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.

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!

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

Introduction

I've known Joe Welinske for nearly 30 years. In the spring of my junior year at the University of Washington, he posted a help wanted ad for his company, then known as WinWriters, on the bulletin board of the Technical Communication department. I applied and was accepted.

I turned that part-time job into a summer internship, and then continued to work there during my senior year. During that year, he had an idea to create a conference focused on developing online help. He rented a small conference room at a little hotel on 6th Ave. just north of downtown Seattle, invited about a dozen people to attend, and hosted a trial run.

It was a success. Within a few years, more than a thousand people were attending what eventually became the WritersUA conferences on user assistance at the Sheraton in Seattle. Over the years, the conference expanded its focus from online help--largely Windows Help early--to user assistance in general, and traveled to locations around the country.

Joe began developing ideas for other conferences as well because he has a passion for sharing knowledge to other professionals in the field. He created ConveyUX for user experience professionals, and now this to focus on UX writing.

For nearly 20 years, I attended every conference Joe hosted. A few years after the first WritersUA conference, I attended a major computer/printing trade show in San Francisco. They published a daily conference publication, a huge glossy thing, with ads, information about conference events, and more. I floated the idea of a conference newsletter to Joe, and he liked the idea. So for several years, I not only attended, I did almost all the work to publish a daily conference newsletter, some samples of which you can see on my portfolio website.

Several years after I started publishing the newsletter, I also started live blogging the conference. I'd do high-level articles, and also notes live from the sessions I attended. And that's what I'm doing here. It has (at least) two benefits. It help capture what I'm learning, and it shares a bit about what can be learned with the rest of the world.

As it turns out, more than 350 people registered for this inaugural--and virtual--event from around the world.