UX Writing: Before and Beyond the Text Box

Torrey Podmajersky, of Google, gave the conference's opening keynote about how content affects the entirety of the user experience. The power of using words in user experiences, how we can get trapped in text boxes and how to move beyond the text boxes.

We've been using text in user experiences since the very beginning of computers. Technical writing is arguably the first UX writing. In early PCs, the entire user interface was text.

Text boxes are not new. They've been part of advertising for years. Writers had to fill text boxes; text was constrained to those boxes. In the printing world, the text box constraints were physical. Those constraints don't exist in the digital world, but this is still how some are trained. Designers use text boxes and lorem ipsum text in the designs.

As writers, we can go beyond this. We're not limited by the text boxes people give us.

We go beyond the literal text box already. We have, for example, voice interfaces and chatbots.

UX writing isn't about the writing, but about the systems. The systems are about principles. Principles help keep the customer at the center of your work. By aligning the product to the principles, we can make the product principled.

UX writing systems make products:

• Principled
• Accessible
• Purposeful
• Concise Conversational
• Clear

We can use UX writing to fix problems that already exist, rather than making them worse. UX writing is one way to protect our public spaces from lies. UX writing is an essential part of disseminating good, helpful information.

No right way to start in UX writing. The jobs in UX writing need people who practice empathy. We have to build trust and relationships. UX writers have amazing successes and make a difference for people. (We also make mistakes.) From the latter, we learn from it and do better. We make our discipline better by sharing our successes. But we need more information, more books more research on the topic of UX writing.

Looks for 2 things initially in a UX writer:

• Empathy for users
• Ability to be comfortable (and playful) with language