How Much Do UX Writers Earn?

Yuval Keshtcherm who founded the UX Writing Hub website, talks about UX writer compensation.

Many people are asking how much they should charge. What responsibilities they should have.

Responsibility = money. UX writer responsibilities include proofreading, writing, style guides, research, technology, and tools.

In a recent UX writing salary survey, highest in U.S. UX writers do not earn as much as UX designers. In U.S., average a bit more than 6 figures. Companies do not understand all the responsibilities and therefore undervalue UX writers. In the U.S., salaries average around $75K for junior level up to almost $125K for senior level.

UX writing is a 6 figure job. So how do you get more? Ask!

Actions you can take include:

• Invite yourself to product meetings
• Build your own research processes
• Learn to work with data
• Publish relevant content
• Communicate what you do

As a final word, our job is to design inclusive systems. "Design for all."

Meeting Users Where They Are: a Design Framework for Writing Strings

Kaila Lee, of Facebook, talks about bringing a framework for designing UI content.

With a background in UI, I can bring design thinking to the process. Apps without content are hardly usable. From the outside, words look like magic. Words and design carry equal weight. Words that blend in the UI are a signifier of great content.

As stewards of UI content, it's important to remember that you're the expert.

Where do you start when faced with a new product or feature? 6 steps of the typical framework: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, implement. This is not a linear flow.

First phase is the understand phase. Most important, because it creates foundation for success. This is the pre-work before you even start writing.

Stat with the basics. Establish a clear direction with a problem statement, objective, and success metrics, for example. These can evolve throughout the product development process.

Harvest the "strategy" behind content. Hard when there's not a product to write for. The value of content goes beyond the surface. Create unique value early on. Dig into research, define product principles, help define product vision, inform ethical design.

Once you start writing, ideate with constraints. Not all ideas are feasible.

It's important to understand that we (writers) are actually designers. Embrace content design.

Seek feedback early and often. An innate part of our role is that there will be a lot of cooks in the kitchen. We have to collect that feedback and decide what to act upon.

For getting buy in, there's no one-size-fits-all approach.

Different partners have different goals. For example, product managers want to know what product goals are, while programmers what to know how designs will be implemented.

Testing is a great solution to find out what the right words are. Data can speak volumes. It's an effective way to drive the team to a content solution.

You're going to get a lot of feedback. At the end of the day, you're the owner. When you get pushback, visualize the pros and cons, propose A/B testing, revisit the problem statement, or loop in other strategists or partners.

Document your rationale. Very important to document the work and the way you get to your decisions. Create a paper trail. Show the evolution. 

Once implemented, can metric changes be attributed to content alone? Can content be optimized? Are we able to iterate on content? Are there adjacent behaviors that indicate that content could have been clearer? How do we apply and scale what we learn? Can't take metrics at face value, but go down the funnel and find what can and cant' be attributed to content.

Scaling the work includes both internal and external. Document content wins. Write about it. Talk about it. And keep it going. Increasing the visibility of content is crucial, especially to people understand the importance of content strategy.

Measuring Impact: How to Test Your Writing

Ann Persson, of Pearson Education, tackles the topic of measuring the effect of content.

UX writing and UX research is a match. Do we need language testing? In usability testing, people talk about the language, even when it's not being explicitly tested.

Worked to understand if UI text was being tested, and how if could be. A test determined issues to address, such as the use of internal terminology. Found there was a strong need for UI text guidelines. Concluded that a need was for getting explicit feedback on UI text.

There are several research methods.

Heuristic evaluation. Perhaps most expensive. But also should be at forefront of mind, especially when entering usability sessions. Take screenshots, use checklist of heuristics. Use 3-5 people top conduct evaluation to help combat bias.

RITE (rapid iterative testing & design) is an "agile" method. Iterative changes to prototypes over the course of a testing sessions.

Sentence completion method, asking users to complete sentences. A way to capture insights of language interaction.

Product reaction cards are a way to measure emotional reactions to design.

A/B testing is a way to compare ways of messaging. The distinctions are usually minimal. If you make the distinctions too large, you lose what you're trying to measure.

What people do and what people say are always different. Small scale studies can look at how attitudes affect behavior.

Help Engineers Write Better: Tools for Enterprise Content

Elly Searle, of CrowdStrike, walks us through practices to help non-writers contribute better content.

People use your product to do their jobs. There's a difference between a "productivity" application and a "consumer" application. Also, the person buying an application, especially at the enterprise level, is not likely to be the people using the application. Harder to get metrics on words in enterprise products.

Often the amount of words being developed is too much for a (usually small) writing staff. So engineers are writing especially field names and descriptions and errors.

You want to identify opportunities for developers to write better. Is there something we can help them with. For example, find places where similar things are written, patterns. Then find a consensus that better writing would help user.

Partner with people, managers, leads, etc. who have social capital and who support better writing. Have supporters make the invites, and then talk up the training. Data on how current content doesn't meet user needs is important. Figure out how to get before and after metrics.

Really important to understand developers' workflow. What tools do they use. Shadow them if you can. Put the resources you develop on their wiki, or wherever they have their resources. Show, don't tell. Show them the before and after. Teach actionable writing guidelines. Workshops should contain exercises. Then audit output afterwards. See if the practices take hold.

Create templates for the different types of content that developers would create. Include information about how users use that information.

Audit existing content. Identify content that's written well and show why it works, in addition to finding the content that doesn't work well. Identify what is and is not consistent.

Create a curated word list. You will find lots of disagreements about words. Define words. Explain why consistency is important. Explain words choices.

Product Content Design at Scale

Kylie Hansen, of Microsoft, talks about taking product content big.

This is about how to design not only your product, but your team to scale (up). full-stack design requires collaborative problem solvers from diverse areas. Content designers are an essential part of success. We're all in this business to solve problems for users.

When you do scale, one of the biggest problems in keeping all of your content consistent across platforms. First, find your tribe. At scale, you need to be more efficient and intentional. You need a system--even if you're solo or siloed.

A "One Microsoft" design system. This gives teams of distributed content designers a shared vision and tools. 

Good writing is good design. At its best, good design feels like a conversation. Content design is about figuring things out and experiencing. Product designers need to start further upstream. Design is figuring out what a product does, which means no lorem ipsum.

Moving the needle involves, strategy, structure, and surface and includes empathy, craftsmanship, and user love.

Language is design material. Content is infrastructure. It's not a distraction, but the experience.

If you take the text out of the interface of any app, how confusing will it be. Text is more than a means of communicating messages. It is the interface itself. 

At Microsoft, they have data. Theory that content design improves satisfaction. Compared products with no product designer with products that do. They achieved +8 NPS points, 44% of task failures eliminated, and products were found to be 92% more usable. Also huge jumps in usage and satisfaction.

Quickest and most effective way to improve is to invest in professional product content.

We can solve the problems that only content designers can solve. Prioritize work that solves the larger good. Identify what you want to improve.

Then go do it.

Content Strategy as a Lens and Design Approach

Joscelin Cooper, of Google, brings the idea of content strategy to UX writing.

The term "content strategy" feels vague and overwhelming.

Good writing uses only the essential words, and nothing more. In UX writing, we're often in the business of subtracting, not adding.

Design systems for language:

• Research: How users understand language
• Marketing & Sales: How they communicate externally
• Product: How content guides users through their experience
• Localization: Natural and human
• Support: Documentation that helps users help themselves

Principles & approach:

• User needs
• Mental models
• Feedback
• Data collection
• Explainability/trust
• Errors

Think about how data tells a s story about more than numbers. For example, what is and isn't important can help structure the presentation of data.

Well-designed content builds trust. Without trust, you can't build a relationship. Trust isn't about taking rsiks, but about the willingness to take risks. A good metaphor is a conversation for your user interface.

The UX Eye for a Content Style Guide

Laura Sands, of Ipsos, is going to talk about UX writing styles guides and content audits.

A content audit is an inventory of all the content in an app, and the flow of that content. Then create a plan to smooth out inconsistencies in style, writing, and more.

Important to set up goals, and not just dive in.

• What you want to achieve
• Time you have

The what you want to achieve should include your goal of how it will improve the product for users.

Deciding how to measure can be challenging. You might have only your own instincts and background. You may have the opportunity to get feedback or actually do testing. Can get lots of feedback from social media. 

Take a step back and think about what your content will sound like. Voice and grammar needs to be consistent. Will the tone be appropriate? Will the text in a component work? Is your content accessible? Does the content guide well, in a way humans communicate? 

A content style guide is as important as a visual or brand style guide. It helps keep your product consistent and high quality.

A content style guide contains:

• Text formatting, style, usage and purpose
• Defines product voice, tone, and audience
• Should include:
• Examples in context
• Definition of grammar rules and accessibility patterns (if you break grammar rules, define them)
  
• Guidelines for other media
• Localization, legal, and internal content processes

For a content audit:

• Review & inventory
• Rewrite and test
• Discuss changes with the team (and use your style guide)
• Develop & measure

Laura uses the same tool I have used for a UI content inventory: a spreadsheet!