome your newest feature is. They only want to know why they should invest their time and money in you. And underlying that, why it’s a safe and wise decision to do so.

A clear understanding of the user experience is the best way to speak to these emotions. Thankfully, lots of companies are doing this well these days—Dropbox, Slack, and Mailchimp to name a few.

But let me give you a recent, personal example of a company who clearly gets their customers, and demonstrates so through their copy: Biteable.

Biteable allows users to quickly make animated marketing videos with custom copy for free. You can even change the color schemes and choose your own music with a few clicks. I first encountered them in a friend’s social media feed and decided to set up an account, not knowing what to expect. (As a copywriter, I always try to examine that first time experience, so I can empathize with it later while working on a client’s copy.)

Aside from being super easy to use, Biteable’s copy nailed one of the most anxiety-producing parts of the creation process: the video rendering. No one likes to wait and watch the spinning wheel of death, wondering if they screwed up.

Based on what I saw, their copywriter and designer clearly have a grasp of where people get tripped up the most, the questions they’re asking in their heads, and the anxiety a user experiences for the first time. They know people have the most questions and concerns just before they get the final version of their video. Did I do it right? Will it work? Why is it taking so long?

The following are a few screenshots of the video rendering process as I waited for Biteable to show me my creation.

Notice the call to action in the first image says, “REBUILD VIDEO.” That straightforward language tells me exactly what I’m about to do. And it implies that I’m about to trigger a process, subtly signaling I’ll need to wait.

All of the copy that comes after clicking that “rebuild video” button is fun, builds trust, and informs me of the process as it’s happening. It all works—the copy and the design—to reduce my anxiety and make me a smile in the process. It’s brilliantly aligned to the user experience I’m having as a first time user of their platform.

Some might refer to this as “microcopy,” which is fine. But I’d make the same case about that term as I made about “UX writing” earlier—they’re all the same thing. Call it copywriting, microcopy, or UX writing, but at the end of the day, they’re all meant to reduce friction and build trust.

UX Writing Makes Your Copy About the Customer, Not You

UX-focused copy requires you to know your customers inside and out. It’s the only way to get meaningful results.

Which is why I spend the first few weeks of every engagement doing customer research, conducting interviews, mining internet reviews, and gathering as much information about a client’s customer experience as I can. I want to see a designer’s or CMO’s journey map and customer profiles. I want to talk to the head of sales. I want to examine chat logs and speak to customer service reps. I request product demos when there’s one to request. I need to be a customer, to adopt that customer’s mindset as my own.

Only then can I create language that guides a user through the challenging parts of their experience. I can fix areas where people get tripped up. I can find ways to have fun, ease fears, and reduce friction, sometimes all at once.

You can call it what you want, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

_____

Chris Cooper creates customer-driven content for B2B tech and SaaS marketing campaigns. He’s worked with SAP Ariba, Atlantic Metro, GTT, Arrow Electronics, and BrowserStack to create content that engages and converts.

Chris has spoken at Denver Startup Week and has been featured on Confessions of a Pink-haired Marketer, Hot Copy, and Conversion Sciences. He also writes a monthly blog post for Kapost Marketeer. Connect with him on Twitter @ElCoopacabra, LinkedIn, or directly at chris@rgwriting.com

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