Writing Is Designing
Tags: #design #technology #writing #user experience #ux writing #content strategy
Authors: Michael J. Metts, Andy Welfle
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Overview
This book argues that writing for digital products is a design practice, and writers should approach their work with a designer’s mindset, prioritizing usability, usefulness, and responsibility in their language choices. We show how to leverage user research, strategy, and collaborative techniques to create experiences that are clear, inclusive, and help users achieve their goals. Our book is aimed at anyone who writes for digital products, regardless of job title: UX writers, content strategists, designers, developers, product managers, or anyone else who crafts the words users see. We believe that anyone who cares about the language in digital experiences can benefit from understanding how to design with words. We offer practical strategies and frameworks for developing a clear and consistent product voice and tone, as well as tips for collaborating effectively with design teams and advocating for the importance of writing in the design process. Our book examines the impact of language on user behavior and the ethical considerations of writing for technology, encouraging readers to think about the broader implications of their work. We explore the importance of inclusive design, accessibility, and user research, and illustrate how a user-centered approach to writing can lead to better products, increased user satisfaction, and business success. We believe that this book fills a gap in the market by offering a comprehensive and practical guide for anyone who wants to design better user experiences through words.
Book Outline
1. More Than Button Labels
Words are not just decorative elements in a digital product—they shape the user’s understanding, feelings, and overall experience. To write effectively for interfaces, you must think like a designer, focusing on usability, usefulness, and responsibility. This requires understanding the product, its purpose, and the needs of its users. Shift your mindset from simply ‘writing’ to ‘designing with words.’
Key concept: Writing is about fitting words together, while designing is about solving problems for your users. To create truly effective user experiences, these two activities must be seamlessly integrated.
2. Strategy and Research
Before diving into the actual writing, it’s essential to align with your team on a shared strategy. A clear strategy acts as a compass, guiding decisions and ensuring everyone is working towards the same goals. This shared understanding is essential for crafting effective and consistent user experiences.
Key concept: Strategy tells you what to do, and, by default, what not to do.
3. Creating Clarity
Clarity in interface writing is paramount. To achieve clarity, you need to break down complex concepts and actions into digestible, easily understandable chunks. This involves understanding the intent of your users and using language they are familiar with. Plain language is often the most effective way to communicate in a user-centered way.
Key concept: Clarity is a moving target.
4. Errors and Stress Cases
Error messages are a crucial part of the user experience, and should be treated as opportunities to help users, rather than as mere technical notifications. Avoid errors whenever possible through careful design. When errors are unavoidable, explain them clearly and offer solutions to resolve the issue and help users get back on track.
Key concept: Where you find sustained success driven by recommendations, you find badass users. Smarter, more skillful, more powerful users. Users who know more and can do more in a way that’s personally meaningful.
5. Inclusivity and Accessibility
Inclusive design recognizes that people experience the world in diverse ways, and aims to create experiences that are accessible and welcoming to everyone. This involves understanding the needs of a wide range of users, including those with disabilities, and using language that is respectful, clear, and avoids excluding anyone.
Key concept: Ideally, accessibility and inclusive design work together to make experiences that are not only compliant with standards, but truly usable and open to all.
6. Voice
A product’s ‘voice’ is its personality expressed through language. It’s essential to define this voice clearly through attributes and principles that guide writers in making consistent choices. This voice should aim to be clear, concise, and human, always prioritizing the user’s understanding and experience.
Key concept: Clear, concise, and human.
7. Tone
While ‘voice’ is consistent, ‘tone’ adapts to the specific context of the user’s interaction. By understanding the user’s emotional state, intent, and place in their journey, you can adjust the tone to be motivational, helpful, reassuring, or supportive. A well-defined tone framework helps maintain consistency while meeting user needs.
Key concept: Tone is so incredibly important because I think it’s the thing that kills most interfaces. You know pretty immediately when you’re talking to someone if they’re a jerk…
8. Collaboration and Consistency
Collaboration is key to creating consistent and user-centered experiences. This involves actively engaging with your team, asking questions, facilitating discussions, and showing your work. Building design systems and style guides can help establish shared language and reusable patterns that make everyone more efficient.
Key concept: A design system is a product.
Essential Questions
1. How does “Writing Is Designing” reframe the role of writing in the digital product development process?
The core argument of “Writing is Designing” is that writing for digital products is a design practice. This means that words should not be an afterthought in the design process, but should be considered as core components of the user experience. The book provides a framework for how to approach writing for interfaces as a design problem, emphasizing the need for user research, strategy, and collaboration with design teams. Key supporting ideas include the importance of clarity, concision, and humanness in writing for interfaces. The authors provide practical tips for achieving these goals, including using plain language, testing messages with users, and developing a consistent product voice and tone. The authors aim to empower writers to see themselves as designers and to advocate for the importance of their work in the design process. The book’s implications are significant for anyone who writes for digital products. By adopting a design-centered approach to writing, writers can create more usable, useful, and responsible experiences for their users.
2. How does the book emphasize user-centeredness in the writing process for digital products?
The authors advocate for an objective and strategic approach to writing for interfaces, emphasizing the need to understand the product, its purpose, and the needs of its users. This requires moving beyond personal opinions and biases and relying on insights and data from user research, such as user interviews, contextual inquiries, and usability testing. A clear understanding of user needs and behaviors allows writers to craft language that is not only usable and clear but also aligns with the overall product strategy and business goals.
3. What role does collaboration play in the book’s approach to designing with words?
The book highlights the importance of collaboration between writers and other members of the product team, including designers, developers, product managers, and stakeholders. This involves active participation in design discussions, asking questions, facilitating workshops, presenting work for critique, and creating a shared understanding of the product’s voice and tone. By embracing collaboration, writers can contribute their expertise more effectively, ensure consistency in language choices, and advocate for the user’s perspective throughout the design process.
4. How does “Writing Is Designing” address the ethical considerations of language in the context of digital products?
The book emphasizes the ethical implications of language choices, particularly in relation to inclusivity and accessibility. The authors urge writers to consider the diverse needs of users, including those with disabilities, and to avoid language that could exclude or harm anyone. By promoting inclusive design practices, writers can create experiences that are welcoming and accessible to a wider audience, contributing to a more humane and equitable digital world.
5. How does the book approach the development of a distinct product voice and tone?
The authors argue that a well-defined product voice and tone can enhance brand identity and build trust with users. The book offers frameworks and practical tips for developing a consistent voice and adapting tone to specific user contexts and emotional states. By carefully crafting language that aligns with the brand’s personality and resonates with users, writers can create more engaging, memorable, and user-centered experiences.
Key Takeaways
1. Understanding User Needs Through Research
The book emphasizes that understanding user needs and behaviors is fundamental to designing effective user experiences. User research, including user interviews, contextual inquiries, and usability testing, allows writers to uncover how users think and talk about the product and its features, informing language choices that resonate with them and enhance usability.
Practical Application:
An AI product engineer designing a chatbot could use user research to understand how people typically phrase questions about specific tasks. This would allow them to design the chatbot’s natural language processing capabilities to more effectively recognize user intent and provide accurate responses. By aligning the chatbot’s language with user expectations, the experience becomes more intuitive and user-friendly.
2. Writing Effective Error Messages
The book advocates for clear, concise, and actionable error messages that help users understand the problem and take appropriate action. Instead of blaming the user or using technical jargon, error messages should offer solutions and guide users towards a resolution.
Practical Application:
When designing an AI-powered error handling system, an engineer could apply this principle by providing specific and actionable guidance to the user. For example, instead of a generic ‘Error: File not found’ message, the system could provide a more helpful message such as ‘Error: The file ‘document.pdf’ could not be found. Please check the file name and location, or try uploading it again.’ This approach not only clarifies the issue but also empowers the user to take steps towards resolving it.
3. Developing a Consistent Product Voice
A product’s “voice” is its personality expressed through language. It’s crucial to establish clear voice attributes and principles that guide writers in making consistent choices. This helps create a unified and recognizable experience for users, enhancing brand identity and building trust.
Practical Application:
An AI product engineer working on a voice assistant could define the voice as ‘helpful, knowledgeable, and approachable,’ guiding writers in crafting responses that are informative, friendly, and consistent with the overall brand personality. By establishing these principles, the voice assistant’s interactions will feel more human and engaging, fostering a stronger connection with users.
4. Adapting Tone to User Context
Tone, unlike voice, is adaptable to the specific context of the user’s interaction. By understanding the user’s emotional state, intent, and place in their journey, writers can adjust the tone to be motivational, helpful, reassuring, or supportive. This creates a more human and responsive experience.
Practical Application:
An AI product engineer designing a virtual assistant for healthcare could adapt the tone based on user context. For example, when a user is reporting symptoms, the assistant could adopt a supportive and reassuring tone, acknowledging their concerns and offering helpful guidance. However, when providing appointment scheduling options, a more direct and efficient tone may be appropriate. By understanding the user’s emotional state and intent, the AI can provide a more personalized and empathetic experience.
Suggested Deep Dive
Chapter: Chapter 4: Errors and Stress Cases
AI systems, especially those that rely on machine learning, can often produce unexpected errors or encounter edge cases that are difficult to predict. This chapter provides a valuable framework for understanding how to design error messages that are clear, helpful, and guide users towards a resolution. This is particularly relevant for AI product engineers as they work to build systems that are robust, reliable, and provide a positive user experience even when things go wrong.
Memorable Quotes
Chapter 1: More Than Button Labels. 20
Designing with words requires a broad range of skills, including many that don’t involve arranging letters into sentences. Framing your work this way will make you more effective.
Chapter 1: More Than Button Labels. 30
You can’t create these experiences without words, and every word included in those experiences shares the user’s understanding, feeling, and outcome. That’s why this kind of writing is design.
Chapter 2: Strategy and Research. 49
Research is never perfect, but it should also never be optional. It’s the best way to understand your users and their needs.
Chapter 3: Creating Clarity. 68
“If, as the writer, I have to think about the words for more than two seconds, I know it’s not good copy.”
Chapter 7: Tone. 155
“Tone is so incredibly important because I think it’s the thing that kills most interfaces. You know pretty immediately when you’re talking to someone if they’re a jerk, or if they think they’re better than you…”
Comparative Analysis
While “Writing Is Designing” shares common ground with other books on UX writing and content strategy, such as “Content Design” by Sarah Richards and “Strategic Writing for UX” by Torrey Podmajersky, it distinguishes itself by emphasizing the holistic integration of writing into the design process. Unlike books that focus primarily on grammar and style, “Writing Is Designing” encourages writers to think strategically, embrace user research, and collaborate effectively with design teams. It also delves into the ethical implications of language choices, promoting inclusive and accessible design practices. The book’s emphasis on design thinking and user-centeredness aligns with the principles advocated in “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug, while its discussion on voice and tone complements the insights found in “Nicely Said” by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee. Overall, “Writing Is Designing” provides a unique perspective on the role of writing in shaping user experiences, offering practical guidance and frameworks for writers to become more effective designers.
Reflection
“Writing Is Designing” is a valuable contribution to the field of UX writing, particularly relevant for AI product engineers who are increasingly tasked with designing conversational interfaces and other complex interactions. The book’s emphasis on user research, clarity, and collaboration aligns with the principles of human-centered AI development, advocating for systems that are not only functional but also understandable, intuitive, and user-friendly. However, the book’s focus on visual interfaces may limit its applicability to certain AI applications, such as those that rely heavily on voice or non-visual modalities. It would be beneficial for the authors to expand upon how these principles translate to non-visual experiences in future editions. Despite this limitation, the book offers a solid foundation for anyone who wants to craft language that enhances the user experience, regardless of the specific technology involved. By adopting a design-centered approach to writing, AI product engineers can create systems that are more effective, engaging, and ultimately more human.
Flashcards
What does it mean to “design with words”?
Designing is about understanding the product, its purpose, and the needs of its users, and then crafting language that helps them achieve their goals.
What are the three key characteristics of effective interface writing, as defined in the book?
Usable, useful, and responsible.
What is strategy, and why is it important in the context of UX writing?
A shared understanding of the product’s direction, goals, and target audience.
How should writers approach error messages?
Avoid errors whenever possible through good design. When errors are unavoidable, explain the problem clearly and offer a solution.
What is a product’s “voice”?
The product’s personality expressed through language.
What is “tone” in the context of UX writing?
How the product’s voice adapts to specific user contexts and emotional states.
Why is collaboration important for UX writers?
To create consistent and user-centered experiences, ensuring that language choices align with the overall design system and style guide.