This post is the 1st of a 6-part series that will help you learn UX writing faster.
You can learn UX writing by familiarizing yourself with user experience (UX) principles, UX writing best practices, and developing a UX writing process.
Learning UX writing will help you create better digital products, engage audiences online, and make money in 2023.
Here’s a quick overview of what I’ll be discussing in this post:
- Why Learning UX Writing is so Important
- The Beginner’s Guide to Learn UX Writing
- An Easy-to-Learn UX Writing Process
If you want Free UX Writing Resources to learn faster, click here to get your free ebook.
Why Learning UX Writing is Important
Writing for UX ensures that a digital product’s text is easily understandable.
UX writing is important because it helps create a positive user experience, ensuring that the goals of digital product users and stakeholders are achieved.
When the text of a digital product is understandable, new users have satisfying experiences and are more likely to continue using the digital product — a direct result of their goals being continually achieved.
By learning UX writing principles, you gain a working knowledge of valuable skills for the job economy of the digital age.
Increase Your Sales, Conversions, & Loyalty
UX Writing: make taking action easier for your users.
Content Strategy: get content that generates traffic.
Paid Media: ROI-driven advertising backed by data.
Writing is a great subject to help you discover the world of User Experience (UX).
In a famous study, ZipRecruiter estimates that the salary range for UX writers is $50,500 to $188,000.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel to learn UX writing for free. Or download my free ebook, The Starter’s Guide to UX Writing.
Next, you’ll learn quick answers to 3 important UX writing questions.
The Beginner's Guide to UX Writing
Here’s a quick overview of the 3 important UX writing questions you’ll learn about now:
What is UX Writing?
If you’ve ever tried creating a digital product — like a website, application, or another form of content— you know how difficult the design and development process is.
UX writing strives to meet the goals of digital product creators and users via conversational and conversion-rate-optimized writing.
The UX writing process you’ll learn by the end of this post offers an iterative approach to UX writing for products and experiences.
Now, you’ll learn about how UX writing helps creators and users meet their goals.
A common goal creators everywhere have is to choose the right words for their most important digital products.
But what are the right words? That’s why UX writers are hired to address the needs of product users with words.
UX writing fosters a connection between experiences and users, like Pixar’s 404 page, listed as one of the best by creativebloq.com.
By planning the text for every part of an experience, UX writers create products that increase revenue, sales, and conversions.
Next, you’ll learn what UX writers do, and why UX writing is difficult.
What do UX Writers do?
UX writers work to Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test text for websites, apps, & other digital products.
But how do UX writers complete these tasks?
At large companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, UX writers work alongside a team to create digital products and experiences.
At small companies with fewer resources, writing for UX is often a skill that falls under a digital marketer’s job description.
For you, the principles of UX writing might be helpful for many reasons.
The average UX writer’s salary is $108K per year. Why do they make so much money? Because digital products and experiences help organizations make money.
As a result, learning UX writing principles can help many workers make more money.
Use this free chart to start practicing UX writing.
Next, you’ll learn about the 8 most valuable skills for UX writers.
What Skills do UX Writers Need?
UX writers rely on the following 8 skills: Empathy, Research, UI/UX, Prototyping, Communication, Collaboration, Design, Information Architecture, and Analysis Skills.
Below you’ll find short descriptions of each UX writing skill. I’ll discuss these skills in more detail during an upcoming video.
Although there are a lot of skills to learn, you’ll get a mechanism to help you get ahead.
In UX writing, empathy helps us understand our users’ goals, needs, frustrations, concerns, abilities, and limitations.
For UX writers, Research allows us to make informed decisions about content strategy during the design process.
Knowledge of UI/UX leads to better communication with digital product users — resulting in more sales, conversions, and brand awareness.
For UX writers, Prototyping offers 2 important opportunities: Visualization, which gives stakeholders an early understanding of the digital product’s form and function; as well as Feedback, which contributes to the creation of better products.
In UX writing, Communication helps us clearly articulate our ideas during the design and development process of a digital product.
For UX writers, Collaboration helps us share perspectives, decisions, and designs in order to reduce points of confusion and misunderstanding in digital products.
In UX writing, Design Thinking is a problem-solving strategy that prioritizes user-centricity to generate successful solutions.
For UX writers, understanding Information Architecture saves time, energy, and money for UX writers by empowering us to create usable, intuitive, and accessible digital products that increase sales, conversions, and brand affinity.
In UX writing, Analysis skills allow us to accurately test the success of our writing and digital products using sale, conversion, and engagement data — offering important insights about how to improve the user experience.
Now you know some of the skills UX writers need. You’ll need to apply those skills.
Soon, you’ll learn a UX writing process to help you create better digital products and experiences.
And incorporate those same skills.
Phrased differently: his process will save you time, energy, and money.
The Only UX Writing Process You Need
If you don’t have a UX writing process, you will waste time, energy, and money.
The digital world gets more competitive every day. A UX writing process is important for keeping UX writers focused, minimizing errors, and achieving the goals of organizations and people.
This UX writing process is comprised of 3 Steps and 5 Phases.
The 3-Step UX Writing Process
I began developing my UX writing process while teaching undergraduate seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
The 3 steps (sections) in my UX writing process are universal writing principles: Prewriting, Writing, and Revising.
What’s unique about this UX writing process is how it combines classic writing principles with the 5 Phases of Design Thinking—a strategic approach for building better digital products.
Here’s how we’ll discuss this UX writing process:
- PREWRITING: Empathize & Define
- WRITING: Ideate & Prototype
- REVISING: Test
Next, you’ll explore the process in more detail. Starting with Prewriting: Empathize & Define.
Step 1: Prewriting
When you’re prewriting, you’re planning.
Prewriting focuses on using thinking systems to create plans that will help you Empathize with your user in order to Define your user’s problems.
The Prewriting step can be divided into 2 phases:
Now that you know the basics of the Prewriting step, you will want to learn about the Phases (Empathizing and Defining) of Prewriting in more detail:
When writing for UX, empathizing with our users empowers us to understand their goals, emotions, and perspectives.
By empathizing with our Ideal User Persona during Prewriting, we save time, energy, and money and ensure that the words we write are tailored to serve a specific audience’s pain points.
To do this on your own, click here to download my Free Prewriting for UX Resources.
After empathizing with your target audience, you need to Define their problems.
And once you’ve defined their problems, you can create digital products that actually offer solutions.
To do this on your own, click here to download a free UX writing voice chart.
Remember: Plan before you write—that’s how the Prewriting step in this UX writing process saves you time, energy, and money when creating a digital product or experience.
Next, you’ll learn about the 2nd step of this UX writing process… actually Writing.
Step 2: Writing
Writing is Step 2 in this UX writing process.
The Step of Writing can be divided into 2 Phases:
- Ideating (Outlining) solutions to the problems you just Defined
- Prototyping (Drafting) solutions
Writing isn’t easy, so do yourself a favor: don’t beat yourself up for writing bad first drafts.
If you use Step 2 of this UX writing process, it will be much easier to improve your first draft later on.
By evaluating different ideas, you can create a blueprint for the digital product you’re building to solve your users’ problems.
The Ideation phase often involves an outline that is structured to help your product quickly deliver value to your user.
To do this on your own, click here to download my Free Writing for UX Resources.
When writing for UX, remember that prototyping is what’s known as “Drafting” in traditional writing.
During the Prototyping phase, use the outline you created during the Ideation phase to offer unique and valuable solutions to your target user efficiently.
To do this on your own, click here to download my Free Writing for UX Resources.
Before you write anything for UX, Ideating can help you conceptualize the future form and function of your Prototype.
Prototyping a digital product is streamlined when a useful and efficient outline is ideated.
Importantly, you can always improve the words that you’ve written. Having a 1st draft to revise as soon as possible is very useful.
Accurate documentation of the writing step will also make your Revising efforts more effective. That’s where the writing resources come into play.
Next, you’ll learn about the 3rd step of this UX writing process: Revising.
Step 3: Revising
Step 3 in my UX writing process involves revising the writing you prototyped earlier.
When writing for UX, the Revision Step’s only Phase strives to Test the effectiveness of the 1st draft of content you wrote.
Do your words position your product as a solution to the user’s problem?
That’s a question that should be top of mind during the Revising step of this UX writing process.
There are many ways to Test your writing, which I’ll talk about soon. First, you should understand why Testing your writing is essential.
Revising consists of just 1 Phase: Testing.
When writing for UX, Testing your work helps you expose potential flaws and shortcomings, collect valuable information, and make well-informed changes when necessary.
After you have a Prototype of the UX writing you’ll need for your digital product, you shouldn’t rush to Launch.
Instead, you should assess and improve on your 1st draft.
A Useful Tip: The relationship between Testing your written Prototype for UX is similar to the way a novelist revises the first draft of their manuscript.
Conclusion
Learning the Principles of UX Writing can empower workers across many different industries.
UX writers use different procedures to craft digital products that offer valuable solutions to users.
Many hard skills are needed for UX writing, including Empathy, Research, UI/UX, Prototyping, Communication, Collaboration, Design, Information Architecture, and Analysis Skills.
Applying the principles of UX and developing the necessary skills is made much easier with my UX writing process, which involves Prewriting, Writing, and Revising — and draws on the 5 Phases of Design Thinking.
To learn UX writing faster, download my Free Starter Guide, Subscribe to My YouTube Channel, or contact me.
