In case you’re looking for an example of skilled user experience (UX) writing, you’ve probably come across the Humble Bundle blog. Launched in 2012, the blog is part of the Humble Bundle family of platforms. It focuses on news coverage and product reviews, as well as hosting educational articles on the craft of UX writing.
If you want to learn UX writing, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll teach you the best ways to become a confident UX writer—from the basics to taking on a big project.
The Basics
The first step to learning UX writing is understanding what it means and how to contribute to the field.
According to the United States Office of Vocational Education, “user experience” is a “set of interactions that occur between a user and a product or service,” which is also the definition employed by the US Department of Labor.
In other words, user experience is the end-to-end interaction between a person and a product (or service), which is defined by how that person interacts with the various components of the product (or service) and how they experience the product (or service) as a whole.
In addition, “user experience design” is “the process of understanding user needs and interests and correspondingly designing a product or service to optimize for those needs and interests”.
This is a vast and difficult field to explore in depth, but it’s an essential one. If you want to be a thoughtful and informative author, you’ve come to the right place.
What Do Designers Need?
The next step is to identify the skills you need to become a confident user experience designer.
Here are the top 4 skills every designer should have:
1. User Research
User research is a vital part of every design project. Without it, you’ll never be able to create a product that is actually useful or pleasing to consumers.
This isn’t to say that every product or service needs to be tailored to the specific needs of the user group you unearth during user research. Nor is it to say that you need to create a one-to-one relationship with every user group you investigate.
All you need to do is fully understand the user group you are targeting, and then strategize around the research you have already done.
2. Content Strategy
We’ve all been there. We enter the world of an online store or a blog and are overwhelmed by the amount of content on display.
What is the first thing you’ll see when you scroll down a blog’s main page? A list of blogs containing content related to your topic of interest.
This is a vital part of online brand management. Without a strategic approach to content creation, you’ll never be able to promote the blog you’re a part of to the right audience and drive the right conversions (i.e., purchases).
To create a content strategy, you will first assess the current state of your blog’s readership. This will include analyzing the behavior of your readers, their demographics, and the platform you use (i.e., whether you’re on a Blogger page, a Facebook page, or a Twitter feed).
You’ll then set (or continue to adjust) the blog’s content strategy based on the results of this assessment.
3. Design Thinking
“Thinking” is used for a wide range of activities, from analyzing the environment you are in to creating a strategy. But in the context of design, it usually referrs to a process of creating solutions by considering the full range of possible options.
One of the most essential things for a designer is to question the status quo. When you design for the mass market, you’ll face a common problem – users are often reacting to disruptive external changes in their environment. To ask a familiar example, if you’re on a mobile device and the screen is too small, you’ll want to reduce the screen size, not adjust your viewpoint to make it fit the device.
To ask a more academic question, if you’re in a display admission traffic signal and there’s a pileup, how do you reduce the jams? Not adjusting the screen size or the viewpoint would be a reaction to the status quo, but considering both variable could be the path to a strategic solution.
Design thinking is the process of strategizing around an identifiable need, initiating a multi-step solution – ranging from brainstorming to prototyping to evaluation – and then adjusting the strategy based on the end result.
Organized Research
Depending on your project’s size and complexity, you’ll either be comfortable doing a bit or a lot of research.
For example, if you’re starting a brand-new product or service, you’ll probably want to dig deep into the needs of your audience.
You may want to research the topics your audience is interested in, your competitors, and how you can differentiate yourself from other products in your category.