How to improve collaboration among design and UX Writing
One of the key parts of a digital product is text, so it’s more than mandatory that UX Writers and designers collaborate for the best results.
UX Writing and digital product design
First things first: we must insist on how strategic texts are in any product and how they are part of the whole user experience.
Text, like other parts of product design, shows the user the path to follow to a goal. These small pieces of text or microcopies can serve to achieve some other goals apart from assisting the user:
- It creates a brand voice
- It contributes to the coherence of the interface
- It improves designs and developments
Although integration can be a challenge in some cases, using titles or short descriptions in an element can help, and can make your users more comfortable using your product than your competitors’. Or get the expected result without frustration.
A classic example of microcopy is when trying to register on a website, a text shows us the requirements for our password or if the email is already in use, allowing the user to remember the password in case they can’t remember it.
In order for texts to generate that brand voice and increase user’s confidence when performing actions, they need to meet a series of characteristics. But three of them are the most important:
- Clear
- Concise
- Useful
Remember: we are talking about microcopy. This implies that the text has to be short (concise), while explaining to the user something relevant at that moment (useful) and, moreover, not creating doubts about the result of the performed action (clear).
We highly encourage you to watch this talk from Google I/O 2017, in which several of the people in charge of defining Google’s content work show you how to improve texts:
Collaboration between UX Writing and Design
As you can see, it involves working with a lot of text. From the most visible classics of the interface, such as titles or headings, to other elements such as calls to action, descriptions and even labels.
In a standard workflow, the UX Writer will receive information about the processes carried out by the user. In fact, the logical thing would be that some parts were already incorporated in the wireframes, even if they are headings or a call to action, which requires work from the conceptual phase.
Starting from there, the ways to get the two areas to collaborate can go from classic spreadsheets with as many tables as necessary, to truly collaborative tools. Some of them, such as Ditto, Frontitude or Strings, allow collaboration on prototypes or real designs.
The process is similar in all of them: text spaces are defined in the design along with notes and sent to the UX Writer, which works on an interface where it always has context of the user’s interactions with the product.
This way the microcopy will be adjusted to the real needs of users and the product itself, as well as maintaining scalability and working with the right patterns. Creating copies for digital products is something we should not leave to chance.
It is a very important part of product design and, as such, it needs some attention. Different text patterns can already be obtained from the research phase; adapting them to the final experience can be what differentiates our product from our competitors.
This article is a translation of the following one published on our corporate website:
