UX writing methodology

The process of traditional copywriting can be fairly straightforward. It typically involves collaboration between writer and business to come up with something clever and bouncy.

Writing UX copy is a thorough, robust process that will involve UX writers collaborating with designers, researchers, and then finally, face-to-face with the customers themselves. In an ideal world, UX writers will be responsible for creating research tasks themselves.

For many UX writers, a traditional design process would look something like this:

• Defining the problem Working with designers, developers, product managers, and stakeholders, UX writers would work to help define the scope of the problem in front of them. That could be gaining new users, increasing engagement, or any other particular problem the organization faces. The UX writer’s role in these discussions is to help think about what ways UX writing might be used to help solve that problem - or if UX writing is the right tool to use at all.
• Ideating Together with designers and anyone else on the design team, UX writers should be helping find solutions to whatever design problem they face next. That means UX writers should be involved in sketching out the problem in a visual way, while also creating tools like content priority maps or hierarchies to help others on the team understand the most effective ways for content to be placed in a piece of interaction design.
• Prototyping While continuing to gain feedback from designers, product managers, stakeholders, and anyone else involved in the project, the UX writer will help designers create a more high-fidelity prototype of the chosen solution.
• Researching Working alongside designers and researchers, UX writers play a critical role in research. The UX writer should be creating copy-specific tasks for researchers to provide to customers. They should also be watching the research take place, taking notes on how users react to the language being used in the prototype.
• Iterating Working with the UX researchers, UX writers will take both qualitative and quantitative feedback to apply to their UX writer and make it more effective. They might also work with an optimization manager to create hypotheses and frameworks for future A/B testing, to iterate on a bigger scale, and get quantitative feedback quickly.
• Deploying While the design is being deployed, UX writers may have to work alongside developers and engineers to adjust copy on the fly if technical constraints or challenges force the design in a different direction. For example, the size of a tooltip alert may need to be shortened, which requires the UX writer to truncate copy.